Basic Training Manual - Boy Scouts Of America: Fill & Download for Free

I you want survival training, join the Boy Scouts of America. You may also pay organizations to go to their survival camps.It really depends upon what you want. You can teach yourself survival. Get a Boy Scout Manual for the best general all around information. There are other publications. Sure, you may have to wade through some BS, but overall you can teach yourself.Recognizing edible plants is fairly easy. But, for city boys skinning and disemboweling little animals may be a bit challenging, that is if you are able to trap them. Shoot, trapping is the easy part. Gagging while you gut the little guy might be a little difficult. In real life, if you really ever have to use survival skills, you will not be as likely to gag, since you will rally be hungry, and may be to impatient to cook the little critter.Survival basically boils down to being prepared. What a coincidence, Be Prepared is the Boy Scout Motto.Seriously, you don’t have to join the military to learn survival. In fact, unless you go for the max—Ranger/Special Forces/Pilot—you won’t gain any real survival skills. The most you will learn is carry plenty of water.You don’t have to join the military to learn survival.

They do, and they have done for a long time.“Since 2003, background checks have been conducted on every new adult when they apply to register in the Boy Scouts of America, and in 2008 a background check was conducted on all currently registered adults.”All leaders must also be approved by the unit committee (basically parents of scouts in the troop/pack/post/crew/ship ) and by the chartering organization representative of the unit (i.e. church/school/organization that sponsors the unit). This process is supposed to involve interviews and reference checks as well.Also, all adults are required to take “Youth Protection Training” - which is basically training on how to notice subtle hints that bad things might be developing, and how to avoid and/or report it. Training must be refreshed every two years, or when it changes significantly.There is also the “two-deep leadership” rule that says that an adult (other than a parent) is never alone with a scout - there are always two or more responsible adults in view of the youth - ostensibly so the adults can watch and guard against the other(s) becoming a bad actor.One of the advancement requirements for youth is that their parents talk with them about a section in the manual that explains about how the youth themselves should watch for signs of bad things happening and tell an adult and/or their parents when these things happen.In fact, BSA is likely on the cutting edge of prevention techniques and is constantly watching out for this sort of problem and new ways to combat it. Modern instances of youth abuse in scouting is at a much lower rate than the general community.The vast majority of these issues are from long ago (before 1970), and are only popping up now because many jurisdictions recently changed their statute of limitations to “forever”, opening up opportunities for class action suits from the distant past (30’s-60’s).The internet, readily available background checks, sex offender registries, email, shared google spreadsheets, and such didn’t exist back then.For a long time BSA maintained its own internal files of people it found to be bad actors , and denied them membership and/or leadership roles if they detected that a bad actor was trying again elsewhere. However, the technology of the time was paper memos and phone calls. So the system was inefficient and error prone, yet still far beyond the current societal mechanisms of the time for dealing with this problem. The first state sex offender registry was in CA in 1947, but it wasn’t federally mandated until 1994, and some states are still not fully compliant due to the complexities involved.

Original Question: As a libertarian, what would you like to tell democrats?No Original Question DetailsThank you for the A2A, Crystal SwarovskiI would like to tell them to get realistic about many things—that they are not thinking clearly.The problem with modern liberal thinking—and it is modern liberal thinking that dominates the Democratic party—is that it became unmoored from classical liberalism. Because of that, modern liberalism has lost its rationality and its credibility, however noble its motives might be.To put that into terms that related directly to our Constitution, they have gone from trying to make a “more perfect Union,” to trying to make “a perfect Union.”That distinction is critical. Modern liberalism has abandoned the notion of gradual progress, and is instead aiming for an unreachable utopia.Now, I can hear the hackles of Democrats going up when I say that and I can hear all the canned responses waiting for discharge.Can it.I am going to be blunt. Wanting to live in a utopia is unhealthy. It is the mindset of the Christian fundamentalist, the Muslim extremist, the Communist and the heroin addict.Utopia is death. What we want the next generation is to have a better struggle than we do. When we aim for utopia, we seek the wrong ends. When we seek to create an Earthly paradise we seek to destroy that which makes us human.Humans were not meant to live in Paradise. I am an atheist, and myth that it is, Genesis is a powerful story, and far from being a tragedy, being booted from Eden was a glorious triumph of the human spirit.In the re-write the only thing I’d change is that I’d have Adam and Eve give God a great big middle finger and say, “So long! It’s been bad knowing you.”So I would like to say to Democrats, abandon your utopianism and come back to classical liberalism. It really is not that difficult to do.So that is the philosophical statement I would like to make to Democrats. What about policy and policy approaches?Keeping in mind the philosophy I outlined above, I would like Democrats to learn the proper use of government.First off, I would like them to see that we have too much government. On some of that, I am sure we could agree. I am sure they would agree we have too much military, too much of a police state, that the endless international wars have to stop. I hope we would agree on that.We do, right?We also have too much domestic government. Really, I wish Democrats would see that we need to end the War on Drugs immediately. I hope we agree on that.We do, right?I am going to be blunt here. Being obsessed with America’s “drug problem” is an obsession itself, and it is a cop-out. It is like the middle-income, middle-American family that goes into uproar because one of their sons or daughters smoked some marijuana or even did some cocaine or ecstasy.In such families, that uproar is usually a cover for much deeper problems.And the same is true at both a state and national level. Drugs are really a small problem compared to the amount of energy and focus we put into them.Frankly, Americans need a Nar-Anon meeting. Okay, I am kidding, but only half kidding. More people die each year from alcohol, tobacco and complications of diabetes than have died from heroin overdoses in recorded history. And there is not a single, credible example of a person dying from a marijuana overdose.The War on Drugs has not worked. For every dealer we have put in prison, ten more have popped up and managed to kill one another off. The government has never seriously dented the supply for any length of time. All we have managed to do is to breed an ever deadlier class of super smugglers.Drugs are not a public health problem. They really are not. But the violence that the War on Drugs has spawned is. Yes, I can hear the hackles going up again when I say, “Drugs are not a public health problem.”Can it.The reality is, we have had a real world experiment that proves this to be the case. That real world experiment was called Vietnam.Something like 90% of the combat troops in Vietnam used opiates and other drugs at levels that we would describe as problematic. And in a war zone, it was problematic, because using drugs did increase your chances of getting killed or wounded. But in the immediate situation, the benefits of the narcotic effect outweighed the potential cost.Authorities were alarmed, even terrified. They were worried that these soldiers were going to come home as waves of heroin addicts.But a strange thing happened. Most of these soldiers, once they arrived home, quit using, in fairly short order and often with little or no medical intervention.The most reasonable conclusion from this is that once these military personnel left the insanity that was Vietnam, the need to use went away.That strongly suggests that those who continue to use, back then or today, carry around the insanity in their heads.The bottom line is that for the user drugs are not the problem; drugs are a destructive solution to the real problem. Because we fail as a society to grasp that basic fact, we cannot deal with that problem correctly.But the BIGGER issue is that we, as a society, are blowing the drug problem WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYYYYY out of proportion because we do not want to deal with OUR problems.The reality is, and I wish I could repeat this until Democrats get it:There are few things that the tool of government can do well.Government exists to defend rights. Government exists to mediate and forestall conflict.Whenever anyone attempts to use government for any purpose other than this, the result is always going to be detrimental to society.But even when defending rights, Democrats quite often get it wrong. Regulations are a horrible way of trying to prevent pollution, and empowering a powerful, Federal bureaucracy such as the EPA won’t work. Why not? Two words: Scott Pruitt.A property rights model of defending against pollution would be a far better approach.And when it comes to civil rights, it is always a better idea to deny government the right to legislate on something entirely.rather than relying upon a court decision that allows same sex couples to marry, you should have pushed to get government out of marriage entirely. I know you do not want to hear this, but in the coming years, conservatives are going to try to chip away at Obergefell v. Hodges in precisely the same way they are doing with Roe v. Wade. It would be a much better idea to push for a Constitutional Amendment to bar the states from legislating on marriage entirely. There would still need to be, and would be laws to deal with domestic partnerships and family matters. We can, and we already do reference those without respect to marriage.The same thing with abortion. Democrats should pursue a simple Constitutional amendment that bars any legislation on abortion. Period.Some will quickly observe that would prevent public funding for abortion.Here is the thing about that. Grow up.If government cannot legislate about abortion at all, think about what goes away: all of the TRAP laws. And if the politics are handled correctly, it becomes a “national compromise”—i.e. you anti-abortion hotheads shut up, and you get to keep your money.This is good because then the protesters simply become a nuisance, or if they do become violent, then you can legitimately label them as the terrorists that they are.Erasing the public funding also takes away their only horse in the race.The same applies with unions and collective bargaining. Because Democrats do not think like libertarians or classical liberals, they fail to see that “Right to Work” laws impair firms’ rights to make contracts with their employees. RTW laws are not returning to the “default state” of no legislation (as much as conservatives would like to play it that way.) RTW laws are deliberately tipping the scale in favor of employers.Okay, you probably agree with me on that one. But you lose credibility when you seek to impose on others in other areas.And I cannot say this often enough, and pardon my language, but SHUT THE FUCK UP ABOUT GUNS.Guns are not the cause of violence in our society. Neither are violent video games, violent movies, or violent TV, any more than porn is the cause of rape. Don’t give me the correlation bullshit, because that is all it is, correlation. It is not causation.You will never solve the violence problem by attempting to restrict or remove guns.Here is the cause of the violence: extreme alienation.Think about it. We can easily take normal, healthy young men, and probably women too, put them into a hostile environment and turn them into mass killers.It is sad that we have to ever do that, and we do that far more often than we should, and we are far less concerned with the effects of turning young people into mass killers will have on them for the rest of their lives, but those are separate, however important issues.If an American Army Ranger finds himself behind enemy lines without any guns and no real hope of making it back to his unit, he is going to find a way to kill the enemy, and if he is well trained, he will kill many of them before he is caught or killed himself. And he will be killing enemies who are trained soldiers themselves, who know that they are at war.Actually, we should be glad that most of our mass shooters do not have U.S. Army Ranger training.The reason that mass shooters shoot or kill is that they have been horrifically alienated from their communities. This happens when nobody, and I do mean nobody is on their side. In some cases, this may simply be genetic, and by genetic I mean caused by their physical makeup. But in most cases, it is because they have never had anyone really help them, and they have been abused, bullied, and neglected.Apart from the fact that you are never going to be able to restrict guns anyway, the reason that restricting guns won’t solve the problem is that for many mass killers, the feeling of power that comes from the anticipation of killing is what drives them. The fact that the actual act never lives up to the fantasy makes them, well, like drug addicts, but the bottom line is, these people feel powerless, and the idea of revenge gives them a tiny sense of power. And then when they express their revenge fantasies, people ostracize them more. That has the peculiar dovetail effect of both ostracizing them further and empowering them more at the same time.In short, mass shootings are not, “Oh, look! Daddy’s guns. Imma gunna go shoot up the skool.”It does not work like that at all.There are a couple of other types of mass shooters, and while I am not going to get into them in detail, what they all share in common is that sense of alienation.The bottom line is, restricting guns will not end the violence. Ending the War on Drugs will cause a lot of the violence to disappear. Providing more resources for voluntary mental health treatment will probably help the gun suicide rate to go down.But to end the mass violence is going to require a culture shift. And it is not the kind of culture shift that Democrats advocate.Finally, stop trying to use schools to solve every social problem. Public schools exist to provide academic development to kids. That is what they should do, no more, no less. When you make schools teach social skills and personal life skills you divert them from their real purpose.I am not saying these things are unimportant. I am saying that schools are the wrong place to deal with such issues.Learn something from Jimmy Carter. If you want to solve a social problem, pick up a tool and get to work.Learn a lesson from conservatives. Just after the turn of the 20th century, Lord Robert Baden Powell discovered that youth groups were using his field military manual to learn basic skills. So he wrote an edition aimed at youth that helped start the Scouting movement, which led to the formation of the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts of America. The point is, if you want to reinforce liberal values, do not use schools to do it. Create your own, private organizations.This post has gotten long, so how would I sum it up?Stop looking for utopia and start focusing on progressLearn what government can and cannot do, and stop trying to force it to do what it cannot do.Re-learn the value of private action. When you act on your own, you do not need anyone else’s permission. That’s the point. Liberty gives you the freedom to do what you think is right. That is where most of our social advances have come from. They have not come from government; they have come from private citizens doing what they felt was right, acting in a free society. When you give government the power to solve every problem, you give government the power to stop you from solving problems.