NOAA Denies Existence of Mermaids- Hipster Ariel Hardest Hit

In an announcement a few months too late for April Fool's Day, the NOAA issued a statement denying the existence of mermaids earlier this month.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was reportedly promted to issue the statement after fielding a number of inquiries from the public in response to the Discovery Channel airing a mock documentary called Mermaids: The Body Found.

"No evidence of aquatic humanoids has ever been found," the NOS said in a post on its website.

The conclusion was apparently not based on research but was drawn from publicly available resources.

"We don't have a mermaid service programme," a spokeswoman told the BBC, prompting sighs of relief from American tax payers.

At least two people wrote to the agency demanding answers after the Discovery Channel broadcast a programme called, Mermaids: The Body Found.

The show was shot in a documentary style and was described as painting "wildly convincing picture of the existence of mermaids".

When reached for comment, one bespectacled mermaid who declined to give her name defiantly declared "I totally existed- Long before it went mainstream!" without a hint of irony.

However, while cracking open a Pabst Blue Ribbon, the unnamed mermaid was reportedly contemplating trading her mermaid lifestyle in exchange for life on land and completion of her vinyl record collection.

An Inconvenient Truth: Armed Right Wing, Bigoted, Hate-Mongering Tea Partier Storms Discovery Channel HQ, Takes Hostages

[The only reason I didn't go with the headline Gun-Wielding EcoTerrorist Demands Human Population Reduced, Montgomery County SWAT Team Obliges apparently was already taken by the Daily Caller- NANESB!]

Just days after Sarah Palin and Glen Beck's neo-fascist rally at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. (which apparently drew 12 people and 299,990 looky-loos passing by the Mall, according to NBC), a deranged right-wing teabagging gunman stormed into the nearby headquarters of the Discovery Channel in Silver Spring, MD brandishing a pistol and metal canisters and took hostages in an attempt to get the network to change their programming to shows that suited his ideological outlook.

Only the gunman's ideological outlook is already subject to some spinning by the mainstream media and the left half of the blogosphere.

43 year old James J Lee posted a lengthy online screed decrying Discovery Channel's programming for "encouraging the birth of more parasitic human infants" and "encouraging war" before arriving at the network's Maryland headquarters on Wednesday [you'd think that he wouldn't mind the war programming so much, since that would reduce the population in some way shape or form- NANESB!]. The eco-terrorist got his wish in a roundabout way when Montgomery County Police SWAT officers moved in and shot Lee dead after he pointed his gun at one of the hostages. All three hostages were able to escape unharmed and a bomb disposal unit was called in to detonate an device Lee was wearing (one device appeared to go off when he was shot).

However, even a cursory examination of Lee's screed indicates that it's not exactly chock full of right-wing shibboleths.

...war must be halted. Not because it’s morally wrong, but because of the catastrophic environmental damage modern weapons cause to other creatures

Shoot....I thought us right wingers loved war and violence.

Civilization must be exposed for the filth it is. That, and all its disgusting religious-cultural roots and greed. Broadcast this message until the pollution in the planet is reversed and the human population goes down! This is your obligation. If you think it isn’t, then get hell off the planet

Wait a second....if civilization needs to be done away with for good, how exactly do you plan on broadcasting anything? Part of Lee's demands included Discovery airing more shows that mirrored his disdain for humanity and 'Apply solutions'.

While it might be tempting to dismiss Lee as a lone crank, the so-called news outlets weren't as quick to dismiss the Pentagon shooter or Texas kamikaze pilot Joseph Stack as lone cranks and desperately were attempting to tie them to the Tea Party, talk radio or other participants in the vast right wing conspiracy. Instead, Lee's hysterical alarmism regarding overpopulation and global warming seems eerily reminiscent of the global warming hysteria surrounding the leadup to last year's Copenhagen climate change conference. It was also reported that Lee was in part inspired by Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. To be blunt, there probably more concrete evidence to tie Lee to the popular and mainstream global warming alarmists and overbearing envirnonmentalists as there is Robert Stack to the Tea Party.

Lee, reportedly from San Diego, CA, was arrested in 2008 on charges of trespass and disorderly conduct in front of the Discovery Channel's headquarters where the threw thousands of dollars in cash up in the air.