Societal Decay – Page 12

Summary of Ashley Madison Hack

Tina Turner had a hit many years before her trip to Thunderdome when she asked, “What’s love got to do with it?” After being married to Ike, maybe she really felt that way.

Supposedly other women do too. If you believe their marketing, a vast number of unhappy and promiscuous women are available on the Ashley Madison website for any man married wanting a fling. This website whose motto is: “Life is short, have an affair” was recently hacked.

Some readers many ask why I am spending time on this data breech of a sleazy website. Why? Because thus far, this is the biggest known data breech in the world…ever. Besides, how many websites do you know that dedicate themselves to violating one of the Ten Commandments.

These guys are dirtbags. They are marketing adultery with a money back guarantee.

Affair Guarantee Program Rules

•Under the AshleyMadison.com Affair Guarantee Program, (the “Affair Guarantee Program” or the “Program”) if you don’t find someone within the initial 3 months after purchasing the “Affair Guarantee” Membership Package, we’ll refund you the amount you paid AshleyMadison.com for participating in the Program (the “Refund”).

• The Guarantee Program is available for a limited time only, and open to anyone.

Of course, a certain amount of fine print applies.
Ashley Madison Guarantee

The cost of sin is high. In this case $249 CDN/$199 USD
Source Article

A year ago, the website was claiming 13 million active users. Oh, no cost for women to join. Prices above are the rates men are willing to pay.
Source Article

Distribution of Ashley Madison users by city.

Graph Source

Those with memberships were promised that for a fee of $19, their account would be deleted.

Ashley Madison sold the delete feature for $19, The Guardian reports, promising users it would remove their profiles from the site, including search results. BuzzFeed discovered that the site made close to $2 million for the service in 2014 alone when 90,000 requested such profile deletions.

However, it turns out that Ashley Madison kept a treasure trove of information for each user that’s good enough to identify that person. The company did remove the real name, username, email and profile information as promised but it retained sensitive data that can be used to find out whether a person may have had an account on the extra-marital affairs site.

The company “retained the date of birth, city, state, post- or zip code, country, gender, ethnicity, weight, height, body type and whether the user smokes or drinks,” The Guardian writes.
BGR Article

The hackers of this website call themselves The Impact Team. This manifesto—including locations of the data—can be viewed here. Impact Team Manifesto

According to Toronto Police, employees of Canadian based Avid Life Media—the owners of Ashley Madison and some similar websites—first became aware of the hack on July 12.

In the news conference, the police detailed how users were targeted in an attack that began July 12, when employees of Avid Life Media arrived at work. When the employees opened their laptops, they were met with the song “Thunderstruck” by AC/DC, and an accompanying message demanding that Avid Life shutter both websites.
New York Times

The hackers then provided samples of the hacked data to prove their claims of hacking the website were genuine. Avid Life refused to take down two of their websites so on August 20th, the hacked data was posted.

Impact Team released a 9.7GB data dump that contains over 30 million Ashley Madison user records. This includes names, addresses and emails, but it is thought that credit card details have not been compromised. Not all the email addresses are real, but up to 24 million are said to be active.

The data was posted to a Tor website meaning that it is not accessible to the general public, as well as to peer-to-peer networks such as BitTorrent. However, details are starting to leak onto the open web via screenshots on social media.

Analysis of the cache has also uncovered a number of government and military email domains. For example one researcher said that over 6,000 of the email addresses were registered as us.army.mil.

“The website has found 1,716 email addresses from universities and further education colleges using the .ac.uk suffix; 124 using .gov.uk; 92 using .mod.uk; 65 local education authorities and schools using .sch.uk; 56 National Heath Service emails and less than 50 police emails,” reported The Telegraph.

Meanwhile, security blogger Robert Graham searched the database to determine the gender balance.

“I count 28 million men to five million women, according to the ‘gender’ field in the database (with two million undetermined). However, glancing through the credit card transactions, I find only male names,” he said.

The Ashley Madison hack is bigger in scale than the recent breach at the US Office of Personnel Management that resulted in the loss of 21 million federal records.
V3-UK

A few days later, the hackers posted a second data dump of 20 gigabytes. These were all internal records of Avid Life Media. This data breech was code of the websites, Google drives of managers, emails, and other internal documents. The Sony data breech was larger in terms of size of the data files but in terms of names this is the biggest in the world.

As a result of the data breech, two people listed on the website have reportedly committed suicide. This from the police news conference mentioned earlier. Their spokesman is Mr. Bryce Evans.

Mr. Evans also said that the police have received two unconfirmed reports of suicides related to the data breach. Security experts had warned the revelations contained in the breach could lead to suicide and violence.

“Others might find the thought that their membership of the site — even if they never met anyone in real life, and never had an affair — too much to bear,” Graham Cluley wrote on his security blog last week, “and there could be genuine casualties as a result. And yes, I mean suicide.”
New York Times

Hack Touches Virtually All of the United States

Gawker’s Gabrielle Bluestone has uncovered that there are precisely three ZIP codes across the country that have no record of Ashley Madison users. That’s ZIP codes, not area codes. And what do they have in common? They’re partially lacking two things: the internet and a large number of people.
Yahoo Finance

Doriana Silva
Thus far we have learned that there are roughly six men for each woman listed on the website. However, the number of women is a matter of some dispute. Many of the female profiles on the website are reportedly fake. Some of the male profiles are also fraudulent.
In 2012, Doriana Silva filed a lawsuit that was later thrown out. Her claim of fraudulent profiles is receiving renewed media interest in the wake of this hack. Below are portions of a news article from New Zealand.

A former employee of the Ashley Madison adultery website has claimed she was told to create hundreds of fake profiles of female “members” to entice men to join up.

Doriana Silva, who worked at the company’s headquarters in Toronto, Canada, tried to sue the firm after claiming she suffered repetitive strain injury (RSI) after being given a month to input 1,000 bogus memberships.

Ms Silva, who is Brazilian, was recruited by Ashley Madison’s parent company Avid Life Media to help launch a Portuguese language website in her home country.

According to court documents in Toronto: “Her allegation is that her job entailed concocting phony profiles of alluring females and inputting these profiles into the appellants’ online dating service in order to attract male subscribers.”

She claimed she was given three weeks to create 1,000 fake profiles.

Her claim stated: “The purpose of these profiles is to entice paying heterosexual male members to join and spend money on the website.

“They do not belong to any genuine members of Ashley Madison – or any real human beings at all.”

She said she was led to believe “that doing so was some sort of a normal business practice in the industry” but found her workplace “oppressive and unethical”.

Ms Silva launched the case in 2012, claiming £10 million in damages. Avid Life counter-sued her, denying her claims, and the two sides eventually agreed to drop their cases earlier this year.

New Zealand Herald

Other Fraudulent Names

Ashley Madison claims to have 1.2 million users in the UK, which would equate to almost one in 20 of all adults between the ages of 18 and 50. Increasing numbers of supposed members whose details have been published online by hackers say they had never even heard of Ashley Madison.

Online security experts have suggested the company could have bought bulk email addresses from marketing companies to make it appear that their membership – and their choice of possible partners – was far larger than the reality.

A source close to the FBI investigation into the leak has told The Daily Telegraph that examinations of the database suggest many of the female profiles on the site were created by a relatively small number of individuals.

Ashley Madison says on its website that it cannot “guarantee the authenticity of any profile”. It relies wholly on men for its profits; women can join for free, but men pay a minimum of £39 to be able to contact other members, though there is no guarantee that they will get a response from people they message.

Peter Sommer, a visiting professor at the De Montfort University Cyber Security Centre, said: “A number of internet dating agencies are known to artificially boost the number of profiles they have in order to make them more attractive.

“They take publicly available information from other databases and added it to their own. People then pay to be able to contact other ‘members’ and it’s not until they get to that stage that they realise a lot of them are duds.”

Bulk email addresses can be bought from marketing companies for as little as 10p each.
New Zealand Herald

Identity Theft

Another possible explanation is that people using the site have simply stolen other people’s email addresses so they do not have to give their own name. People can even browse the site using entirely fake email addresses, because no verification emails are sent out by Ashley Madison to check the email is genuine.

Among those who believe they may have been the victims of identity theft is Oliver Coppard, who stood as Labour’s parliamentary candidate in Sheffield Hallam against Nick Clegg earlier this year.

He said an email address for him that appears in the leaked data is one he has not used for three years.

“It’s a bit of a mystery to me,” he said. “I have never been on the site and I’m not even married so I would have no need to use it. It doesn’t really matter to me, but I don’t know how it has happened.”

New Zealand Herald

If you want to see if you know anybody involved in the hack, you can check at these two links. Use at your own risk.

http://www.trustify.info/check

Please be aware that this hack is creating a secondary market in scammers and malware sites.

Remember that email addresses are not verified by Ashley Madison so tread lightly before accusing folks of being actual clients. There is a chance they are innocent.

For a business that is predicated on secrecy and then is hacked with the outpouring of personal details then it no longer becomes a viable business.
New Zealand Herald

Career Opportunity for The Just Us Brothers?

In the wake of the Ashley Madison data breech, a new career opportunity has presented itself for The Just Us Brothers.

The Just Us Brothers know all about data breeches. They have done it themselves so they know what information is harmful to have released on the Internet. In addition, they also have successfully purged all electronic records of CRA including information on current and former members, chapter bylaws and other records. The Just Us Brothers know how to make this information unrecoverable.

On the other hand, Ashley Madison has been charging subscribers a flat fee of $19 to have their accounts deleted from their website. In 2014, they collected almost two million dollars in such fees from a subscriber base of 37 million. Unfortunately, the website folks at Ashley clearly don’t know how to scrub such information. They still retained names, address, credit card numbers and other user preferences after they were supposedly deleted. (Frankly, Ashley Madison sounds almost as insidious as Facebook.)

The hacker group called “The Impact Team” claimed responsibility for this data breech. If you need an impact team to counter “The Impact Team” clearly the folks from “Impact Republicans” have to be on your short list of counter measures. The Just Us Brothers have a proven track record and would be an asset to Avid Life Media—owners of Ashley Madison.

Lest you doubt me, think about this, if the security folks at Ashley Madison had been the administrators of CRA’s membership records, we would still have all names and addresses of current and former members, their payment information, chapter bylaws, backups of all CRA related websites and all emails within the organization; in short, everything since 2002.

Having the right people makes all the difference. 37 million times $19 per account deleted means a potential of over 700 million in termination fees are on the table. Boys it’s time to move on from politics, other more lucrative markets are waiting for your talents.

Complete Capitulation of the Boy Scouts

The Sith Lord was once an Eagle Scout before turning to the Dark Side
He mourns the passing of BSA

At its recent business meeting in Atlanta, BSA President Robert Gates advocates lifting the ban on gay adult scout leaders and states their current position is unsustainable given a changing cultural and legal environment. Ironically, it is the BSA’s abandonment in 2013 of its historical membership standard which it successfully defended before the U.S. Supreme Court in 2004 that made their current compromise unsustainable. Quite frankly, I believe this was the goal of the BSA leadership all along. They always intended to lift the ban on gay adult leaders but knew they could only achieve it in stages, not all at once, lest they see a mass exodus from Scouting. The Boy Scouts as we knew it is gone, another casualty of the progressive agenda.
boy-scouts-leadership-asked-to-end-ban-on-gay-adult-leaders

Federal Government Recognizes Gay Marriage Despite State Laws to Contrary

Crippled though it may be, I thought the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) signed by President Clinton was still in effect; so I was surprised to read in the 2014 tax instructions that the Federal government recognizes gay marriage even if your state does not.

Same-sex marriage. For federal tax purposes, individuals of the same sex are considered married if they were lawfully married in a state (or foreign country) whose laws authorize the marriage of two individuals of the same sex, even if the state (or foreign country) in which they now live does not recognize same-sex marriage. Form 1040 Instructions pages 12 – 13

The US Supreme Court has not issued such a ruling. Is this another Executive Order from Obama? I’m surprised there is no pushback from defenders of traditional marriage. Also, where is Congress on this issue?

Bathroom Bill Challenge

Once again the challenge to the “bathroom bill” is in the news. The failed effort was handed a pyrrhic victory earlier this week as some petitions that were disallowed by some smaller counties where ordered by a judge to be included for verification. Judge orders Count of Disputed Signatures

Per the World Net Daily article, (Judge bashes California for ignoring election rules) supporters consider this a victory. This fundraising propaganda piece—disguised as a news story—implies that this small number of signatures will be enough to qualify the referendum. Per this article, supporters claim they gathered 620,000 signatures and need 500,000 valid ones to qualify this effort. They actually need more than 500K but do the math using their numbers. This means that supporters are banking that they have an eighty percent verification rate for petitions largely gathered by volunteers at various churches. Such a high validity rate is impossible.

Per the WND article, signatures must be verified by January 8th. When the referendum effort is declared dead by the California Secretary of State what will supporters do then? Probably send out another fundraising letter declaring that the evil Liberals have thwarted the will of the people again. The blame should be affixed to CRI but somehow we know they will avoid fixing any blame on themselves.

CRI Track Record of Failure Continues

As many of you will note in the news today, the transgender bathroom law is about to take effect in California. As burdensome, ridiculous, and unworkable as this law may be, many readers will ask about the supposed referendum effort to block this law.

Bad news, there never was a serious effort to block or repeal this law. Some financial backers of Prop 8 were interested in funding such an effort until it got hijacked by CRI (Capital Resource Institute). Once CRI interjected itself into the issue, the potential funders sat on the sidelines; only if CRI succeeded with the qualification of the referendum would they jump into the fray. CRI—the Karen England led conservative lobbying group—took this issue and turned it into another half-baked fund raising campaign for her organization.

This is at least the fourth such effort that CRI has made in recent years. They have a zero track record of success in anything they have tried to put on the ballot. In fact their efforts are so feeble that you can’t even find any trace of them on the California Secretary of State website for campaign finance reporting. The little money they have raised has gone to their staff payroll and CRI overhead and not to any signature gathering or other legitimate efforts to get anything on the ballot.

In a recent Sacramento Bee article, it was revealed that CRI got cross-wise with the IRS last summer and was in danger of losing their tax exempt status. I asked a politically connected friend about this article and his unsolicited response was, “I guess that explains why they were running the referendum campaign; to maintain cash flow.”

CRI is not only failing in their mission, they are actively hurting the few remaining conservatives left in California by emboldening our ideological opponents. By purporting to speak for all conservatives and failing miserably at every turn, CRI is creating the perception that nothing stands in the way of the looney Left agenda.

In recent years, CRI has lost their way. They spent much of their time fighting with conservatives and trying to take over the CRA and after that failed, they then expended effort trying to create an identical organization under their control (currently they have about two active chapters statewide).

Their fundraising often involves pretending to be part of someone else’s efforts to get something on the ballot or creating a parallel effort instead of supporting folks that are like minded on an issue. Prop 8 is the poster child for this behavior. CRI raised money from people that thought they were giving to Prop 8 when in fact they were giving to a CRI shadow organization that funneled money into CRI for the purpose of helping them make payroll. As is often the case with CRI, the money did not go to the purpose that donors were promised.

This referendum drill by CRI was a dismal failure. I knew it would be before they ever collected a signature. They never had a chance of success. The reality of politics in California is that such an effort typically requires about three million dollars just to get it on the ballot and an additional fifteen million or more to run a legitimate campaign. CRI ended up getting about half of the valid signatures required for qualification. Only paid gatherers could make up the needed shortfall. Why they would undertake such an effort when defeat was certain is mind boggling.

The reality is that we need CRI or a group like them at the Capitol but we also need an effective group. CRI has lost their way. The fact that Karen England is now residing in Nevada and commutes to Sacramento to work two days a week is not a harbinger that things are looking up for them.

Lest you think I am alone in this belief take a look at these articles:
http://www.rightondaily.com/2013/12/retrospective-why-the-ab1266-referendum-effort-looks-dubious-part-1/
http://www.rightondaily.com/2013/12/why-the-ab1266-referendum-looks-dubious-part-2-view-from-the-ground/

Redefined Soon: Dog is Man’s Best Friend

A few years ago, Paul Shanklin did a parody of a man taking wedding vows with his dog. What was a whitty jab at judges changing the definition of marriage a few years ago has taken several large steps toward reality during the first half of this month.

On Monday, a Federal Judge struck down parts of the anti-polygamy laws in Utah.

A federal judge in Utah has struck down part of that state’s law banning polygamy, after a lawsuit was brought by the stars of the television reality series “Sister Wives.” The ruling late Friday by U.S. District Court Judge Clark Waddoups threw out the law’s section prohibiting “cohabitation,” saying it violates constitutional guarantees of due process and religious freedom.
Utah polygamy law

Elsewhere, the decision was explained as striking down the polygamy law because the law limited freedom of association in violation of the First Amendment. Kody Brown and his four wives, who gained notoriety in the reality TV show “Sister Wives,” are challenging Utah’s bigamy statute, claiming it is unconstitutional because it violates their constitutional rights to due process, equal protection, free exercise of religion, free speech and freedom of association.
Judge in Sister Wives case asks for definition of polygamy

OK, so polygamy is now allowed under the First Amendment as a freedom. However, this decision says that a man can still only have one marriage license.

Those of us who support marriage as being between one man and one woman have been saying that the next domino to fall would be prohibitions on polygamy. Clearly, those floodgates are about to burst if they have not already. To decriminalize polygamy is a de facto judicial approval of the behavior.

Next to follow is why limit such loving arrangements to one man and several women. This clearly is discriminatory. What if a women wants multiple men simultaneously? While it might strike at the financial empires of Hugh Hefner and Larry Flint, clearly this is a reasonable corollary once polygamy is allowed. Soon any random assortment of consenting adults will be allowed to play house however they would like.

While this exponential decay of traditional marriage is underway, a second movement is also in the works. When combined to the above discussion, this get really weird because it opens up the possibility of legalizing bestiality.

I would like to introduce the other cutting edge movement that is gaining momentum on the fringe Left; personhood. No sadly, this has nothing to do with recognizing that all the unborn children aborted each year are baby humans. This also has nothing to do with the ethics of euthanasia. Instead the enlightened members of the Ivy League Left are pushing the recognition of the personhood of sentient animals.

Enter Yale University and the “Personhood Beyond the Human Conference” This event held December 6-8, 2013 was described by organizers as:

This historic event will focus on personhood for nonhuman animals, including great apes, cetaceans, and elephants, and will explore evolving notions of personhood by analyzing them through the frameworks of neuroscience, behavioral science, philosophy, ethics, and law. nonhumanrights.net

The event featured the crazy bioethicist, Peter Singer. Singer is the guy who advocates that children that are born should not be declared “human” until they pass rigorous testing. Those children that fail to measure-up as human should be destroyed. “Newborn human babies have no sense of their own existence over time. So killing a newborn baby is never equivalent to killing a person…” Peter Singer In short, Singer is the poster child for the eugenics movement of the 21st Century.

Here is another quote from the abstract page of the non-human rights web site. “Legal personhood for animals would symbolize and institutionalize the intrinsic value of animals and, furthermore, offer significant procedural advantages.” – Saskia L. Stucki

Once whales, dolphins, elephants, and apes are made legally equivalent to humans—which is one of the chief goals of the conference—then it won’t be long before Fido is added to the list. Every movement needs a face people can love to sell the idea to the masses, what better poster being for this movement than the family dog. Yes, Lassie and Snoopy will be the gateway pets to proving the personhood of canines to the public.

Once the ideas of the Personhood conference gain traction and are combined with the definitions of marriage (and family) being developed by the courts then it is reasonable that an animal could be included into the definition of a family. To exclude such sentient beings from being equal partners in our families is “Speciesist”. If things continue as they are, the day is coming soon when a dog will truly be man’s best friend.

Here are a few passages from the “Good Book” that come to mind on this topic.

And God said , Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful , and multiply , and replenish the earth, and subdue it : and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.
Genesis 1: 26-28

Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles. Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.
Romans 1:22-25

Neither shalt thou lie with any beast to defile thyself therewith: neither shall any woman stand before a beast to lie down thereto: it is confusion. Defile not ye yourselves in any of these things: for in all these the nations are defiled which I cast out before you: And the land is defiled : therefore I do visit the iniquity thereof upon it, and the land itself vomiteth out her inhabitants .
Leviticus 18: 23-25.

Scouting to Accept Atheists

A few months after stripping the concept of being “morally straight “ from their core beliefs, the Boy Scouts are now willing to remove God from their pledge. Granted, this action is “across the pond” but can it be far away from the United States? Scouts pledge welcomes non-believers In England—where church attendance is less than three percent and the top boy’s name is Mohammed—is it any wonder that The West is falling?

Appearing Today: Earth Overshoot Day

And now from the people that brought you Global Warming, Climate Change, and Green Energy in their never ending quest for a socialist utopia, we proudly present Earth Overshoot Day. What is this; enquiring minds might ask? Warning: Read this and you may see your lunch again.

An environmentally focused think tank has announced that Earth will be living in what they referred to as an ecological deficit for the remainder of the year.

As of Tuesday, humans officially exhausted the planet’s resources to a point where the Earth is not able to regenerate them fully for the rest of 2013, the Global Footprint Network reports. The group referred to the official date of transition from one side of the ecological preservation coin to the other as “Earth Overshoot Day.”
study earth forced to operate on ecological deficit for rest of 2013

For me to know that God is in control is mythology but this idiocy is science? Mother Earth (a.k.a. the goddess Gaia) is failing to undo the damage inflicted on her by mankind! It’s shocking that this was even put into print. Walter Cronkite’s network has really fallen on hard times to call this newsworthy.

Whatever happened to the law which states “matter can neither be created nor destroyed; only changed in form”? So what are we loosing? This planet can support billions more people than live here now.

Ok, so if this were true what would these environmental extremists want us to do? I would venture to guess they want more government control of our lives.
• Socialism-Abolish personally owned vehicles and other private property ownership.
• Eugenics-Population control coupled with government healthcare.
• Freedom from Religion-Outlaw guns, God, and grillin’.
• Community Planning-all housing would be assigned by the government based upon your contribution to society. This would eliminate suburban sprawl by eliminating privately owned housing and replacing it with more efficient multistory housing and allow for establishment of more green spaces and community gardens. Millions of jobs would be created by building the new multistory housing units and environmental restoration of formerly inhabited spaces that would be returned to the state of nature which existed prior to humans inhabiting the area.

Only in Berkeley could something like this originate.

My Resignation from Boy Scouts

Last night was the night I have been dreading for many days. I finally responded to the Scout vote last week and sent in my resignation to my local Pack.

Before I wrote my resignation email, I sat down with my son and explained why he and daddy needed to leave Scouting. I tried to explain the vote in simple terms without getting into specifics. I told him that the Scouts had adopted policies that were contrary to what Jesus taught us. He was not satisfied with such a vague reason so I tried a different tack.

Then I said that marriage was between one man and one woman. He agreed with this. Then I asked him about the principal at the school where mommy worked. I said he is a man and is married to another man. My son understood that this was wrong. I said the Scouts have changed their policy to permit such behavior and said that this is OK.

At this point he began crying. I asked him why? His response was that he could never be an Eagle Scout and that would make it much harder to be President when he grows up.( He wants to be President so he can undo all the bad stuff that Obama has done to our country.) I told him that instead we would have “daddy scouts”; I would have to take him camping and fishing and do more stuff with him. I told him that some people were trying to organize a Christian replacement for Scouting but I don’t know how far they will get by the time school starts up next fall. He was happier with this explanation. Then I sent him to bed and sat down and wrote my letter to the Pack leader.

I told the Pack leader that I was leaving but offered to allow time for a second signer to be added to the checking account. As Treasurer I support the two signature rule on expenditure of funds. Yes I know I’m showing more grace to the Scouts than they showed to me but I don’t directly blame the local Pack for the turmoil caused by the national organization. In my letter I stated that we would be at the meeting tonight to watch my son advance to the rank of Bear. He earned it. (This advancement was supposed to be last week before the vote but was changed at the last minute.) Following the meeting tonight, I will be done with Scouts.

Today I sent a letter to my son’s private Christian school to ask them to prevent Scouts from using their facilities unless the Pack breaks away from the BSA. This will be interesting to see how the school and its sponsoring church handle this situation. The Pack has been permitted to use the school facilities as long as some members are from the school—many children in the Pack attend local public schools.

Prior to tonight’s meeting, I will see if I can find some information to give to parents about the vote. The national organization kept the local scout council in a virtual news blackout leading up to the vote and no information was circulated to them or to any of the local Packs. The policy change was engineered in secret because it was the only way that advocates could get it passed. This vote also flipped scouts from a grassroots organization to a top-down one. Look for the BSA to consolidate this power in the coming months.