ArcaMax

China is America's economic rival. The way capitalists deal with rivals is to compete. President Joe Biden vows to compete with this rival on the rival's terms. He calls it "extreme competition."

China has built a massive semiconductor industry with massive government spending. It is about to send another $200 billion to its semiconductor ...Read more

Donald Trump is no longer president. COVID-19 is no longer the threat it was. And Dr. Anthony Fauci, America's top infectious disease expert, is back to more routine briefings on vaccination rates and such. So why does Fauci remain so much in the news?

Because the Trump camp can't stop bashing him. And why is that? Why does the right continue ...Read more

As lockdowns sent city dwellers "fleeing" to the suburbs for more space, the prices of homes offering that space took off. To play in the bidding wars, homebuyers had to cough up big money and chain themselves to giant mortgages. This painful scenario led many to choose renting over buying, and that's not a bad thing.

Why can't the American ...Read more

I'm fully vaccinated, and so is just about everyone I know. We feel mostly protected against COVID-19. And so if others don't want to get the shot for political reasons or out of ignorance, must we care?

We read that many Republicans are refusing to get the coronavirus vaccine, while most Democrats are all in. The reasoning on the right seems ...Read more

Not that long ago, American shoppers cleaned store shelves of toilet paper. Pandemic panic had fueled the run on toilet paper, the point of it never clear.

The bicycle shortage, on the other hand, made some sense. With the lockdown forcing millions to stay at home, bikes offered exercise, safe outdoor activity. Many stores used to display every...Read more

Palm Springs, California, has a world-class art museum. And the museum building is itself a world-class example of midcentury modern architecture.

Thus, it was understandable that a group of Palm Springs residents would object to placing a kitschy 26-foot statue of Marilyn Monroe right in the museum sightlines. The "artwork" reproduces the ...Read more

It's been a given that Democrats would benefit from an official probe into the Jan. 6 rampage on the Capitol and Republicans would not. The thinking goes that Democrats would use a commission report to bash Republicans in the 2022 midterm elections. It would certainly detail how former President Donald Trump incited his supporters to commit the ...Read more

The conversation started on a long Uber ride. The driver, originally from Colombia, said he knows a lot of Colombians living in the U.S. "without papers." He argued that they are good people paying taxes and should be left alone. I responded that I believe they are good people paying taxes but our immigration laws should be respected.

He then ...Read more

Tradition tells us that, come the midterms, the president's party loses seats in the House. If this tradition holds in 2022, that could be bad news for Democrats, whose House majority now stands at only nine seats.

But history of late doesn't seem to be commandeering the driver's seat. Right after Joe Biden turned Georgia blue, Politico ...Read more

We're a statistics-happy society. We obsess over the latest numbers on just about everything -- birthrates, jobs and population changes -- mining them for trends.

Some stats are really obscure, such as the shocking amount of electricity Bitcoin uses. The digital currency's complex computing process devours 143 terawatt-hours a year -- more than...Read more

Liz Cheney's ouster from the House Republican leadership has prompted many observers to say that the Wyoming representative is headed to the "political wilderness." This assumes that the Republican Party is itself a civilization and not some decaying political entity about to be buried under the lava of its craziness.

The Donald Trump ...Read more

As the Trump presidency fades into the past, we are reminded of the sex scandal at its dawn. The Federal Election Commission has just dropped its probe into former President Donald Trump's alleged hush-money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels.

Charges that Trump broke campaign finance laws in 2016 by not reporting the $130,000 payment to ...Read more

Joe Biden's multitrillion-dollar plans to revive the economy, fix America's infrastructure and ease poverty have spawned comparisons between him and Franklin D. Roosevelt. At the 100-day mark of the Biden presidency, David Gergen, who has advised presidents of both parties, wrote, "Biden is off to an excellent start -- arguably, one of the best ...Read more

When told to wear face masks two COVID-plagued winters ago, we thought: "Can't wait until this is over and we no longer have to wear a piece of cloth over our mouth and nose. It's ugly. It interferes with breathing. It muffles voices and makes some conversations hard to follow."

But wear face masks we did. And responsible people still do -- ...Read more

Finland is the world's happiest country -- fourth year in a row! So says the World Happiness Report, produced by the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network. The United States ranks 14th, right behind Ireland and ahead of Canada.

The report authors based their conclusions on interviews with more than 350,000 people in 95 ...Read more

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell had a warning for American business: "Our private sector must stop taking cues from the Outrage-Industrial Complex." The sector's complaints centered around Republicans' going state to state to undermine free and fair elections.

And so, are companies outraged? Damn straight they are. They have good reason,...Read more

"Nomadland" is a remarkable movie about struggling Americans wandering the vast spaces of the interior west. Most of them are white, middle-aged and up, living in vans. The filmmaker, Chloe Zhao, is a Chinese woman who has captured their bare existence as they move through a bleak but beautiful landscape. Based on a nonfiction book of the same ...Read more

Kristine Hostetter is a fourth-grade teacher in San Clemente, California. Her husband has been a big promoter of the QAnon conspiracy theory, and she appears to be supporting his lunatic efforts. As the story is being told, liberal parents and students temporarily forced Hostetter's removal from the classroom. In response, local conservatives ...Read more

When Henry Ford introduced the Model T in 1908, he had a problem. There were almost no paved roads in America. To sell his product to the masses, he needed good roads.

No one would ever deny his place among titans of American capitalism, but Ford was not shy about urging the government to supply the infrastructure essential to his business. And...Read more

"We are not supporting doing any vaccine passports in the state of Florida," declared Gov. Ron DeSantis. "It's completely unacceptable," he said, for either government or the private sector to require showing proof of vaccination against COVID-19 "to just simply participate in normal society."

Actually, Florida requires proof of vaccination for...Read more