Helicopter Parents Could Learn From Their Trad Moms and Dads

 Helicopter parents are getting worse.

The Wall Street Journal reports that a growing number of Gen Z parents are actively intervening in their children’s job searches, interviews, hiring processes, and even early career issues.

According to the Journal, parents are calling companies about their adult children’s performance reviews, benefits choices, and even calling in sick for them.

According to one survey, 20 percent of Zoomers had a parent attend a job interview with them.

One staffing executive had to fire a 24-year-old twice — once to the employee, who failed to show up for meetings four times, and again to his irate mother who demanded her son be given another chance.

Needed: Trad Parent Wisdom

Ironically, the parents who are hovering over their children now grew up two or three decades ago under trad parents who raised them in an opposite manner.

Not only did our trad parents not obsess over us, they made us go outside to play and not come home until supper, and we knew we had better not be late.

We were free to roam, invent, and discover on our own. We learned how to socialize, make friends, and deal with some of the jerkier kids without a parent anywhere to be found.

True, families were bigger back then and there was always an older sibling around to help us get out of scrapes.

When a big bully busted up my hand-built go-kart, my big sister kicked the tar out of him — he was two years older and 70 pounds heavier than she, but I will never forget the image of her sitting on his back, pounding her fists into his sides as he cried like a baby.

Trad parents didn't give us unwarranted praise. Rather, our parents specialized in admonishing us for the millions of things we were doing wrong — not getting to school on time, not getting high enough grades, not keeping our beds made.

In fact, if we were ever accused of any wrongdoing by other adults, our parents sided instantly with the accusers.

“What did you do now, Tommy?”

We had to prove, beyond any reasonable doubt, that we were not at fault — though, truth be told, we usually were at fault.

Adults Must Figure Life Out on Their Own

When my parents dropped me off at college, they didn't worry about the life challenges that awaited me. They could barely contain their glee that I wouldn't be eating everything in their refrigerator or racking up auto repairs on our Ford Pinto with Jim Rockford maneuvers (don't ask).

They gave me a big jar of peanut butter and some crackers and advised me there was no point in writing home for money — as there wasn't any.

I admit my blue-collar father did intervene in my studies. Worried I would never find a job as an English major, he insisted I minor in something practical.

Thanks to his meddling, I became the only person to ever graduate from Penn State with a major in English and a minor in air-conditioning and heating.

In any event, our trad parents knew that the process of becoming a well-functioning adult required us to figure most things out on our own.

Looking back, that is the greatest gift they gave us.

End Helicopter Parenting Before It’s Too Late

As I said, it’s ironic that so many of today's parents, who enjoyed a trad-parent upbringing, are suffocating their kids’ development by endlessly meddling in their affairs.

It has gotten so bad, reports the Journal, that employers increasingly view heavy parental involvement as a red flag — a signal that Zoomers with especially meddlesome parents likely lack independence and the ability to make their own decisions.

I sure hope these kids figure out how to function on their own before their turn comes to run the country.

Or one day, during a live White House press conference, the president will be asked a tough question and his mother will grab the microphone.

“I don’t appreciate the tone of these questions!” his mom might say. “And for the record, it’s not his fault he was late to the NATO summit — the traffic was terrible and his alarm didn’t go off!”

VIVIFY’s Hydrogen Generators Can Power Anything

 The distributed energy hydrogen revolution is here — bringing worksite-ready hydrogen-powered electricity without any connection to the electric grid.

VIVIFY Technology founder and CEO Jason Herring says that "Talk is the cheapest thing the energy industry produces. So I did not brag about our systems until they were production ready."

That's why his staff began working quietly in a barn in Griffin, Georgia, over a decade ago, even eschewing email communications, until six months ago, when VIVIFY first unveiled its CAT™, HOG™, and Flying Pig™ clean technology machines to the public. The company's factory in Jupiter, Florida, is already capable of rolling out 100 units a day.

Herring's vision is larger than just profits. "We are," he says, "currently focused on the intersection of energy innovation and national infrastructure. As an America-first leader, I am championing pro-growth energy policies and the development of next-generation hydrogen solutions. Our mission is to ensure American energy remains resilient, independent, and technologically superior."

Herring says that VIVIFY's primary objective is to reduce dependence on centralized energy infrastructure supplied by an aging, often-failing grid. His focus on clean energy inspired the five-stage Clean Air Technology (CAT™) emissions control system, which integrates with coal, natural gas, diesel, and other exhaust systems so that operators can clean emissions without changing core operations.

The CAT™ was designed to help industrial systems move toward near-zero emissions by reducing parasite load, improving plant efficiency, and delivering a more cost-effective path toward cleaner output across both legacy and modern infrastructure environments. Its integrated platform brings together multiple stages of filtration, separation, and incineration technologies to remove virtually all pollutants from exhaust while maintaining strong operational performance.

The five core system elements are hydroponic towers that support particulate separation through water condensation and help prepare the exhaust stream for downstream treatment stages; the Cold CAT™ that applies cryogenic carbon dioxide removal and separation logic to strengthen the platform's overall emissions treatment profile; the clean air turbine that provides multistage pollutant incineration; the AGES™ Separator, which uses artificial-gravity water filtration to improve treatment performance within the process train; and a particle acquisition tower that acts as a final-stage particulate filtration element.

A second market-ready VIVIFY product is the Hydrogen Oxygen Generator (HOG™), which uses water (even dirty water or salt water) as its primary input to provide on-site electricity for facilities seeking alternatives to grid power. The platform can operate as a closed-loop system that is largely emissions-free, self-supporting, and scalable.

The HOG's integrated architecture brings together Pulsar™ for on-demand hydrogen creation and system revitalization, alongside multistage turbines, multi-functioning transformers, an H2O input generator, and combustion chambers for power and heat distribution. The HOG can provide alternative power for cold-storage sites, disaster-response operations, remote worksites, data centers, and any entity facing frequent power disruptions.

The Flying Pig™ is VIVIFY's containerized hydrogen power unit that packages the core architecture of the HOG platform into a deployable module. Each 20-foot by 8-foot Flying Pig is a 1-MW power system that can be delivered by airdrop, assembled in 15 minutes, and paired with multiple other units to power an entire remote industrial facility, mining operation, or mobile military or disaster-relief operation.

The Flying Pig provides hydrogen power from the moment it arrives at a site. It requires no external fuel delivery chain and scales by adding modules as demand grows. The initial 500 gallons of water are sufficient to power the Flying Pig for up to 15 years, making it far more efficient than diesel or natural gas. It can also be operational years before any future nuclear microreactor or small modular reactor.

Herring estimates that the Flying Pig™ has the potential to lower operating costs compared to diesel generation by nearly $9.8 million over a five-year period (based on $4/gal diesel costs). Data centers and other entities on multi-year waiting lists for grid connections can start up right away.

"The underlying idea is simple. Rather than waiting years for new transmission lines, substations, and grid upgrades (or NRC permits), the HOG™ and Flying Pig™ can generate electricity right away wherever it is needed." It is especially beneficial for military operations because it gives no heat signal and can operate in any environmental conditions.

Herring says that VIVIFY's engineering team has 20 major patents, over 200 in all, and an ensemble of products that can be used wherever an activity needs immediate electric power. "My hardest challenge, says Herring, "is keeping the geniuses — led by chief engineer Buddy Hall — in line to get products to market. My job is to focus on product distribution and pushing excellence from my staff."

Herring sees a future in which hydrogen technologies can power just about anything, even totally replacing the aging electric grid. As we generate revenue, says Herring, we will continue to spend on R&D, with one goal: a hydrogen generator the size of an auto battery to power automobiles and households.

Already the city of Jacksonville is looking into powering its new pro football stadium and infrastructure with VIVIFY's products. Longer term, just as Starlink provides internet with no cables, VIVIFY envisions a future in which its hydrogen products can even provide electricity for future outposts on the Moon or even Mars.

Bernie Sanders Is the Democrat Party Now

 The “God” for leftists is Bernie Sanders, the “independent” Senator from Vermont who runs the Democrat Party these days. Sure, there are other people in official jobs who run the party, but Bernie controls the people who call the shots…or will likely shoot you if you don’t obey. Communists have a history of that kind of violence; they just aren’t yet in a position to do anything about it. Thanks to comrade Bernie, they might soon be. If you can’t imagine a world in which that happens, you haven’t been paying attention.

Race-Based Hiring Changed Higher Education

 person 2: I mentioned a couple of episodes ago our friend Bill Jacobson with Legal Insurrection. He has some efforts aimed at ferreting out that stuff. Yeah, it’s not only, let’s just say, racism in schools, which could be in hiring. This could be in scholarships. Here’s a scholarship: blacks only need apply.

Or teachers, you’re going to get this bonus, but only if you’re a minority. So, he has a legal arm there that goes after that. There are efforts to …

person 1: You know, I had a student tell me, “You don’t know what it’s like to be Latino.” And I said, “I do,” because I came of age when this started.

In those days, 4.0 was the top, and I had a 3.99. I had two Bs. I did pretty well for a country boy on the SAT, so I applied to UC Santa Cruz. It was a new campus. It was harder to get in than Stanford. I was on the waiting list at Stanford and UC, so I might not have gone away to college. They let me into both, I think, much later at Stanford, but I got into Santa Cruz from the waiting list.

So, I went there, and there were two students from my high school who were C students, and they were there already. They had been there all summer long. They were Latino. I never said anything, but they could not believe that I had, you know … There were three students who had the top grades.

It’s a long story, but there was a valedictorian. I wasn’t that, but we were all one-tenth of a point apart. I was, I think, the third highest. But the point I’m making is that when I went to graduate school, this was in 1975, Mark Edwards was a great guy. He called us in, and there were four white males. He said, “I want to tell you right now, we’re hearing of lawsuits.”

This was kind of like the [Allan] Bakke era. “None of you are going to get a job. I’ve been to the American Philological Association, and everybody’s told me they’re going to hire women and minorities no matter what. We have to at Stanford.”

We said, “Well, you have three or four women here, and you have an African American.”

I said, “How about all you guys? Why don’t you all resign and then give up your places? You’re all in your 60s.”

When you’re that age, 21 years old, you don’t believe it. So, you think, “Well, I’ll be fine.” I told my adviser. He said, “Well, if you’re good, you’ll make it. I did.”

I said, “Yeah, but you were in a different generation.”

So I finished all my exams in two and a half years. That’s all I did. I studied 20 hours a day and slept about five hours. I wrote my thesis in my third year. I went to the American School of Classical Studies for a whole year. I did all of that.

When I applied to seventeen jobs at age twenty-five, I got one interview at the Naval Academy. They said, “That was a great interview.”

They interviewed me on everything. “Can you tell us who Jomini was?” and things outside classics. Then they said, “But you’re not going to get the job. We have to hire a woman.”

I said, “Well, you guys are kind of old. Why don’t you resign and hire her?” Because they have a civilian system at the Naval Academy, not like West Point.

So, I came back, and I’d farmed for five years. I was unemployable. When I went to Fresno, Cal State Fresno, they said, “We’re not going to hire you. We’ll have you part-time.”

I said, “I published a book.”

They said, “Well, let me see. You have a Ph.D. from Stanford and you’ve published a book, but we’re going to hire a woman and a minority.”

These were all white guys telling me this.

Finally, I gave a lecture, and a person from the McClatchy Foundation heard me speak. She said, “That was a great talk. Why aren’t you teaching?”

I said, “I only have one class.”

So, she gave a gift for me to teach for one year. I did pretty well, and I doubled the enrollment.

But my point is that there’s a whole generation of people born in the 1950s who came of age during this whole racial preference system, and that’s all they’ve known. So, when people say discrimination, there has been discrimination, but when I saw it institutionally, I’m not talking about what people thought. Institutionally, it was all one way, and people are tired of it.

So, when I got a job and I got tenure, I had a guy from the philosophy department come to me and say, “They’re not going to hire me. I’m a white male. I’ve been a part-time teacher for eleven years, and I make one-third of what a professor does. I drive all over to community colleges. Can you help me?”

So, I went to the chairman, and I did that for about five people. I got all five hired.

But it was very strange how amoral it was. It was just blatant. You know what I mean? Blatant racism. It would have been much better if, when people thought there was inequality, and there was, they had started at K-12.

You could have gone down to the kindergarten level and said, “These are the types of schools in minority districts in the forties, fifties, and sixties that educated people well, and we’re going to restore them. We’re going to make them academies. Anybody can go, but they’ll be located in poorer areas to make sure that when you come out of there … ”

It was holistic, and that’s what I grew up with in a Hispanic district.

So, when I had students, I would always say to them, “You’re going to give a lecture, your class report, and you can have no notes. You’re going to memorize it, and you’re going to talk to me. I don’t want you reading it off a page. And you’re going to have perfect English.”

I corrected their syntax and their grammar. The whole point, I thought, was to make sure that Mexican American, Black, and Southeast Asian students spoke perfect English and were better educated than anybody.

person 2: Right.

person 1: And to do all that work, that’s why I retired.

One day I walked into my office area, and this guy had a big Land Rover. It must have cost $60,000. His office was next to mine, and he had a sign that said, “No blood for oil.”

Then I walked down the hall, and a student came into the office after me. This guy who had been up for tenure was terrible. I was on the tenure committee.

He was telling the student, “Don’t worry about grammar. You don’t need grammar. You’ve grown up in a disadvantaged household. I don’t correct grammar.”

He was an English professor.

I saw that and I thought, “I’m so glad that I don’t have to deal with these people.” I had wonderful colleagues, Bruce Thornton, etc., and I had wonderful students.

Then one of the students I liked a lot, a guy who was really good, came up to me and said, “Well, I’m applying to Ph.D. programs.”

I said, “Yeah, but it’s going to be very competitive because we have two or three people this year with master’s degrees, perfect GRE scores, and they know French and German.”

He said, “Yeah, but they’re not minorities like I am.”

At that point, I said, “I’m done.”

So, I turned around and walked to the California PERS retirement office and said, “I want to retire.”

They said, “Mr. person 1, you’re 51 years old, and you’ve only been here 21 years.”

They showed me the actuarial tables.

“We are notorious for having the best-defined benefits, and you would be getting $110,000 in those future dollars when you complete 35 years.”

I said, “I can’t take it. What would it be right now?”

At that time they said, “$18,000 a year when you’re 65.”

They’ve inflated it a little because of the cost of living, but I said, “I quit.”

The president called me up and said, “You can’t quit.”

I said, “Why?”

He said, “Because you get more hits on your website than the entire school.”

I don’t know what he meant by that.

And I said, “But I’ve had enough.”

person 2: But you also had heavily populated classes, right?

person 1: Yeah, I had 200 students, and I had been there for 21 years. I’d written 16 books. I’d won a National Endowment award. All of those things they count, though I didn’t care much about them. I had been a visiting professor at Stanford and a visiting professor at the Naval Academy.

But I was done. Done.

The Strange Alliance Between Islam and Socialism

 One of the things that is perplexing and often a topic of conversation is this new American-Western European alliance or absorption of Islam and Marxism-socialism-communism. In other words, people who identify as radical Muslims, often in their alliance, include people who are traditional Western Marxists, and it doesn’t seem possible for a variety of ways.

There’s a lot of antitheses. Do we really believe that these upscale people in blue enclaves in the United States who declare themselves socialist and are voting for people like Zohran Mamdani, or Ilhan Omar, or Rashida Tlaib, who are proud, and active, and often fervent Muslims, tolerate gays? Do you really believe if you said, “I am gay, and I’m proud of it, and I want to announce that in Saudi Arabia,” you wouldn’t be in trouble?

Do you really believe that if you went to Iran and said, “I want to repeal all the sodomy laws,” you wouldn’t be in trouble?

Or if you went, let’s say, to Egypt and you said, “I wanna have a trans, sexual support group,” you wouldn’t be in trouble? Do you really believe that upscale, independent women in Western cities, maybe unmarried, professional, doesn’t that bother them a little bit when they ally themselves with radical Muslims who tell them that, as far as men go, their dream is going to an Islamic heaven and having the sexual use as if they’re almost tools of 72 virgins?

Does that go well with a book editor in Manhattan or the head of an NGO in Denver? I don’t think so.

Another thing that’s quite different is Islam believes in Allah, and that’s it. All other people who are non-believers are doomed to hell, and the duty is to spread worship, loyalty, fealty to the Muslim Allah.

But throughout the history of socialism and Marxism and communism, all of them agree on one thing, that religion is really the opiate of the masses. They feel that class struggle is harmed or negated by people who believe in a God. In the Christian sense, they feel that, blessed are the meek, blessed are the poor.

That Sermon on the Mount doesn’t do anything. It basically says there will be social justice in heaven, but not here. If you’re poor, you go to heaven by being morally better than the rich man. Remember, it’s harder for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than a rich man, Jesus says, to go to heaven.

So, the message for believers is that there is social justice in heaven. The message for a socialist, communist, Marxist is it’s right now. There is no heaven. There is no God. We have to get social justice now.

Another thing that’s very different is Marxists believe in the state control of the means of production, and socialists believe that this—there can be private property, but mostly the utilities, the railroads, the steel companies, most all of the muscles of a society are owned also by the state.

But they believe in a commission, a committee, a chairman. They don’t believe that one exercises power through royalty or succession, although most communist and Marxist states, which we see in North Korea and we see in Iran, they’re very similar in some ways. But, in the Arab world, monarchy is pretty much de rigueur, as we see in the Gulf states.

But Marxism says, “No, we don’t believe in kings. We overthrow them.” That was what the revolutions of 1848 were about. That’s what the French Revolution was about. That’s basically what the Bolsheviks were trying to get rid of an imperial dynastic tsar. So, that’s another antithesis.

Another thing is the Arab world is based on tribalism, that your first loyalty goes to people who look like you, speak a dialect of Arabic like you, and have a local or regional affinity, a proximity to you.

That’s always been the challenge of the modern Arab nation or state. How do you include people from seven, 10, 15, 20 different tribes who have fought each other for centuries and only come together when coerced to, for example, under the Ottoman Empire?

But Marxism is very different. Your first allegiance is not to people who look like you.

It’s to the global proletariat, the oppressed, the Comintern. Socialists believe that they have more in common with people in Europe who are fellow socialists than they do with rich people or, or people who are devoutly religious in their own country.

So tribalism is part of Islam’s foundation. Globalism is central to the socialist or the communist or the Marxist.

However, all of that said, someone’s going to say, “Well, Victor, they’re alike. They have a coalition. Zohran Mamdani is a hardcore Marxist, and he’s a hardcore Islamicist, and so is Ilhan Omar, and so are almost all the people in Dearborn, Michigan, it seems like, and so are these new socialist candidates that are popping up like flowers everywhere in blue cities and urban areas.”

So, what’s the similarities? One, they hate Western civilization. They can’t stand the values of Western civilization, free speech, religious opportunity, market capitalism, etc. They both hate that and Islam has been, has been at war with the West since the seventh century, and it’s fought Westerners not just in the Crusades, but all through the history of the Byzantine Empire, all through the history of Europe and North Africa.

And when [Osama] bin Laden said the great tragedy was that Islam lost its hold in Europe, what he was basically talking about was the Battle of Tours and the stopping of the Islamic movement northward into Europe. They, of course, have, in the Quran and its related apocrypha, there’s a lot of hatred of Jews.

They hate Israel with a passion. So do Marxists, socialists. I’m not sure why they do, given the creation of Israel was based on a kibbutz system, which is socialistic in nature, and many of the original generation who settled in Israel even before World War II came there as dissidents from Eastern Europe and Russia, and they believed in a socialist future.

But that’s all ancient history now. As of now, what draws Muslims to the new left-wing hardcore socialist and communist, and what draws them to include rather antithetical Muslims into their movement, they hate Israel with a passion, and they hate Jews.

There’s another, similarity. They hate capitalism.

They do not believe that a person should have freedom of opportunity to start his own business, to make a profit. In the Islamic world, interest is frowned upon officially. Not that the Gulf states are run … The Gulf states are run on hypercapitalism, but officially they find, euphemisms and mechanisms to get around prohibitions in the Quran for hypercapitalism or laissez-faire capitalism.

And of course, capitalism is the main enemy of Zohran Mamdani and others who feel it’s unfair, it doesn’t share the wealth. They believe in the message not of the Americans, “Give me liberty or give me death,” a revolution to ensure political freedom, but a holistic, totalitarian, three-hundred-and-sixty-degree revolution of fraternity egalitarianism.

In other words, we’re not just going to give people freedom to speak. We don’t want them to have freedom to speak. We want to make them equal on the back end by the use of government coercion.

Both of them hate democracy then. They don’t like the people voting because, in the Arab world or the Muslim world, there will be people who object to the role of women, especially in the modern age, or the role that intolerance for sexual minorities or the intolerance shown Christians.

And so, they will object, and they wouldn’t want to express that objection. That’s taboo. And we know from the history of socialism, they say they believe in free speech, but very quickly socialists try to outlaw it, and when they become communists, they kill for it.

That’s another difference. And both of them justify violence.

They believe the violent method is necessary for the, desired end. And so you see people who are committing … Who are the people that commit violence? Who was the person just this week in New York that stabbed somebody? Who was the person in Europe that tried to run over people at a gay party?

Who are the people protesting ICE? Who are the people on the campus protesting violently? They are either radical Islamicist or they’re radical socialist communist Antifa types, or often they’re mixed together in the same demonstration.

Finally, remember that Hitler himself said he was a national socialist.

Yes, he made deals with crony capitalism, but even though he said he despised Bolshevism, he said after he was looking back in his final days that he admired Joseph Stalin’s communism, and he said that if he had defeated the United States and Russia, he would have executed American leaders, but welcomed Stalin in kind of a genteel captivity.

And by the same token, Hitler said that he preferred Islam to Christianity. He had a great deal of admiration for the Grand Mufti. There was an alliance of radical Islam with national socialists. They both hated capitalism, and they hated the same thing as we’ve just reviewed, and they liked many of the same things.

Hitler was not a hypercapitalist. He was a socialist, a national socialist. And in some ways, even though he said he despised Bolsheviks, they had a lot in common.

So, remember, next time you see this bizarre, weird, surreal alliances or people shouting Allah Akbar or, power to the people, spread the word. They’re not as different as you think.