Free Republic

Log onto Facebook. Before you know it, you’ll see ads from Temu or Wish, pitching cheap products. Or open your old email account, the one that you’ve had for years, so it gets the most spam. Every other message is an offer from some unknown store, selling the sort of thing in which a person like you just might be interested. Or log onto Amazon and look for something, anything at all. Twenty percent of the hits, maybe more, will be “sponsored” items, often from a brand you’ve never heard of. Of course, you can shut down the internet, close...

...In "The Graduate"...Dustin Hoffman's Benjamin is given a one-word bit of career counseling by one of those shallow and corrupt grown-ups at a shallow and corrupt grown-up cocktail party: "Plastics." Forty-two years later, the line has picked up a meaning that the makers of "The Graduate" could not possibly have anticipated.. today, the reaction is, "Oh, right: America still made things then." We don't any more...Since 1987, manufacturing as a share of our gross domestic product has declined 30 percent. Once the world's leading net exporter, we have become the world's leading net importer. In 2007, we exported $1.2 trillion...