@Viss

I'd love this all to come out.

The worst weekend of my life was the Thanksgiving weekend that #MitchMcConnell and #JimJordan stayed in #WashingtonDC to lobby against the disclosure committee. The defense authorization bill for the year was going to require that someone go through all the old paperwork and they'd have a historian, lawyer, engineers, other subject matter experts, a few million budget, and subpoena power. The two of then could have gone home to be with their families, but they spent Thanksgiving weekend trying to kill that provision. 

I used to spend my summers bailing hay in what is now Jordan's district. The area includes #JohnGlenn 's hometown where there's a museum about space flight, includes Dayton where there's an Air Force museum with a bunch of planes out to pasture, and Wright Patterson where they took whatever wreckage was recovered in Roswell. In Jordan's district Aviation is in the blood can start driving from the South and watch as the farms go from modern industrialized farms to small family farms and then Amish subsistence farming. Thing is, Jordan's district also includes Lima Ohio (pronounced like the bean). That's where the Abrams battle tanks are made. The Army doesn't want more Abrams, so the factory just parks them in the parking lot. The lights stay on so the locals have jobs. 

Why were McConnell and Jordan so desperate to kill the bill? The reason they gave was patent law. There are special procedures for patents on nuclear energy and military technology. There is almost no oversight. The rules have been abused for years. The transclassified nuclear secrets law had been used to hide technologies from members of Congress for years, and the idea that they'd have to go through any kind of review put the fear of god into them. The worst part was the excuse they used. The two of them objected to the fact that the stuff that's being hidden, whatever it is, can't be patented and controlled without restructuring of U.S. patent rules. The change isn't really tenable. Their answer: just claim national security. 

This is going to turn out to be some immigration thing. They'd rather kill us all than be poor, and the Chinese are already kidnapping our scientists without news coverage, so I don't see this being #Disclosure.