Stigma of ‘Dirty Fossil Fuels’ Drives Young People Away from Lucrative Careers in Oil and Gas Work

Petroleum Engineers

Petroleum engineering is the highest paying bachelor’s degree in the United States, according to a report by Payscale, but despite an average annual salary of $97,500, oil companies struggle to fill positions.

The industry faces a number of challenges. Employees often face cyclical layoffs whenever commodity prices collapse, and that makes the jobs appear unstable. Young people today are also concerned about working in an industry they’re taught is destroying the planet.

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Commentary: ‘To Have and to Hold’: Marrying Young and Making It Last

Marriage

Kate Z. works in childcare and as a part-time barista in my local coffee shop. She’s the oldest of 10 children, with seven brothers and two sisters. Home-educated during elementary school, Kate then entered Padre Pio Academy here in Front Royal, Virginia, a hybrid school which combines homeschooling with three days a week in the classroom. She graduated in 2021 and currently lives in an apartment.

Jesse R. is adopted and the youngest of three siblings. For the most part, he was homeschooled before entering Padre Pio. He also graduated in 2021 and works as a chef de partie in the restaurant of a retirement community. He shares a house with a friend.

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Commentary: Study Shows Teens with Very Conservative Parents Most Likely to Have Excellent Mental Health

Family Dinner

Adolescents who have “very conservative” parents are 16 to 17 percent more likely to have good or excellent mental health compared to teenagers with liberal parents, according to new research by Gallup.

The fascinating finding was made in June 2023 and features in a comprehensive report published last month by the independent, non-partisan Institute for Family Studies (IFS).

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Commentary: The Anti-Capitalist Attack on Therapy

Therapy session

There is a common criticism that therapy has become too mainstream and commercialized, feeding into snowflake culture. From influencers receiving sponsorships to promote mental health apps to the prominence of online therapy advertisements on social media, it seems like there’s a movement to push therapy on young people who arguably might not need it.

As the substack writer Freya India writes on the matter: “Maybe you’re struggling because [therapy] companies are taking your human need for connection, your normal feelings of stress and sadness, and using all this to sell solutions that leave you more anxious and alone. Because again: what could be more profitable?”

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Commentary: Young People Turn on Biden over Stagnant Wages and Inability to Launch

Young voters were one of the core coalitions that installed President Biden in the White House, supporting him by a twenty-four-point margin in 2020. Peering deeper into the data, young voters have been slowly drifting away from Democrats in each election since 2012. That drift has rapidly accelerated in the past three years as economic issues have become paramount for young adults. New polling suggests Biden is on track to lose double-digits with voters under thirty compared to the 2020 election, and economic issues are at the center of the problem.  

Stagnant wages, crippling inflation, a housing affordability crisis, the importation of cheap foreign labor, and an absurd regulatory environment that stifles small business growth are issues all Americans face, but young people are hit particularly hard in Biden’s economy.

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‘THE CHOSEN’ Star Jonathan Roumie Warns March for Life Activists: ‘God Is Real, Satan Is Also Real’

Catholic actor Jonathan Roumie, who plays the role of Jesus in the fan-supported television series THE CHOSEN, warned thousands of young pro-life activists Friday that while “God is real,” so “Satan is also real.”

“And I’m not talking about the simplistic cartoon of some dude with horns and a tail,” Roumie said during his address at the March for Life rally. “I’m talking about the father of lies, the Great Deceiver, the diabolical slanderer, who pushes you to doubt when you know in your heart the right thing to do.”

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Commentary: Getting Young People Back in the Pews

Only 54 percent of Christians aged 18–35 attend church once a month or more. Meanwhile, Christianity is rapidly declining in the American population, especially in the younger generations.

The secularization of society is evident wherever we turn, and it will only worsen as young people continue to turn away from Christianity. To survive, the church needs to continue through the generations and get young people back in the pews.

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Tennessee Sen. Blackburn Blasts YouTube, TikTok and Snapchat Execs for Allowing Dangerous Content

A U.S. Senate committee investigating the promotion of material harmful to young people on social media expanded beyond Facebook and Instagram Tuesday to include the video-sharing sites YouTube and TikTok as well as the Snapchat messaging application.

Therein, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) deplored the health-threatening viral challenges (e.g. binge drinking, the infamous “cinnamon challenge”), enticements toward illegal drugs, encouragements to engage in drastic dieting and presentations of child-sex abuse that she said have been purveyed to children and teens via these websites. She raised particular alarm regarding minors she said have been led into illicit sexual relationships on Snapchat.

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Commentary: Demographics Is Not Destiny

by Edward Ring   A special election is scheduled for September 10 in North Carolina’s 3rd Congressional District to replace former incumbent Walter Jones, the long-serving Republican who died earlier this year. The district is solidly Republican. Jones earned twice as many votes as his Democratic challenger in nearly every election since he first took office in 1995. But the district is interesting for another reason, one that every Republican strategist in America should study. It is one of 47 congressional districts in the United States where, in the 2018 midterm elections, a majority of nonwhite voters were projected to vote Republican. The following map, prepared by elections analyst Geoffrey Skelly at FiveThirtyEight, shows the congressional districts (red) where, if no one but nonwhite people voted, Republican candidates would still be likely to win. It’s hard to overstate the significance of these 47 congressional districts. They belie the smug certainty on the part of Democratic politicians and strategists across the United States who equate the demographic transformation of America with an inevitable and unbreakable Democratic majority. Take mass nonwhite immigration, higher birth rates for nonwhites, mix in identity politics and leftist, race-centric indoctrination against “white privilege,” and voila, America becomes…

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Poll: Young Voters Overwhelmingly Democratic, But Young Republicans Are Increasingly Conservative

by Paul Ingrassia   Young Republican and Democrat voters are united in their dissatisfaction with older politicians and overwhelmingly believe the country is heading in the wrong moral direction. Those were some of the findings of the new Spring 2019 Harvard IOP Youth Poll, which was released Monday in anticipation of Tuesday’s “youth-focused” CNN town halls featuring a number of 2020 Democratic presidential contenders, including South Bend Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg, and Sens. Kamala Harris of California, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. The results found that young voters are more energized and politically engaged for 2020 than in 2016. Forty-three percent of 18-29-year-olds, for example, said they were likely to vote in their state’s primary, a 7 percent increase from 2015. The poll also found that “The 2020 electorate is shaping up to be more progressive than 2016 on a range of social and economic policy related issues, including on health care, poverty, and trade policy.” Since 2015, the number of younger voters who agreed with the statement, “government should do more to curb climate change, even at the expense of economic growth” rose a whopping 14 percent to 46 percent agreement.…

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