Every once in a while you hear about these people who build up totally fake identities on the internet.

They devote hundreds of hours to crafting a persona and a story that are completely fabricated. They claim they have eight kids. They claim they have a ton of money. They claim they are something they are absolutely not.

We shouldn’t seek out approval pretending to be someone else. We shouldn’t drift off into the digital abyss, play-acting like little children.

What is that? What can we learn from it? What does it mean for us?

A new kind of delusion

It’s a very modern phenomenon, that’s for sure. It didn’t exist 50 years ago. It couldn’t have existed 50 years ago. There was just no way to do it. There was no internet. No possibility of retreating into the safety of a false digital reality.

And that’s what it is at bottom: a retreat into a more alluring world. A world where you don’t have to ever do anything or be anything. You can just say you are anything, and that’s enough.

It’s a kind of fantasy escapism. Yes, of course, we have had fantasy and escapism for a long time. Books can be just that. But this is very different from books. It’s more interactive, more immersive, more alluring.

We live in an era of parallel worlds. There is the digital world and the actual world. It’s no stretch to suggest that retreating into a false digital identity, living in a false digital world, is a retreat from life itself.

How do you end up claiming that you have 11 kids when you have none? How do you end up claiming you are some wealthy mogul when you are living with your parents? How do you end up claiming you are 27 when you are 49?

The same old escapism

I imagine it happens slowly. It starts with a desire to escape. To leave life behind. To become someone else, someone you see as greater, without doing any of the work to get there.

You don’t leave your life if you are happy. You don’t leave reality if you are fulfilled. Think about drug addicts who zone out every day. Do they do it because they are fulfilled in their lives? No, they want to zone out as far as they possibly can without going over the edge into death.

A similar thing is going on with retreating into the digital. “Life is miserable, but the digital world can be whatever I want.” That’s the logic.

That’s how it all starts. Then it accelerates. The "likes" start coming in. The followers start increasing. Fabricators see what works, and soon enough they are throwing red meat to their mob. The people eat it up.

They see that everyone loves who they are. Well, not who they actually are, but who they pretend to be. “I’m not enough, but my pretend self is.” That must be painful, but it can be overcome for the sake of likes and follows.

Bridging the gap

The examples above are extreme. Most people, thankfully, don’t concoct false parallel lives for internet dopamine hits. But the question of how we bridge the gap between the digital and the actual in a healthy way is a question we all must wrestle with. How do we remain ourselves in the digital world?

Honesty. That’s how we remain ourselves. We just have to be honest, or at least not dishonest. We don’t have to tell the whole world everything about who we are. Strangers don’t have a right to anything that’s ours. We don’t owe anyone any details about how we live our lives.

But we shouldn’t lie to ourselves or others. We shouldn’t seek out approval by pretending to be someone else. We shouldn’t drift off into the digital abyss, play-acting like little children.

Living a parallel life isn’t natural. We haven’t evolved with the internet. We are new to it. Throughout human civilization, we have only lived IRL. Now, we live IRL and online. The dissonance of managing two conflicting identities at the same time is not something we were ever made to do.

Bad for the soul

It’s not good for the soul, either. There has to be some kind of corrosion that happens when you live a parallel life in the digital world. Some kind of deeper self-hatred burns there. The self-deception must eat away at you.

The most fundamental problem of losing oneself in the digital world is the fact that we will never escape the actual one, no matter how hard we try. We can’t upload our brains to the cloud. We can’t get away from the fact that we are stuck here on earth. We can’t escape our bodies, the rooms where we sleep, or the fingers with which we type. The actual world will always remain, as long as we do.

Offloading one’s energy and emotions to a parallel identity in the digital world only prevents us from bettering our actual lives in the actual world. It doesn’t matter how many likes you get or how many followers you have if you hate yourself. It doesn’t matter how exciting your digital life looks if your actual life is miserable.

The internet has given us incredible opportunities, but it also presents us with incredible dangers. We must never lose our way in a false digital world. We must always remain ourselves, both online and offline. This might be one of the great challenges of our time.

You are a child until you have a child

You are a child until you have a child.

Right up until the moment you hold that baby in your arms, you are a child yourself. You see the world from that perspective. You are on that side of things, and it colors everything you feel.

My dad always used to joke about how he would never go see us in our room when we were sleeping because we always looked too sweet. That’s parental humor. The good stuff.

You might be an old child, one who graduated college a decade ago, but you are still a child.

And then it all changes. Or at least the seeds of the change are planted, and you are thrown onto the other side, forever.

The great divide

The world is divided between those with children and those without. It's parents vs. the childless in our society, and the battle is just getting started. It will only intensify as we move into the future, and greater numbers of childless people grow older without becoming parents.

But I'm not here to stoke this conflict. I'm not here to attack those who, for whatever reason, don't have kids. I merely want to state a fact of life. We are not the same.

It’s hard to nail down what it is that really separates the children from those with children. It’s not politics. It’s not money. It’s not education. It’s not culture. There are those with children and those without on all sides.

Nor is it being a good person. There are bad people who are bad parents. Great people who are not parents.

It’s not necessarily responsibility either, even though kids do demand that. It’s deeper than all these things. It’s some kind of essence or knowledge. Or maybe it’s some kind of acceptance of a constellation of truths that you only perceive once you have kids.

Falling short

There’s something about imperfection. That’s one of those truths in the constellation. It’s not just the surface imperfection of the scratched up tables, the walls that always end up covered in scribbles, or the realization that you are not going to have “nice things” for a long time.

(And that’s OK, by the way. Nice things are overrated.)

But it’s more than all that. Something stranger. It’s about the imperfection of life itself. Having kids forces us to give up trying to think of ourselves as perfect. When we are parents, we try to be better than we were, because we want to be good role models. So we aspire to be greater (or more perfect) in this sense.

But at the same time, our children can't help but reveal how far we fall short. Their innocence reveals our corrupt nature in more poignant terms. Life isn’t perfect; neither are we.

You’re beat, sick of work, sick of corralling the kids in the car, sick of ushering them along the sidewalk, sick of cleaning up rice from the floor after dinner, tired as hell, and counting down the minutes until you can finally get a break once the kids are in bed. And then, once they are finally asleep, about 15 minutes later, you feel bad for wanting to get them in bed as soon as possible.

“Damn it.”

The good stuff

There’s a certain way you say that word as a dad. Under your breath, by yourself, in the morning, late at night, in the car, out back behind the house, just sitting there by the window, looking at a photo of your kids from a few years back.

The way you say it, that’s the tragic part. The resigned part.

It’s the feeling that no childless person understands. My dad always used to joke about how he would never go see us in our room when we were sleeping because we always looked too sweet. That’s parental humor. The good stuff. Sardonic and deeply sensitive at the same time, if you get it. It’s the stuff that you can’t relate to if you are childless.

You are spinning plates when you have kids. Your arms reach wider, and you are pulled 100 ways at once.

Benevolent dictator

You take on more roles than ever before. You are like a dictator who controls the education system, religious system, medical system, housing, and everything else you could possibly imagine all at the same time, 24/7, for decades.

Your stress tolerance increases, and you just naturally start to think about yourself less than you did before. You fade in a sense, and you are no longer the center of your own world.

You are a leader and need to manage your people like a ruler manages his, and it demands a stronger stomach. You have to lie all the time because you don’t ever tell your kids the whole truth. Answers for a 5-year-old aren’t fully honest answers. There are things they shouldn’t know yet.

You also teach your kids never to lie in the next breath. Yes, it’s complicated.

In truth, for parents the concerns of the childless are hard to take so seriously. They seem more and more petty the deeper into parenthood you get. They feel like the concerns of children.

But you know they don’t feel like it to them because you remember how you felt before you had kids, when you were a child, too. It’s not their fault for feeling like that, and it’s not ours for feeling like we do. None of it is anyone’s fault. It’s OK, we all have our own role in this life. But we aren’t the same.

You’re a child until you have a child, and you can never go back.

Trump pulls plug on government's 8,000 EV chargers

The word has come down from on high: Shut down the power, and sell the fleet.

The Trump administration's General Services Administration is set to pull the plug on all EV charging stations in federal buildings nationwide. In addition, the agency plans to off-load newly purchased EVs from the federal vehicle fleet.

Shutting this down isn’t just about saving pennies; it’s a signal. The Trump administration is pumping the brakes on the whole EV push, big time.

Tell me again how Trump's in the tank for Elon?

Fleet cheat

The GSA is the agency that keeps the federal government’s buildings humming and manages a massive fleet of about 650,000 vehicles.

Under Biden, the GSA went all in on EVs — ordering over 58,000 zero-emission rides and installing thousands of charging ports nationwide. The goal? Electrify everything by 2035.

But now, with Trump back in the driver’s seat, the GSA is hitting the brakes hard. It is pulling the plug on hundreds of charging stations — think 8,000 plugs going dark — and off-loading those brand-new EVs faster than you can say "range anxiety."

The reasoning? These assets aren’t "mission critical." Translation: The GSA doesn’t think EVs fit the government’s real priorities.

Free ride

Let’s break this down. These chargers weren’t just for government vehicles and federal employees; they were being used for personal EVs, too. We’re talking Denver Federal Center, VA sites, military bases, and other places where federal employees could cop a complimentary charge for their personal vehicles.

The free ride is over. And GSA is unloading its electric vehicle fleets, too. No word yet on whether the government is selling them cheap or just parking them in some giant government lot. Either way, this is a seismic shift. The Biden administration spent billions of your tax dollars to push this green dream, and now the GSA has yanked the emergency brake.

And let’s not kid ourselves — shutting this down isn’t just about saving pennies; it’s a signal. The Trump administration is pumping the brakes on the whole EV push, big time.

War on the green agenda

It's no secret that President Trump is not a fan of Biden’s EV mandate. He’s already paused $5 billion in public charger funding and nixed plans for more federal EVs. This is war on the green agenda. Biden’s team dropped BILLIONS of dollars of your money to electrify everything by 2035.

The GSA is responsible for managing federal assets including a fleet of approximately 650,000 vehicles. Under the Biden administration, it embarked on a plan to transition to zero-emission vehicles. That included the procurement of over 58,000 EVs and the installation of more than 25,000 charging ports. It never came anywhere close to achieving those figures though, and this new directive puts that plan to a swift end.

It's not clear where all those unwanted EVs will go. Technically, the GSA could simply take the vehicles out of the fleet and put them into storage rather than sell them at a loss.

It’s also uncertain how the agency will replace the vehicles being phased out; possibilities include purchasing new gas-powered models or reallocating older ones from retirement. I hope they reuse the older ones and stop wasting our tax dollars.

Waste management

Three years ago, the Biden administration gave out a total of $7.5 billion in grants for states to develop EV charging infrastructure; since then, only about a dozen charging stations have been built nationwide.

This is a waste of taxpayer dollars. Carmakers need to shift gears and stop cranking out EVs that are not selling and sitting on dealer lots. Making what their customers want rather than what is mandated will return the profits they once enjoyed.

So what’s your take? Is the GSA right to ditch EVs and chargers? Hit me up in the comments. I want to hear your opinions!

How leftists think — and how you can change their minds

Doesn’t it seem like Donald Trump has been president for longer than seven weeks?

The administration has accomplished so much in such a short time that it’s easy to forget “we’ve only just begun.” So far, most of the changes that are de-wokifying American life are coming in the form of executive orders.

I never believed a man in a dress was a woman, and really, no one else does either. ... [But] I was afraid that not believing it would make me a morally bad person.

The most consequential moves — for example, protecting children from chemical and surgical abuse in the form of “sex changes” — need to be codified in laws passed by Congress.

Conservatives are celebrating the death of woke; I’m one of them. But if woke is on the wane, it is not dead. It may be in the process of dying, but actual death has not occurred. And its death may be much farther off than it looks.

Right now, less than two months into the Trump presidency, we’re seeing what I call an unveiling. Some call it an “extinction burst,” the idea that people act out their behaviors even more flagrantly just before the social environment changes enough to make their behaviors “go extinct.”

Whatever you call it, we’re seeing the depth of derangement in the woke minds of Democrats and leftists even more starkly than before.

The media is hyperventilating that free speech leads to Nazi pogroms. Leftists are gnashing their teeth over the deportation of noncitizen Mahmoud Khalil, acting as though he has a fundamental right to agitate against U.S. interests while he’s here as our guest (no concern at all for the effect of his agitation on their own countrymen, of course).

Democrat lawmakers shocked by the new reality that people are not going to call mentally ill men “women” any more just because they say they’re women are melting down in emotional tantrums in House committee hearings.

Inside the leftist mind

Here you are, a conservative, wondering just what these people are thinking. Why do they believe what they believe? Do they, in fact, actually believe what they say they believe?

I have these same questions, but I think I also have some of the answers.

Before a years-long process of changing my mind about politics and culture, I was one of them. The backstory that got me to being a leftist Democrat is a backstory shared by millions of people like me. It won’t describe everyone, but the generalizations I’m going to make are drawn from my own experience, and they do describe a large number of leftists and the woke-minded.

The first and most important generalization? Look into the past of any given leftist, and chances are you'll find some variation of ...

Fatherlessness

This is the single biggest factor that predisposes a child to mental troubles and leftist “people are victims of societal forces” ideology.

Not only is fatherlessness damaging to a kid’s normal ability to relate to the sexes, to regulate his emotions, and more, but it tends to coincide with single mothers with feminist attitudes. I never met my father, and my mother married a violent child molester by whom she had two more children.

She kicked him out after he tried to kill her, and the die was cast. To my mother, and by osmosis to me, all men were lazy deadbeats and scum. All the men in her life had victimized my poor, innocent mother, and nothing could be laid at the feet of her own choices.

Thus, the male feminist version of me was born, nurtured by those two companions of fatherlessness ...

Single motherhood and welfare dependency

One day in 1983, a college student stopped my mother on her way into the grocery store asking for her signature on a petition to end welfare fraud. My mother haughtily raised her nose, pointed at us three children, and said, “Do you see any welfare fraud here?”

At home, she’d scream at the television when Ronald Reagan spoke of “welfare queens,” saying there was no such thing and that Reagan was an abusive scum for trying to reform welfare. We were taught that our poverty was the fault of the government and that the government was cruel to give so little to single mothers like mine.

Thus was born my anti-capitalist sentiment that would flower into protesting against “greedy corporations,” my support for absurdly high minimum wages, and more.

As I discussed in my recent review of Adam Coleman's forthcoming book "The Children We Left Behind," modern America gives single moms the “you go girl/slay kween” treatment. We’ve made them heroines who cannot be criticized.

Of course, spending your whole life feeling like a victim of "the system" lets you justify all sorts of ...

Bad adult choices

Children who grow up in neglect and abuse as I did are far more likely to gravitate toward the left because the left embraces victimhood, hedonistic behavior, and self-centered, narcissistic choices dressed up as “self-care” and “self-love.”

As a young adult, I took up the stereotyped behaviors of abused children, living a promiscuous party life, becoming an alcoholic, and blaming all of this on anything but my own choices. Naturally, I surrounded myself with similarly damaged people. Every single one of them, to a man or a woman, was a leftist, socialist, or proud Marxist.

Once you realize the emotional disorder that leads people to adopt these beliefs, you might ask yourself ...

Do they really believe what they’re saying?

Democrat/leftist beliefs are so extreme and absurd in the 21st century that it baffles non-leftists. It’s been eight years since I started changing my mind to what it is today (conservative, anti-woke).

Even though I can remember when I was one of them, today’s leftists have gone farther than I ever did. For example, take the beliefs surrounding ...

Transgenderism

Do they actually, literally believe that a man claiming to be a woman makes him a woman?

Yes and no.

No, not in a literal sense, even though they claim very loudly that they do. The emotional urgency of their claims is used to cover up the fact that deep down, they know it’s insane.

I know this because it used to be me. I never believed a man in a dress was a woman, and really, no one else does either. So why did I say I believed it? Because I was afraid that not believing it would make me a morally bad person.

You see, children from abusive homes are forced into an adult role when they’re still little, trained to become emotional surrogate spouses to their damaged parent. So we grow up believing we are morally obligated to fuss and coo over any person who presents herself as a victim.

No, I didn’t believe these men were literally women. But I did believe I had a moral duty (it works as a religion because it is one) to say that I believed it and to act as if it were true. Fortunately for me, this cognitive dissonance was so severe that I didn’t keep this stance for long.

“Trans” was the first chink in the armor of my leftism. But rejecting it didn't mean letting of my conviction that ...

America is an exploitative, racist, misogynist hell

I’m afraid I did believe this in the literal sense. Looking back, I laugh at myself. How was it possible to believe that blacks in America were just as bad off after the civil rights era as they were during slavery? Given the reality that women in the U.S. can do anything they want for a career and enjoy absurdly generous legal protections and quotas, how could I believe we lived in a “misogynistic patriarchy”?

I'll tell you how: because the crowd around me believed these things.

Who made up this crowd? A disproportionate number of people with personality disorders. Pathological levels of narcissism, extreme emotional instability, and a victim stance toward the world.

Feminism and leftism preferentially attract the personality-disordered because they give mean, lazy, self-centered people excuses to act the way they do and blame their bad actions on outside boogeymen. Capitalism. Men. Colonialism. Heteronormativity. White people.

The point I’m trying to get across is that the beliefs held by people captured in a leftist frame of mind don’t, and don’t have to, have any relationship to reality.

You can’t break these beliefs by presenting objective facts, because these people don’t believe that objective facts exist. Or they do so only when those facts are convenient for their emotional goals.

This is why they get angry or tearful, or scream at you when you offer an article that questions their belief in vaccines, or in "the patriarchy," or in the idea that black people are systematically killed by police.

A deep part of their mind knows that what you’re saying is true, but that is intolerable. Therefore, they punish you with tantrums and reputational smears that get you kicked out of social groups or cost you your job.

Once you understand it as a social contagion, it's only natural to ask ...

Is there a cure for leftism?

The answer is also yes and no. Frustratingly, there’s no technique you can use on your leftist son, or wife, or best friend that will snap them out of it. Human mentation and emotion do not work that way.

We’re not dealing with ordinary political disagreements that we remember from a more collegial past. These leftists are in an actual cult. The same rules apply as do for any cult. They’re not tethered to facts, their commitment is entirely emotionally driven, and no presentation of facts will make any difference.

No one could have “changed” me from a leftist lunatic into a (I hope) saner conservative. I had to face the wall on my own, so to speak. I had to hit rock bottom, as we say of alcoholics.

For me, that came from a confrontation with the reality of how disturbed and morally depraved my own mother was, a confrontation that happened in 2016. A lifetime of abuse I’d rationalized away could no longer be excused. I saw my mother for what she really was — an unstable, vicious narcissist who exploited her loved ones — and my false but well-constructed view of the world started to crumble.

It kept crumbling. After I saw the truth about my family, I saw the truth about my chosen friends and political circle. Surprise! The same resentments, exploitation of others, false claims of being a victim when one is actually the perpetrator — all of these that I saw in my mother, I now saw in the social and political world I’d lived in all my adult life.

Becoming a small business owner dependent only on myself for my livelihood, and moving to the country, cured the last bits of anti-capitalism I had left.

As someone who made it out, I want the same for every poor brainwashed member of the leftist cult — especially people I care about. But experience has taught me that they have to want to be helped first.

In other words, when it comes to your leftist loved ones, the best practice is to ...

Be available, but don't tolerate abuse

Make it clear that you'll be there when and if they’re ready to talk. Be willing to explain your point of view, and offer them articles or videos that demonstrate why you believe as you do.

This may seem rather passive; unfortunately, it's really all you can do. You can’t make them have that final confrontation with reality. That either happens for them or it doesn’t.

At the same time, I urge you not to tolerate their abusive behavior. Expect the same level of respect and civility from them that you expect of anyone and that they demand from you (while giving you no respect in return).

If they won’t do it, stop talking to them. Tell them, “I will not be spoken to this way. We’re not going to talk until you’re willing to behave like a reasonable adult.” Then stop answering the texts, block their numbers, do not respond to attempts they make to engage you or provoke you.

They may be misguided, and many of them are indeed at least temporarily psychologically disturbed. But that is not an excuse for their bad behavior.

If we are to get society back on track, we conservatives have to be the adults who hold boundaries. Narcissistic, awful behavior needs to be objected to in front of others. We need to chastise those who take advantage of our loving feelings in order to treat us badly. We must dis-incentivize the greedy, grasping, histrionic emotional distortions of leftists if want this bulls**t to stop.

Good luck.

You will never be 'ready'

Life doesn’t wait.

Time doesn’t stop. We can’t press pause. The longer we put something off, the harder it gets.

Lots of people talk, but many never do. I remember so many conversations where so many people would tell me about so many things they were planning.

These things all sound like cliches — and maybe they are — but they are true. But it’s hard to see it at the time. And it’s particularly hard to see it when you are young, because it feels like life is just always coming. There is always more road. There is always another chance. No need to rush.

Pick a city, any city

In modern America, there’s a familiar path lots of young people tend to follow. College, grad school, move to the city. It doesn’t really matter which city. You just move to the biggest, closest one. Or that’s what I did, at least.

It’s a liminal time. You’re done with school, but not really living your real life yet. What’s real life? Marriage, kids, and a house outside the city. You don’t have that. You have some crap job that’s just enough to pay the bills. Or, if you are serious, you might have a decent first-year job where you can “get your foot in the door.”

That brief period in your mid-20s feels full of possibility. But that possibility is a fleeting and deceiving thing. Lots of people talk, but many never do. I remember so many conversations where so many people would tell me about so many things they were planning.

“I’m just going to work a few years, save a bunch of money, and then I’m going to go travel.”

I heard so many iterations of this sentiment. They seemed so sincere when they talked about their plans to quit and travel, or start a business, or do what they really wanted to do. But they never did. It was all talk. It was all dreaming.

Too comfortable to fail

I am sure they meant it when they said it. I have no doubt they really wanted to quit that job and go on some adventure. But the pay was too good. Their job was too easy. Their apartment was too nice. They got in a routine — and it was a nice routine — and getting out got harder and harder the longer it went on.

It’s understandable. I don’t blame them. Getting a good job and sticking with it is a good idea if that’s what you want to do. We all live different lives, and that’s good. The world would be boring if we were all the same. But it happened so often in such similar circumstances that I couldn’t help but notice that it wasn’t just different people living different lives. There was something else.

It’s hard to quit a good job. It’s hard to take a pay cut. It’s hard to choose more work (running your own business) rather than less work (being a corporate cog). It’s hard to scale back your lifestyle once you let it creep up to intoxicating heights.

First it’s the nice apartment that you don’t really need. Then it’s the really nice car. Then it’s the constantly going out to eat. Then the expensive gym membership. Then the vacations and the superfluous junk you just like to buy whenever you feel like it. Soon enough, it really feels like you “need" all these things that you didn’t have just a few years earlier, and you can’t imagine sacrificing them. Quitting the job and traveling is off the table. Starting the business is too risky.

That’s how it happens. That’s how people let life slip away. They drag their feet just a little too long. Get a little too used to the things they don’t really need and then can’t imagine giving them up. All that talk of taking control of their life was just talk. They are now stuck. I remember it so well back in my mid-20s, but it doesn’t stop there. It’s a theme through all of life.

'Not a good time'

You see this same thing when it comes to having kids. So many people — often, believe it or not, the same people — put it off until they are “ready.” Or that’s what they call it. They say they need to have more money, need to own a house, have to buy a bigger house, need work to quiet down. “It’s not a good time right now.”

Truthfully, they will never be ready. There will never be a good time. There is always an excuse. The longer and longer they put it off, the harder and harder it gets to pull the trigger. And then, eventually, it becomes impossible to pull the trigger. That door closes eventually. If you wait to have kids until you are ready, you are never going to have kids. That last sentence could be expanded beyond kids.

Take the leap

If you wait until you are ready to do it, you are never going to do it. That’s it. That’s the thread through all of this. The 25-year-old in the city. The professional couple who is waiting to have kids. The guy who has an idea for a business but is too afraid to take the leap.

All of us, any time we wait because we are too scared or hesitant to make it happen. Every day that we delay, the harder it gets to go do what we really want to do. We get trapped in permanent delay. Waiting for life to happen.

But life doesn’t wait. It’s always happening. Right here. Right now. It is the one thing we can only lose and never gain. If we want to do it, we’ve got to do it now. Time is always slipping away like sand in an hourglass

“If not now, when?”

Extend your EV battery's lifespan with two simple steps

Here's a question for anyone thinking of buying an EV: How long will the battery last?

Short answer: longer than most EV buyers will own their vehicles.

While battery degradation is inevitable, there are two important steps you can take to slow it down.

Anyone who's kept a cell phone or laptop long enough knows that even the trustiest rechargeable battery gives up the ghost eventually. Over time, battery cells lose the ability to hold as much charge as when they were brand-new.

Battery life

So exactly how long do electric car batteries last, and what steps can you take to slow the degradation?

Much like those in a phone or laptop, electric car batteries are lithium-ion and made of a variety of rare-earth minerals like cobalt, nickel, cadmium, and manganese plus other materials. Every battery, regardless of what vehicle it's in, will experience degradation over time.

Even your location's weather can affect the longevity of a battery. Extremely hot and extremely cold environments, as well as those with excess humidity, can shorten a battery's lifespan.

Lithium-ion batteries have a high-energy density compared to the lead-acid batteries or nickel-metal hydride batteries found in hybrids. They also charge up quickly and are able to retain their energy density over hundreds of charging cycles. That's why they're the ideal choice for electric vehicles right now. The introduction of solid-state batteries may change that soon, but for now, lithium-ion is the best option for EVs.

But every charge and discharge cycle fractionally reduces a battery's overall capacity. Over the course of hundreds or even thousands of charging cycles, a vehicle's range eventually takes a hit.

Range decline

A 2019 analysis sampled data from 6,300 electric cars and found the average rate of range decline for a battery is about 2.3% per year.

In real-world terms, that means that if you have an EV with 300 miles of range, as so many do now, in five years, you can expect to have a maximum range of 267 miles due to battery degradation. Of course, it takes forever to get a 100% charge, so most people charge to 80% to get back on the road.

Every manufacturer has different projections for how long its batteries will last, but the U.S. Department of Energy has made its own predictions.

According to the DOE, "Predictive modeling by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory indicates that today’s batteries may last 12 to 15 years in moderate climates," while those who live in "extreme climates" can expect those numbers to be in the eight- to 12-year range.

As we don't have as much real-world data yet, this is largely speculative. The average vehicle on American roads right now is more than 12 years old.

What about your car's EV battery warranty?

The federal government mandates that EV manufacturers offer at least an eight-year/100,000-mile warranty on all EV batteries. California ups that to a mandatory 10-year/150,000-mile warranty. Assuming the warranty is transferable, this could be a future concern for the fourth or fifth owner with 100,000 miles on a used vehicle.

What you can do

While battery degradation is inevitable, there are two important steps you can take to slow it down:

1. Avoid heavy acceleration and abrupt braking

Asking your battery to discharge energy rapidly over and over again essentially overworks it and causes it to degrade faster — it's a lot like constantly leaving your phone screen on.

2. Maintain a charge between 20% and 80%

Charge your battery when it reaches 20% and charge it to 80%. Most cars allow you to set the specific parameters and can cut off charging at a certain value. This approach puts far less strain on the battery's internal chemistry.

'The Children We Left Behind' puts a face on America's fatherlessness crisis

Think of that joke meme from "The Simpsons," the one in which a character asks, “Won’t somebody please think of the children?”

It pokes fun at the kind of people we modern Americans call “pearl-clutchers.” Whenever someone asks the question honestly — what is the effect of this music, this culture, on children? — our impulse is to smack it down with snarky comedy. After all, people who worry about what we’re doing to children are all prudes who really want to spoil our adult fun.

'The Children We Left Behind' includes enough of Coleman’s personal experience to connect the reader to a real person, a real child, who lived out the dysfunction the book identifies in society as a whole.

And anyway, what’s the big deal with obscene lyrics in rap and rock? That meddling old Tipper Gore was just a fuddy-duddy. Besides, it’s no big deal — kids are resilient!

No, they’re not. Children are not resilient; they are plastic, they are moldable, and they are vulnerable.

“Kids are resilient” is what self-centered adults tell themselves to justify their carousel of spouses and boyfriends, their quick divorces, their abandonment of their offspring to smartphones and the addiction of the internet.

A question worth asking

Won’t somebody please think of the children? In his forthcoming book "The Children We Left Behind," Adam B. Coleman asks us to take this question seriously — and to answer it like the grown-ups we purport to be. As Coleman’s book shows, modern parents are handicapping their children for life through their solipsistic obsession with their own adult wants while leaving their children’s genuine needs neglected.

“As an abandoned child, I’ve watched the adults in the West make the family unit about themselves, solely hinging on the relationship success or failure with their spouse rather than being motivated for the betterment of their children,” he writes.

As unwelcome as that statement may be to many parents, it is quite obviously true. “Divorce him — your kids need to see that their mother is happy,” we say to bolster our friends. Or, “You need to live your best life, and it’s great for your kids to see a working mom in action!”

Adam B. Coleman

"The Children We Left Behind" is part memoir, part social commentary. Coleman’s father walked out on him, his mother, and his sister in the 1980s before Coleman was old enough to go to school. As his mother took the small family from town to town and state to state, they found themselves homeless more than once. A family member or friend would sometimes offer them a room to stay in while they got on their feet, but sometimes, what seemed to be a kindly gesture turned into a trap when their hosts revealed themselves to be unstable, cruel, or dangerous.

Coleman’s mother tried to keep a steady job while Coleman and his sister tried to make new friends at a new school, over and over, as they went from one drab apartment to another with little hope of stability.

Single mom as superhero?

He notes that America has swung from demonizing single mothers 40 years ago to another, even more unhelpful extreme. Today, we make them into heroines. We say that single moms are superheroes and put them on a cultural pedestal so that any criticism of divorce and its effects on children are characterized as “attacking single mothers.”

But Coleman’s mom could not be both mother and father no matter how hard she tried. No mother, no father, can be both parents. Wives need husbands, husbands need wives, and children need a mother and a father.

The family’s peripatetic and unstable life led to a crisis in young Adam’s life that even jaded readers will find shocking. At 8 years old, Adam Coleman wanted to kill himself.

In the fourth chapter of his book, “Alone and Abandoned in Hell,” Coleman tells of how he ended up committed to a mental institution at age 8, punished for his inability to bear up under the weight of abandonment and inadequate parenting.

Neglected and abused children usually pay the price for the sins, and sometimes the crimes, of their parents. When children act out in distress because of unstable or abusive home lives, they get sent to institutions — child prisons — not their parents.

Tell me again how we prize children’s welfare above all other concerns.

'I'm fine'

Eight-year-old Coleman could not bear up under the strain any longer and had what we call a “nervous breakdown.” In one of the most affecting remembrances in the book, he tells us what happened that landed him in a psychiatric institution surrounded by other troubled children.

“‘If you love me, you’ll help me die,’ I implored my mother. I had verbalized to my mother my wish for me to crawl under my bed and pray for my bed to crush me to death so I could end the anguish I was experiencing. Even my sister remembers her broken little brother lying underneath the kitchen table, crying hysterically and seemingly inconsolable.”

Coleman spent months in this institution, and the only thing he learned was how to better hide his despair so that he never ended up behind bars or a locked door again. “I’m fine,” became his standard answer when someone would ask why he was so quiet.

"The Children We Left Behind" includes enough of Coleman’s personal experience to connect the reader to a real person, a real child, who lived out the dysfunction the book identifies in society as a whole.

Sadly, there is no happy ending for the relationship with his father. Aside from occasional visits to town, maybe once every few years, Coleman’s father never evinced any interest in the welfare of his son. “Visits” were really about his father making business connections and bunking down in a room that his son happened to be in at the same time.

Like most children from such broken homes, Coleman didn’t have a role model to peg his own behavior to when he became a father himself in young adulthood. After a year of dithering over whether to try for a career several states away (in hopes of giving his son a higher quality of life), Coleman finally decided that his son needed his father in the flesh now, not sometime later after everything else was put in place. He got in his car and drove back up north to be with his son and find his way to a better job with the boy at his side.

Coleman enacted what this reviewer sees as the book’s primary message: He made a choice to do the right thing. He made the choice his father should have made.

No excuses

Twenty-first-century Americans don’t want to hear this, but it all comes down to individual moral choices. We like to let ourselves off the hook by complaining about how bad the job market is, how many “systemic forces” make it hard or impossible for us to do the right thing by our families and children. But these are just excuses, and no excuse will fill the hole left in a child’s soul by a parent who doesn’t care enough to put his offspring first.

The book’s final chapters offer the reader Coleman’s prescription for bringing up whole, healthy, secure children. Like most good advice, it’s simple and straightforward, a reminder of what we all really know already. The chapter titles are self-explanatory:

“Put Your Children Before Yourself and Don’t Be a Selfish Parent”

“Love Your Children More Than You Hate Your Ex”

And for the reader who was abandoned or neglected, the very last chapter speaks to them: “If You’ve Been Left Behind, Don’t Lose Hope.”

The hard work of hope

For anyone who came from neglect, abandonment, or abuse, that can be a tall order. Early childhood mistreatment changes a person permanently, and no children from such a background will have an easy time emotionally or spiritually. Re-raising yourself in adulthood, gaining the skills and perspective that you should have grown into naturally under your parents’ guidance, is damned hard work.

But it can be done, and Coleman did it.

Not because he “turned out fine.” He didn’t turn out fine. He became a stronger man and a good father in spite of his childhood, not because of it. No reader should look at Adam’s current success — a grown adult son, a happy marriage, and burgeoning career as an author and podcaster — as a kind of permission to leave one's children to figure it out on their own. The book’s subtitle warns against that default thinking: “How Western Culture Rationalizes Family Separation and Ignores the Pain of Child Neglect.”

Will we stop joking and ask ourselves seriously, finally, if anyone will think of the children?

"The Children We Left Behind" will be released on April 1, 2025.

If Canada turns down US statehood, what about just oil-rich Alberta?

If Canada won't take Donald Trump up on his offer to become the 51st state, one Canadian has a counteroffer: What about just Alberta?

Foothills, Alberta, lawyer Jeffrey Rath says he and a lot of Albertans have “had it” with the Trudeau government and, increasingly, even with Canada itself. He says if Canada isn’t interested in becoming the 51st state, then Alberta should accept President Donald Trump’s invitation.

'We're fed up, and we see no reason to continue being governed by complete idiots from Ontario and Quebec who don't even know where their oil comes from.'

As he wrote in a recent Substack post:

With the election of Donald Trump, Alberta has a unique opportunity to shed its inferior status as a Canadian "province" (effectively a colony of Ontario and Quebec) and become an American state.

There is no doubt that President Donald Trump would happily announce Alberta statehood as the greatest real estate deal since the Louisiana Purchase as the culmination of the American 250th anniversary celebration.

First steps

Rath has organized a blue-ribbon committee to move Alberta first on the road to independence and then to join the United States.

“We've had, I've said, several steering committee meetings today. I mean, I'm working with people. We're putting together a package of materials and briefing notes and those types of things," he told Align.

"We don't want to go down there [to Washington] and come across as anything other than serious professionals with a serious professional message that we want to deliver."

Although the immediate catalyst for Rath's plan was Trump's offer — as well as the current tariff crisis and trade war with the U.S. — Rath said he’s “been feeling this way” for three years at least.

Remember the Freedom Convoy

“I have to say, it really came to a head for me when [Canadian Prime Minister] Justin Trudeau unnecessarily declared the War Measures Act against my fellow Albertans who simply went to Ottawa to peacefully protest,” Rath said, in reference to Trudeau invoking the Emergencies Act to crush the Freedom Convoy, a trucker-based protest against the COVID-19 mandates that was centered in Canada’s capital of Ottawa in February 2022.

Rath called Trudeau’s draconian measure "an anti-Canadian unconstitutional violation of our rights. … You know, we need to take our dirty, smelly diesel trucks and our dirty, smelly oil and go home, or face 10 years in an Ontario prison.”

Rath is also furious over the federal government's talk of using Alberta oil and gas to fight Trump’s tariff — despite Canadian law giving provinces jurisdiction over their natural resources.

"We're fed up, and we see no reason to continue being governed by complete idiots from Ontario and Quebec who don't even know where their oil comes from."

Ignorant threats

As evidence of this ignorance, Rath cited the federal government's threat in January to cut oil exports from Alberta to the U.S., a move that rankled local leadership.

"They were all too dumb to know that their own oil comes from Alberta, goes down through Michigan, up through Line 9 Illinois, and then back into Ontario and Quebec. So if they shut off Alberta oil, they would effectively be doing what a lot of Albertans suggested that we should do [in the first place] … let the Eastern bastards freeze in the dark."

Rath also slammed Ontario Premier Doug Ford for his continued threats to shut off the electricity to the U.S., saying doing so would constitute an "act of war."

"If you crash the northeast power grid, there's going to be at least 500 or 600 deaths, whether it's from traffic lights going out or ventilators [at hospitals] failing."

COVID all over again?

Rath compared the current euphoria over counter-tariffs against the U.S. to the pro-vaccine groupthink that dominated the country's media and government during the COVID pandemic. Like the vaccine, counter-tariffs are not the cure for what ails Canada.

For that, Rath suggests Canadians look closer to home.

“Everybody keeps forgetting that the Trudeau junta is preparing to slap us all with a 21% increase in the carbon tax in April."

Rath said this carbon tax would likely cripple the Canadian economy far more than any of Trump's tariffs. "It's right across the board on all energy, all home heating, trucks, cars, anything people need to go to work,” Rath told Align.

“And maybe the reason that Trudeau is so mad about this and thinks it's the end of Canada is because he doesn't want to back off on his 21% carbon tax. He's already booked that and cooked that into the books.”

Check out the full interview with Rath below:

Why does our furnace go out every winter? (and other burning questions)

The furnace goes out every winter.

I never know what it is. Some switch or some gauge. I’m not an expert in HVAC. All I know is that my wife ends up asking, “Is anyone else cold?” And just as I realize that I actually am feeling kind of cold, she informs me that the thermostat is reading 64 degrees.

I spent about two hours down there in the corner of the old basement next to the cobwebs and the window fans. Detaching that little tube. Using my wife’s hair dryer to dry every little drop.

It always happens at the worst possible time. I don’t know why, but it does. It’s not in November, when it’s a little chilly. It’s not in April when we're warming up for spring.

It’s in the middle of February, when we’ve got two feet of snow on the ground, highs of 13 degrees in the day and lows of 2 degrees at night. The furnace always goes out during the coldest time of the year.

A history of failure

I remember one year it was out for a couple weeks. They sent a guy out a few days after we called. He installed a temporary switch, but then that went out pretty quick. They forgot to order the permanent one, too. Then, that ended up taking an additional seven days to get here.

By the time they finally came back to fix the furnace, we had all become so used to the space heaters, we had almost forgotten what it was like to have a normal heated house. “Wow, this is pretty nice,” we all said.

Last week, like clockwork, the furnace decided to go out again. Fourteen degrees, February, after 5:00 p.m., so no one is going to come fix it until tomorrow at the earliest. “Lovely,” the resigned father (me) muttered under his breath as he skulked down the stairs to take a look at the cold furnace.

DIY dad

The last time the guy was here to fix it he explained the problem. Condensation in some tube. The buildup of the moisture forces a shutoff. He showed me how to fix it in case it happened again. So there I sat, down by the furnace, with a headlamp around my forehead, fiddling with this thing, trying to remove the little black tube without damaging anything else.

I spent about two hours down there in the corner of the old basement next to the cobwebs and the window fans. Detaching that little tube. Using my wife’s hair dryer to dry every little drop.

Reattaching it. Running upstairs to turn the thermostat back on while my wife and kids ate dinner. Heading back downstairs, turning the furnace back on. Waiting for the blower to kick in and hoping it stayed on this time.

I repeated the process at least 15 times. Over and over again. Little droplets of condensation kept coming out of that little black tube. Remarkably, just as I was about to give up, it worked. The furnace was fixed.

It's always something

It’s always something. That’s the truth. If we don’t already have enough to do, something else is thrown into the mix. If we aren’t already stressed enough, some other problem comes along.

Of course, the furnace isn’t really that big of a deal. Yeah, it’s freezing up here in the deep north, but it’s not life-threatening when it goes out. Just very annoying. It’s just another thing to take care of when all we want is for everything to go right.

That’s life. We just want everything to go right, but it never really does. There is always something. The furnace that always goes out at the worst possible time is a metaphor and a reminder.

We can’t control everything. Things are going to happen that we can’t anticipate and we can’t fix forever. I know the furnace will go out again. Maybe in a month. Maybe in two months. Maybe in a year. But what I know is that it will go out again, someday. All I can do is wait and then get down there in the corner of the musty basement to try to fix it again when it stops working.

Fuel for reflection

It sounds funny, but I think mundane problems like the furnace going out really are good opportunities for reflection. They are little hidden lessons of life. Opportunities to open up and consider bigger questions. How do we react when things going wrong? Do we try to deny them? Or face them head-on? Do we rely on someone else — and sometimes we need to — or do we rely on ourselves? What do we do?

We can sweep some problems under the rug. Others, we can’t. The furnace is like that. The snow that needs to be shoveled at 6 a.m. is like that. The one toilet in the house that’s not working is like that. The flat tire on your way to dinner is like that. They are small problems, but they’ve got to get solved. They simply can’t be ignored.

Things go wrong. They always will. Sometimes it’s big things, and sometimes it’s little things. For some reason, they always seem to go wrong at the worst possible moment. At the end of the day, it’s up to us to decide how we are going to handle the problems when they eventually come.

It’s true for the little problems of furnaces and toilets. And it’s true for the bigger problems, too. The tough ones without any good answers at all.

Is the US government really spending $400 million on Cybertrucks?

Rumors are swirling that the feds are buying $400 million worth of Tesla Cybertrucks.

That would be a huge conflict of interest, considering that Tesla chief Elon Musk is heading up the Department of Government Efficiency in its campaign to curb out-of-control government spending.

But is it true?

Not according to Musk. “I’m pretty sure Tesla isn’t getting $400M. No one mentioned it to me, at least,” Musk posted on X last week.

Some clarification is in order. Yes, some state officials will be driving around in special armored versions of the stainless steel pickup. The U.S. State Department has budgeted for new “Armored Electric Vehicles” over the next five years.

But it's important to note that this budget was first drafted under the Biden administration in December of last year. Then it specifically included “Armored Teslas” as one of its line items. Also included were armored sedans and armored BMW X5 and X7s. A December State Department procurement list also included $400 million in Cybertrucks.

Under Trump, the State Department has changed all of those to the more generic “Armored Electric Vehicles.” The program has a target for delivery through the next five years.

These were first listed under the code for "miscellaneous food manufacturing." That's since been updated with the code for "armored car services."

That could be a simple clerical error. But a bigger question remains. No matter who makes these vehicles, why does the State Department need $400 million worth?

The State Department buys all types of armored trucks and gas vehicles annually. My guess is that this is a tempest in a teapot and that much of this government purchase will be canceled.

We'll be watching if something comes of this story.