Let’s assume the this woman or DOGE is uncovering a lot of this fraud, deception, misappropriation of funds or whatever we are questioning as citizens. Do you honestly think that since this has been going on for a very long time that a person is going to be able to easily and causally sit at their desk and figure it all out by internet search engines? I know this group is made up of some seriously sharp people. If this proof and/or information exists it is not going to be that easy to find on the public internet. If they have been getting away with it for this long it is going to be well concealed, obfuscated, and/or buried deep in layers both in and out of the country. One would easily run in to dead ends of poor record keeping, or non-existent records, or hidden behind shell corporations that the ownership is not known.
If someone was purposely trying to disguise or hide these levels of information, they would not be so foolish as to do these things in such that any hack could figure it out by internet searching casually at home. If it were that easy so many of things would have been discovered and revealed so many times over the last 20, 30 or even 40 years. Someone would have been curious enough to just stumble over these easily accessible documents and information. Please take the time to seriously consider that statement. I understand the healthy doubt and skepticism most people have AS THEY SHOULD. There should be a healthy questioning of these claims and stories. But one should also know that for people who have been in the know about things that they are bound to not talk about, disclose or divulge, for various reasons; not all information is intended to be easily accessible by the general public. For the same reasons intentional disinformation is also released for the purpose of obfuscation from any real truths. One must also consider that if there is a lot of actual proof of these accusations, there is probably a fair amount of legal action that might happen. That would mean that it would be part of an active law enforcement investigation and possible court cases. As such, the general public are is not going to be privy to all of the facts until such investigation is concluded and any legal proceedings are completed. If DOGE is uncovering any information that could be considered a violation of law, of course you are not going to see the proof yet. I am not saying anything is true or false but in my 21 years in the military and just as many being involved with emergency management and law enforcement activities, I know that the public is always going to be the last to know, if they get to know at all. Especially when it comes to any possible legal actions. In our hyper-connected information society the public always wants stories to have visible proof immediately. And this stems a lot from media outlets failing to actually report just facts and not 90% opinion. That is human nature of an informed society. A more mature society that has witnessed many of these types of things over a longer lifetime, those people have learned that sometimes you just have to sit back and wait for the whole story and all of the facts and evidence to come out in their entirety. Then and only then would a person get all of the facts that a rational person can receive to draw a proper conclusion. Every side will at times release just enough information not to compromise what they are doing, but they seek to start swaying the court of popular opinion. Sometimes to flush out other players and/or evidence. Sometimes it’s to make possible offenders panic and make stupid mistakes that will solidify incriminating evidence. The list goes on and on. My suggestion would be to grab a bowl of popcorn, take a deep breath and sit and wait for more information to become available, understanding that the immature are going to foolishly parrot the facts that have been made available to date(not realizing that those facts may have been cherry picked to be released), and that some of these perceived facts may just be a parroting of someone else’s opinion rather than actual facts. All of this will take a ton of time to get the facts out. It’s painful and boring. I remember as a kid absolutely hating that fact that there was so much time spent on the TV and news about the Watergate hearings, then later on we had to suffer through horrendous amounts of media time and attention on the Iran/Contra hearings. Months and months of that mind numbing process. This crap is going to take a lot of time…… Thank you, Brian Webster From: AF [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Adam Moffett Sent: Monday, March 17, 2025 2:14 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Twitter by any other name would still smell I'm not sure what you mean. There were claims from her in the link you sent earlier. I itemized and responded to them. I assume her financial numbers and her data about who works for which organization are largely correct because those must all exist in public filings that she could compile a data set from. I got into X this morning and looked a bunch of her past posts as well. She makes a LOT of political claims, and none of them are supportedby the data she provides. I'm sure she's a very intelligent person, but that doesn't mean she's not a nutter. So ultimately you have to believe she has additional data she's not sharing, or that she's a nutter. I think the largest use of her website will be for people to look at arrows and numbers with no context and pretend they prove something that they don't. It comes down to choosing to believe someone. Twitter/X gives people a firehose of things they could choose to believe, and a collection of people who will agree and reinforce it. The former (now mostly dead) "mainstream media" didn't provide every viewpoint, but at least they did filter out the unsubstantiated and nonsensical ones. Now we have to filter it ourselves, and mostly we're not good at it, and regardless of how good we are at it we don't have time to do it. We're also pretty terrible at numeracy. People are more likely to assess statistics based on their preconceived notions than what the numbers actually mean. We're really great at seeing patterns where none exist. There are studies which can demonstrate these traits of humanity. So no, I don't agree that X is a great news source, or that crowd sourced fact checking is meaningful. I think it sends people down rabbit holes into worlds of make-believe. Now we're having politicians make policy based on that make-believe. If you believe the DOGE/MAGA/Whatever point of view is all true and verifiable and contains 0% make-believe (they're eating the cats!), then just look over the fence and tell me that the left isn't down their own social media rabbit-holes. -Adam _____ From: AF <[email protected]> on behalf of Chuck <[email protected]> Sent: Monday, March 17, 2025 12:42 PM To: [email protected] <[email protected]> Cc: [email protected] <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Twitter by any other name would still smell She never made any claims. She was anon and doing it as a hobby. RS outed her. She has never made any statement as to her sources but she had written a bit about her methods. I just enjoy how she seemingly has a nice UI showing how agencies and people connect. She has published some of those connections on X and that got her a bunch of unwanted attention. The claims about connections and sources seem to come from the various articles that have been published about her. I think she should be lauded for her work. Sent from my iPhone On Mar 17, 2025, at 10:05 AM, Adam Moffett <[email protected]> wrote: People are generally pretty bad at assessing sources. Even if they're great at it they don't have time to check everything. Some curating and integrity has to be built in. DataRepublican is an interesting case in point. Read her actual data. She's drawing conclusions driven by her feelings and assumptions. Her charts and numbers don't actually show any connection to her claims. On this Tom Cotton/IRI thing she spits out numbers about the salaries and benefits paid, but none of it is out of line for the size of the organization. I think in reality she sees something funded by tax payers, decides she doesn't like that thing (i.e. because it aligns with "global elites" or the "uniparty"). She concludes that thing is fraud. Then she looks at the paths of funding and sees USAID in the path. Therefore USAID is the source of the fraud. People on the board of that org must be in league with the evil/bad. Meanwhile once again: The data she is providing is not actually supporting her claims. You either have to believe that she has evidence she's not showing us, or that she just unsupported theories. This is not a news source. _____ From: AF <[email protected]> on behalf of Jeff Broadwick - Lists <[email protected]> Sent: Sunday, March 16, 2025 2:28 PM To: [email protected] <[email protected]> Cc: [email protected] <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Twitter by any other name would still smell X is an amazing news source! Like any other source, you have to look at the bias of the contributor, but that’s pretty easy. It’s now the free speech platform of choice. The crowd fact checking is quite good…unless one can’t let go of past lies that “fact checkers” regularly spewed. Regards, Jeff Jeff Broadwick CTIconnect 312-205-2519 Office 574-220-7826 Cell [email protected] On Mar 16, 2025, at 11:47 AM, Adam Moffett <[email protected]> wrote: I’m more than a little disturbed by the state of things. Apparently Twitter is now an information source? Why? When you hear people say stuff at a cocktail party you don’t believe all of it right? It’s just a person talking. It’s not been reviewed, edited, or vetted. Even if it was Albert Einstein talking about physics you don’t know if he’s being accurate when he’s speaking off the cuff, and you don’t know if he’s joking (or even lying). Twitter is just 50 million people talking at a cocktail party. Facebook is graffiti on the bathroom wall. The most frightening thing to me about our future is that we’ve come to rely on these as information sources. Get Outlook for iOS <https://aka.ms/o0ukef> -- AF mailing list [email protected] http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com -- AF mailing list [email protected] http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com
-- AF mailing list [email protected] http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com
