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Five Keys to Professional and Personal Development

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The remarks I’ve prepared today relate to your personal and professional development, which are of course closely interrelated. This is not to be confused with “self-help,” a somewhat disreputable genre whose practitioners often want to sell you shortcuts. Development means just that: developing your skills, knowledge, and interests to advance toward goals which hopefully become more clear as you go through your twenties and thirties. Remember, you may well have a longer work life than your parents and grandparents, so you have more time and more choices perhaps than they did. But it is important not to waste your best years for learning, when your brain’s neurons fire at their best! Even at your age, still in college, it is not too early to view yourselves as professionals and to take your work seriously.

Here are five suggestions you can implement immediately to stand apart from your peers.

1. Sift

Access to information is virtually costless today. You job is to sift through all of the white noise and recognize what is important.

The supply of information in a digital age outpaces demand, and makes information very, very cheap. In a digital world, information is instantaneous and often free of any financial cost. This is especially true of social media, where information and opinion are readily available but knowledge and discernment are in short supply. When something is cheap and easy, we naturally tend to discount its importance.
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Ideology over Economics: the Case of Lithuania

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Nowadays, political dogma trampling economic pragmatism drives European government action as shown by the imposition of Green Party ideology on Germany’s energy policy risking the deindustrialization of Europe’s leading economy.

Another case is the conflict started by the Lithuanian government against China, illustrated by the Baltic country’s decision last year to open a “Taiwanese representative office”, an event that prompted the Chinese government to downgrade state relations, an extraordinary episode on the 32 year-long diplomatic history between both countries.

As is known, the Chinese government firmly believes that having a “Taiwanese” representative office in a foreign country can be construed as giving sovereign acknowledgement to the Taipei government against the one-China policy accepted by most of the international community. Only a few countries - most of them small Central American, Caribbean, and Micronesian states - have diplomatic relations with Taipei and certainly no European state has given such recognition. The European Union (EU) hosts a liaison bureau with the name of Taipei instead of Taiwan, in line with international consensus. When Lithuania established diplomatic relations with China in 1991 it undertook not to establish official relations or engage in official contacts with Taiwan, effectively accepting the one-China policy.

Lithuania’s recent decision risks a conflict with the world’s largest economy and has no commercial justification. During the 2004-2020 period Lithuania’s exports to China were €1.6 billion, whereas to Taiwan only 10% of this value, and their annual growth has exceeded Taiwan’s.  During this term, Lithuanian imports from China were €13.3 billion against €1 billion from Taiwan and grew at twice the Taiwanese rate.
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The DNI Two-Step and Trump

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If you play poker with a guy named Doc often enough you learn to watch his hands carefully when it’s his turn to hold the deck. Same when the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), the Intelligence Community (IC), and the FBI sit down at the table with the American people.

The game right now is will he or won’t he; will Attorney General Merrick Garland indict Donald Trump over something to do with classified information held at Mar-a-Lago? Everyone is holding their cards tight to the vest, but the deal just passed to the DNI and the game is about to get serious. Stakes are high; in the pot is the presidency of the United States.

DNI Avril Haines said that DNI “will lead an Intelligence Community assessment of the potential risk to national security that would result from the disclosure of the relevant documents” including those seized. She said the DNI was aiming not to interfere with the ongoing criminal investigation, to which everyone at the table had better shout “bull.” A review of potential risk means the DNI can show a pair of twos and claim they are kings. The DNI’s whole point is to interfere with the investigation, same as they did with Hunter’s laptop, Russiagate, and the Clinton server before that. The IC is as much a part of our elections now as it ever was in any other banana republic.

It works like this: using classified methods in secret to look at classified documents the DNI will come to conclusions about what might happen to the security of the United States if those documents were to fall into “the wrong hands,” i.e., the hands of their choosing and certainly a worst-case scenario.
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School Shutdowns Leave Children Behind

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A new report from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a program of the US Department of Education, confirms what most parents already knew: shutting down the schools because of the panic over covid was a disaster for American schoolchildren. According to the NAEP, since the 2020 school shutdowns the average nine-year-old suffered a decline in reading skills and math skills. The reading skills decline is the largest since 1990. The math skills decline is the first ever reported by NAEP.
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Washington Neocons To Send Taiwan Billions In Weapons

A Bipartisan group of Congressional warmongers is pushing a multi-billion dollar military assistance package for Taiwan. The measure will include new language designating Taiwan a de-facto “major non-NATO ally.” Clearly the Ukraine model is being applied to Taiwan: fighting mainland China down to the last Taiwanese. Watch today's Liberty Report...
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Europe, More Than Putin, Must Shoulder the Blame for the Energy Crisis

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Outraged western leaders are threatening a price cap on imports of Russian natural gas after Moscow cut supplies to Europe this month, deepening an already dire energy and cost-of-living crisis. In response, Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned that Europe will “freeze” this winter unless there is a change of tack.

In this back-and-forth, the West keeps stepping up the rhetoric. Putin is accused of using a mix of blackmail and economic terror against Europe. His actions supposedly prove once more that he is a monster who cannot be negotiated with, and a threat to world peace.

Denying fuel to Europe as winter approaches, in a bid to weaken the resolve of European states to support Kyiv and alienate European publics from their leaders, is Putin’s opening gambit in a plot to expand his territorial ambitions from Ukraine to the rest of Europe.

Or so runs the all-too-familiar narrative shared by western politicians and media.

In fact, Europe’s arrogant, self-righteous posturing over Russian gas supplies, divorced from any discernible geopolitical reality, reflects precisely the same foolhardy mindset that helped provoke Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in the first place.
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Overthrow the Government: All the Ways in Which Our Rights Have Been Usurped

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In America today, the government does whatever it wants, freedom be damned.

“We the people” have been terrorized, traumatized, and tricked into a semi-permanent state of compliance by a government that cares nothing for our lives or our liberties.

The bogeyman’s names and faces have changed over time, but the end result remains the same: in the so-called name of national security, the Constitution has been steadily chipped away at, undermined, eroded, whittled down, and generally discarded with the support of Congress, the White House, and the courts.

What we are left with today is but a shadow of the robust document adopted more than two centuries ago. Sadly, most of the damage has been inflicted upon the Bill of Rights.

Here is what it means to live under the Constitution, twenty-plus years after 9/11 and with the nation just emerging from two years of COVID-19 lockdowns and mandates.
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Homeland Security Chief: Americans Who Don't Trust Government Are Biggest Terror Threat

The head of the Department of Homeland Security has identified the latest terrorist threat to the United States...and it is us. People who do not trust the government and who question government narratives on social media have not surpassed foreign terrorists as the biggest threat to America. Also today: Was Steele Dossier an FBI op? And - Lindell the pillow guy has his phone stolen by the FBI. Today on the Liberty Report...
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Durham: The FBI Had Danchenko on Payroll as An Informant During the Russian Collusion Investigation

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Yesterday, a filing by Special Counsel John Durham revealed that Igor Danchenko, who worked as a key contributor to the discredited Steele dossier funded by the Clinton campaign, was later put on the FBI payroll as an informant. The disclosure rocked Washington and raised additional questions of the FBI’s eagerness to pursue any allegations against Donald Trump despite being warned that the dossier appeared to be a vehicle for Russian disinformation.

Danchenko is facing with five counts of lying to the bureau during that relationship. His trial is scheduled for next month in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia.

The filing states that “In March 2017, the FBI signed the defendant up as a paid confidential human source of the FBI. The FBI terminated its source relationship with the defendant in October 2020.”

The news shocked many of us who have closely followed the Russian collusion controversy for years. The FBI showed a zeal to investigate Trump and his campaign that seemed to border on the blind obsessive. It was not simply with the Steele dossier. On the baseless Alfa Bank allegations (also pushed by Clinton campaign through friends at the FBI) the supervisory agent for the FBI’s Trump-Russia probe, Joe Pientka, sent a note to FBI special agent Curtis Heide, stating: “People on the 7th floor to include Director are fired up about this server.”
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