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Many of you loyal readers, and you know who you are, who have been following us for any length of time know that we here at the Institute often do top-secret work for the government as part of our charter. Various organizations come to us hat in hand, begging, threatening ,cajoling to have use of our facilities and the various programs and researchers that we have in the works at all times. Being primarily a wildlife and nature front, I mean, organization, our primary mission has always been to bring you new and old research, anything that will make us a buck, that will better your life and allow us to continue receiving those fat checks we get monthly.

Imagine our surprise when we learned that we were part of a clandestine program conducted by some super secret organization whose name can not be revealed but whose initials are NSA, to eavesdrop on the American public for God knows what purpose. We were shocked at the audacity of this program. Shocked right out of our BVD’s. How dare they? We’ve been accused by our critics of doing anything for money but even we have our limits. If it hadn’t been for that guy, what’s his name, the squealer who leaked all that secret stuff, Justin Arrange or whatever his name is, spilling his guts and naming us as one of the perps in this ongoing mess, we never would have found out about it.

Here’s the real deal. We had been studying the amazing ability that marmots, the golden ones not the hoarys, have in receiving, and now we’ve recently discovered in transmitting, the information broadcast in the C-band radio — radio in the 3.7-gigahertz (GHz) to 6.4-GHz frequency range and the digital broadcast in the Ku frequency range (11.7 GHz to 14.5 GHz ). In other words Television. Yup. TV. What we hadn’t put together yet was that also included computers and you know what that means, the Internet.

To break it down further into language that we can understand, not that geek-speak where you listen and nod your head sagely like you understand what that fool is talking about but you really don’t have a freaking clue, this means that marmots, beneath that cute fur and those stubby little ears, have the ability to spy on us and worse, tell everybody else what we’re doing. Think about that for a second. You’re sitting there in front of your computer in the morning and you accidentally slide your finger up into your nose, just for a second mind you, and somewhere probably close by, there is a marmot surveillance team monitoring your isp address and suddenly you’re going viral on YouTube. You don’t know, that’s what clandestine means, you’re sitting there with a red nostril oblivious to the fact that some one in Bolivia is squirting milk out of his nose watching you.

Well, we’re not having it. That program is going down, regardless of how much it costs us in grant money, we’ve cashed the check already anyway. There will be no more using our defenseless wildlife to spy on the American public. We have taken steps to counteract this program. They are harsh steps but we feel, necessary ones. The only way we have found to deactivate a trained marmot is to deactivate it permanently. It is no longer a case of a ‘Good Marmot is a Dead Marmot’ instead it is “A Dead Marmot is A Silent Marmot’. We’ve found that by Googling ‘marmot, the preparing of ‘ there are many recipes on the very net we are trying to protect and save, for the preparation and serving of freshly cooked marmot. I know, I know, but we have to do something, our reputation is at stake. Besides the staff kind of likes it, says it tastes like chicken or emu and it’s rich in vitamin C so we see it as a win-win situation. We save the country and cut our food costs at the same time.

The cost of this self-sacrificing action has been huge, costing us that grant that we had and basically prohibiting the chances of obtaining any more money at that trough, but due to the fact that we are constantly submitting new ones, grants that is, under different names, the chances of this being a permanent setback are few. These guys don’t talk to each other and since their marmot listening stations have been going dark lately at a hell of a clip, (we have a lot of staff to feed) they’re like a blind guy in a brassiere factory. They don’t have a clue. We’ve told them that we think the marmots have developed some kind of virus and unfortunately in attempting to discover a cure we’ve lost every patient on the operating table. So unless one of you guys decides to leak this info, you won’t will you, we’re home free. OK then, mum’s the word. And remember until we’ve made this country of ours free from the scourges of the nefarious plans of those who would violate our privacy, watch what you’re doing when you sit there, because somebody else is.