Groundhog Bitchslaps Lynne Cheney

Groundhogs day sneaks up on me every year, its one of those strange mysterious 'holidays' that seemed to matter alot more when i was just a kid. Now you look back and wonder why it mattered at all, there was never any fanfare, gifts or family dinners, whats the big deal? Did anyone even really hold that rodent accountable for his predictions or what?

This year was a little different, and i was reminded of Groundhogs day when i had heard rumors that my good buddies down at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) had dropped off a SUITCASE FULL OF CASH to the groundhog in order to potentially influence his 'prediction'.

The AEI, an ExxonMobil-funded conservative thinktank with close ties to the Bush Administration, determined that an early-spring prediction compounded with this already unseasonably warm winter, might fan the flames on the hot topic of global warming. The AEI offered the payments for articles that emphasise the limitations of the groundhogs shadow gazing method of climatological prediction. More than two dozen AEI alumni have served either in a Bush administration policy post or on one of the government's many panels and commissions.

Thankfully, our furry bucktoothed friend threw the suitcase back at Lynn Cheney - Dick Cheneys wife and AEI senior fellow claiming:

"Bitch - i'm a fucking GROUNDHOG! What the fuck am i supposed to do with a suitcase full of money!?"

Needless to say, the 'hog said early spring, and crawled back into his hole - and Lynn Cheney crawled back into her hole too.

But in all sincerity, this actually happened, except not to the groundhog - It happened to a consortium of British scientists on Feb 2nd. The Guardian UK reported:

"Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world's largest oil companies ... offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) ... The letters, sent to scientists in Britain, the US and elsewhere, attack the UN's panel as "resistant to reasonable criticism and dissent and prone to summary conclusions that are poorly supported by the analytical work" and ask for essays that "thoughtfully explore the limitations of climate model outputs"

In other words: the AEI is whining about science being irrefutable. The IPCC report was published the same day and of course yielded the results everyone has been expecting:

"A substantial portion of the IPCC's membership argued that global warming was "virtually certain" to have been caused by human activity."

and

"The really chilling thing about the IPCC report is that it is the work of several thousand climate experts who have widely differing views about how greenhouse gases will have their effect. Some think they will have a major impact, others a lesser role. Each paragraph of this report was therefore argued over and scrutinised intensely. Only points that were considered indisputable survived this process. This is a very conservative document - that's what makes it so scary,"

'Nuff said really. the main point is that this isn't some left wing liberal leaning organization or Al Gore here - this is science at its most conservative, and i don't know how you can spin that around, even with a suitcase full of dough. Now, I don't think much of Greenpeace, they're intentions are good, but i think extremist environmental groups tend to just give a good cause a bad name to most of the populous. But Ben Stewart from Greenpeace had a great quote:

"The AEI is more than just a thinktank, it functions as the Bush administration's intellectual Cosa Nostra. They are White House surrogates in the last throes of their campaign of climate change denial. They lost on the science; they lost on the moral case for action. All they've got left is a suitcase full of cash."

werd.

so fa king we todd ed

"It's a hoax - and it's not funny," said Gov. Deval Patrick.

Au contraire governor, it was fucking HILARIOUS.

Thank you for giving me a topic to chew on here that had nothing to do with political or religious strife ( i swear theres more to me! ).

So, today, some genius in Boston was driving his 'cah' to the 'pahk' and saw this and thought it might be some twisted evil device designed to inflict pain and suffering:


if you're not in the know, much like the maligned Bostonite, thats my main man Err, mooninite marauder from Aqua Teen Hunger Force - flippin the bird - as hard as he can. So what the hell were these things doing all over Boston? Well, its just a viral marketing tactic employed by the uber-hipsters at Williams Street / Adult Swim for what im guessing is the new Aqua Teen movie (the new season ended a few weeks ago so it wouldn't be for the show). The idea is you're walking around through the city and you see this crazy space-invaders character glowing in the dark flipping you off and you go 'huh?' and the insuing 'huh' makes you go out and ask/tell other people about it, thus spreading the marketing virally. Viral tactics have been the method of choice lately for many companies, proving to be far more successful than traditional saturation methods like billboards, urinal-posters, or repetitive tv and radio ads.

the idea is that the human mind can only take so much before they start to tune out the message - oversaturation: you're only going to see the ad once and then begin to tune it out (unless its the girls gone wild commercial, which still sends me into a rabies-like frenzy of violence and psychotic laughter). If you see something that isn't quite normal, like an atari game character giving you the finger without any accompanying message, you freak out and desperatey try to make sense of what you've seen, and you absolutely remember it until you can manage to figure out exactly what you've seen. And i guess if you're from Boston and you can't figure it out, you call the fuckin Dept of Homeland Security.

Needless to say: the boys at Williams street got more than they were bargaining for, a moment of paranoia that closed highways, bridges and a section of the Charles River for most of the day today while 8 other devices were gathered up from different parts of the city. Ok - 9 mooninite lite-brite magnets shut down parts of Boston for the better part of a day without a single person recognizing the characters and quelling everyones dirty-bomb fears? Dude. Unacceptable.

Also worth pointing out that this campaign took place over the last several weeks and in a bunch of other cities: New York; LA; Chicago; Atlanta; Seattle; Portland; Austin; San Francisco; and Philly. Leave it to Boston, they obviously need to smoke more moonajuana.

Three things are certain:

1) Viral marketing works.
2) Aqua Teen movie is gonna rock.
3) The Red Sox still suck.