They fixed that in 2013.
That’s at least 80 years after the French, the Czech and the Dutch, but hey, nobody is perfect.
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I don’t know what that is, I’m afraid.
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I think it would be very successful.
I can’t compare and contrast what I’d learn there versus the BSA, but I can definitely say I’d learn some stuff I’d never learn by not being in BSA…
How do they feel about Unitarians?
They are confused! They already have trouble conceiving of a religion that is non-theistic, so when they encounter one that is optionally theistic it gives the Mormon elders brain spasms.
My son and several members of his troop were raised in the Unitarian Universalist church so I got firsthand experience with this phenomena ;).
Incidentally, UUs generally have more problem with the BSA than vice-versa, because of the aforementioned cluelessness, and UU congregations sometimes encourage local dissent inside the BSA, or sponsor alternatives like the Spiral Scouts.
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Good lad!
I had no problem reading it:
But just in case:
Don’t worry about Donald Trump — his Republican supporters have been whispering to Never Trumpers like me for months. He doesn’t really mean all of his campaign rhetoric. In fact, he doesn’t have much interest in policy at all, they said. He’ll delegate governing to Mike Pence, Reince Priebus, and Paul Ryan while he plays a lot of golf. You’ll see that there’s nothing to be scared of.
After just one week in office — arguably the worst opening since The Adventures of Pluto Nash premiered in 2002 — Trump has exposed such assurances for what they are: the kind of lies that supposedly smart people tell themselves to feel better about a catastrophe they know in their bones is looming.
The president’s first seven days began on Jan. 20, when he delivered the bleakest and most divisive inaugural address in U.S. history, presenting a dystopian picture of the country as a land of “carnage” that he blamed on America’s trade partners and disloyal American elites. It sounded just like one of his campaign rally speeches — not the kind of elevated addresses that we have gotten used to from his predecessors, Democratic and Republican alike.
Seven days later, on Jan. 27, the first week concluded with the release of an un-American decree temporarily barring our doors to refugees from all over the world and passport holders from seven Muslim countries selected seemingly at random. This ill-drafted and badly implemented order caused chaos at U.S. airports with border agents not knowing whom they were supposed to admit and federal judges stepping in to prevent the implementation of important parts of this draconian diktat until their constitutionality can be litigated. The ostensible justification for this move was to protect us from terrorists, but no terrorists from any of the seven banned Muslim countries — Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen — have ever killed anyone in America. It is hard to disagree with Benjamin Wittes’s conclusion on the Lawfare blog that Trump is “elevating the symbolic politics of bashing Islam over any actual security interest.”
In between these lowlights, the nation was treated to risible claims from the thin-skinned president that the media had lied about the size of his inaugural crowd and that he would have won the popular vote were it not for the “millions” of ballots cast illegally. To support the latter assertion, for which there is no actual evidence, Trump alternatively cited a third-hand anecdote relayed to him by a friend of the German golfer Bernhard Langer (who is not a U.S. citizen) and a study, which no one has seen, supposedly conducted by a conspiracy theorist named Gregg Phillips. Phillips has also tweeted that it was Barack Obama’s Department of Homeland Security, not the Russian intelligence services, that hacked the election and that “The UN is global fascism.”
Trump also repeated his defense of torture and again doubled down on his claim that the United States should steal Iraq’s oil — messages that, combined with his anti-Muslim immigration decree, put U.S. troops in the Middle East in greater danger. As if offending Muslims wasn’t enough, Trump issued a Holocaust commemoration proclamation that, echoing the claims of Holocaust deniers, made no mention of the Jews — the Nazis’ primary victims — with his spokesmen subsequently making clear that this was no accidental oversight.
Making good on his protectionist rhetoric, meanwhile, Trump withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, thus empowering China and hurting the American economy, and then provoked a diplomatic crisis with Mexico by signing an executive order to start building a border wall that he insists he will somehow make Mexico pay for. When the Mexican president, Enrique Peña Nieto, resolutely refused to ante up, the White House threatened to impose a 20 percent tariff on Mexican goods, leading him to cancel a planned summit. It is a mystery how America will benefit from aggravating relations with our third-largest trading partner and a vital ally in the battle against drug trafficking and illegal migration — but Trump is clearly intent on provoking just such a crisis because of the anti-Mexican animus he has long displayed. (Remember his racist remarks about Judge Gonzalo Curiel or his rhetoric about Mexican “rapists” and “criminals” with which he launched his campaign?)
The background music accompanying this horror show has been Trump’s nonstop taunts of the “lying” news media, culminating in this Sunday morning tweet: “Somebody with aptitude and conviction should buy the FAKE NEWS and failing and either run it correctly or let it fold with dignity!” Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan couldn’t have put it better; this is exactly the strategy they have pursued to silence press criticism. To make sure that no one missed the message, Trump’s enforcer, Stephen Bannon, told the press to “keep its mouth shut.”
There isn’t any new Trump, just as there was never a “new Nixon.” It’s the same old Trump that we saw all during the campaign and indeed during his previous 69 years on this Earth: offensive, divisive, prickly, bombastic, impetuous, conspiratorial, and resistant to any evidence that contradicts his idée fixe. And to the extent that anybody is calling the shots in this presidency besides the president himself, it isn’t Vice President Pence, Chief of Staff Priebus, or House Speaker Ryan. It’s Bannon, the former publisher of Breitbart, a website that he has proudly described as a “platform” for the racist, anti-Semitic, and xenophobic “alt-right.”
This is looking very much like the Bannon Regency. It was Bannon and his sidekick Stephen Miller, a young former aide to senator-turned-attorney general nominee Jeff Sessions, who, according to the Wall Street Journal, wrote Trump’s kick-them-in-the-teeth inaugural address. And it was the two Steves who, according to CNN, ran the rollout of the immigration executive order on Friday afternoon, doing an end run around the normal interagency process and overruling the Department of Homeland Security to insist that the entry ban apply to hundreds of thousands of permanent residents who happened to hail from one of the seven banned Muslim countries.
Bannon’s ascendancy was ratified with the release of an unprecedented presidential order appointing him to the National Security Council’s principals committee while kicking off the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the director of national intelligence. Who needs to hear from intelligence or military professionals when you can hear from the publisher of Breitbart?
Imagine George W. Bush appointing Karl Rove to the principals committee. Or Barack Obama appointing David Axelrod. It would never have happened. And even if it had happened, it would have been far less disquieting than appointing Bannon, because Rove and Axelrod are far more mainstream figures than he is.
White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s lame justification for this shift was to say that Bannon deserves to be on the NSC because he’s a “former naval officer.” Yes, it’s true, Bannon was a junior naval officer more than 30 years ago, without ever seeing combat. If that’s the standard to qualify for the nation’s most important security committee, then there are literally millions of veterans who are better qualified, having served more recently, seen more action, or attained higher rank.
One wonders how Secretary of Defense James Mattis and soon-to-be Secretary of State Rex Tillerson feel about having a political hack with extremist views elevated to be their equals. Just as one wonders how Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly feels about having a hugely important immigration order issued without, apparently, any consultation with him. If they don’t push back now — and strongly — threatening to quit if necessary, they are tacitly accepting that they will be taking orders from Bannon for the rest of the administration.
As a Never Trumper, I sincerely wished that my fears about the Trump presidency would prove unfounded and overblown. But if anything I underestimated just how capriciously he would rule. If Trump continues the way he started, he will usher in Democratic congressional majorities in 2018, leading to impeachment proceedings, and a Democratic president in 2020 — likely on the present trajectory to be Elizabeth Warren. But there is an awful lot of damage that he can cause in the meantime. And he’s just getting started.
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When was this? I assure you, girl scouts used to be – and some still are, depending on the troop – every bit as woodsy and gutsy as boy scouts.
I recently stood up to a mother who was using the framework of the GSA to teach her children to be intruding capitalists. The choral tradition in the U.S. includes some form of potluck…people bringing food/snacks to share. This one mom started bringing her daughters in their scouting uniforms to SELL cookies (and not cheaply, btw) at the table instead. Every single week. Which meant everyone else stopped bringing food to share. Most of our singers come straight from work and we don’t finish until 9:30pm, and most are young enough that money is a big issue, so this was rude and selfish on many levels. I don’t blame the kids…the oldest was around 10. But this was so antithetical to the ideals of the GSA that I finally had to tell the woman that it needed to stop. She’s enough younger than me that she would have been raised in a different GSA era, but then again, I know enough current troop leaders to know the ideals are still there for those who care to uphold them.
Ideals are only as sound as the people who uphold them.
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That bit sounds good, if we survive that long.
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Since transgender boys are boys, I don’t see why it would be an issue to allow boys to join the Boy Scouts of America.
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I can’t speak about the GSA, but up here in Canada, we have Scouts Canada (not Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts), and Girl Guides as a separate organization.
The two were very similar (although, even since I was a kid, girls were allowed to join the Scouts), until a fatal incident in 2003.
From what I hear, the Guiding organization in Canada is now a lot more risk-averse than the Scouts are, and focused on more traditionally “female” activities. When they do go out and do “risky” outdoor activities, there is a lot more paperwork involved, including making qualified instructors for an activity re-submit their qualifications before each instance of an activity, and, if one activity is cancelled at an outing, not allowing those Guides to transfer to another activity at the same outing (because that’s not what they’d signed up for).
Admittedly, this is all things that I’ve heard second- and third-hand, but my Cub pack has had a Girl Guide quit Guides and join us, finding Scouting a lot more fun than Guiding.
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My sister was in scouts in the 80’s and early 90’s, for whatever that’s worth.
Another poster mentioned that activities vary quite widely based on leadership, which makes sense. I only have 1 data point to work with, of course.
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So much depends on the troop leader. When I joined Cub Scouts, our leaders were lazy dads; our “meetings” were just an excuse to play Atari and horse around, and they’d give us ‘merit badges’ every once in awhile to seem like we were being productive. Then I got my Arrow of Light and became a Boy Scout, and our new troop leader was the opposite. Our meetings were at a local church, and all we did was recite Bible verses and repeat them. You had to stand and repeat verses by memory, and if you got it wrong, he’d beat you. That lasted only a few months before he got fired and I quit Scouting pronto.
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But wait, that’s EXACTLY what I’m scared of. 
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