Worked out in the yard today for about an hour getting the weeds and trees out of my rose beds on the side of the house. Drank plenty of water. It was hot. I’m beat. Fortunately, I’ve got Ron to fall back on. Here’s his latest.

Spying, leaking, surveillance, espionage, snooping, wiretapping, data mining . . . it’s all just the modern version of a primeval stratagem for maintaining one-upmanship over another tribe who might have neater stuff or a cooler religion or better weapons or bigger dicks or something.

It’s most certainly nothing new, and nobody should be surprised that modern paranoiacs are using modern technology to gain advantage in la dans ancienne. What’s worse is that it’s been going on in this country for decades. Remember J. Edgar? Now THERE was a guy who KNEW some stuff, and how to USE it.

That’s how he was able to stay head of the FBI through so many administrations. He knew where all of the bodies were buried and who buried ’em.

Hell, the British were reading the German Enigma traffic even before many of the field commanders or U-Boat skippers had even decoded it. And we were reading the Japanese naval codes by the middle of 1942.

My bet would be that the Israelis and Russians know more about us than our own government does, the difference being that they know how to keep their damned mouths shut about intel once they have it and our government is populated with blabbermouths.

Look at all of the leaks sanctioned by Obungler and his minions to make him look good. Who cares if it gives important info to our enemies as long as it makes Jug Hussein Ears Downgrade look good. The only leaks these assholes are concerned with are the ones that make the Obamessiah look bad. They don’t give a damn about national security.

I can remember back in Subic during ‘Nam if you wanted to know when a particular ship was coming in for a liberty call or shipyard repairs, all you needed was which mama-san in which bar to ask. I’m assuming it was the same in Sasebo and Yoko during the Korean war, and prob’ly even during ‘Nam. And this was all BEFORE e-mail and smartfones and i-Pads and all that stuff.

I can attest to the girls in Subic knowing ship movements. Ron, it was the same in Sasebo and Yokosuka at that time, as well.

Jeeez, I had a Top Secret clearance and did virtually all my shipboard work in the communications or combat-information centers, and I could hear more stuff at Mama Yee’s or D’Cave or the Rio Club or even the Eagle’s Nest about ships’ movements than I could aboard ships.

I was an ET who stood radio watches and had a Top Secret/Crypto clearance so I had the same info as Ron, even more since my Crypto clearance allowed me to use the little crypto machine in the safe in the crypto room to decipher the crypto messages. The babes on the beach did know more about ship movements than I did.

Heard a guy two days ago on some alphabet network news show that the new data-storage center in Utah that everybody’s got their undies in a wad over is actually more for cyberwarfare than for data gathering on US citizens.

Actually, I HOPE the site is accumulating and analyzing international calls on a who-called-whom basis to identify potential terrorist threats. But I suspect the guy I heard is at least to some degree correct and all that time, energy, and money is multi-purpose, one of which is hacking into the Chinese and Russian servers and data bases. I mean, if we’re NOT going mano-a-mano with those guys with hi-speed servers locked in eternal combat, we’re doomed.

With assholes like Oblunder, exSpeaker Blinky, Horrible Harry, Chuck ‘the schmuck” Schumer (someone ruined a perfect prick when they put ears on him), the rest of the liberals progressives rat bastard commies in the Dimocrat Party, and the RINOs in the Republican Party running things (Sure, let’s give the illegal aliens amnesty before we secure the borders because that’s always worked so well in the past. Hello scamnesty!), we’re already doomed.

Leaks have come out of the Obama head shed like those slick, stiff, brightly colored flyers we get tons of in the mail every two years just before elections. Most of them are deliberate, and damned near all are political, especially from THIS regime. Today many leaks are just feelers, like teenage kids at a school ball game on Friday night looking for a hookup after the game.

Intel gathering, surveillance, data mining . . . makes no difference what it’s called, we’re inextricably locked into it, and we’ll never know to what extent it goes. Never. Wouldn’t be worth much if we did. In fact, it’s much like sausage – if we watched it being made, we’d prob’ly quit eating it for a while ‘til the shock wore off.

Spying is a de facto ritual, a sacrosanct ceremony, an unwritten and time-honored contract through which nations with divergent interests agree to harass, sabotage, outmaneuver, out-intrigue, out-negotiate, out-propagandize, and out-scrutinize each other . . . kinda like a marriage after a few years . . . ‘til death do them join.

And there ain’t one helluva lot any of us can do about it, ‘cause even if we toss out the entire bunch of reprobates and thieves in D.C. today, we can’t allow a snoop gap to develop.*

Remember, Oboner ran against all of this snooping until he became president and then he doubled down on all of it.

[* I’d have used the word spook instead of “snoop,” but since it’s a given that sooner or later somebody in gubmint (or should that be bugmint) will read it, I’d much rather be on a list of subversives than be under investigation by the Political Correctness Cops.]

Yeah, go ahead . . . you can use “bugmint.” Tell ‘em I said it’d be O.K.