Bessie Burp Barriers 

For years, the global warming crowd has been obsessed with cow methane. Animals that have been peacefully chewing their cuds in fields all over the world from time immemorial are regularly blamed as emissions culprits. There are 1.5 billion cows on the planet! Their farts are 5 percent of greenhouse gases! Now Bloomberg reports some inventors are on the case with a bovine mask — to capture cow burps. (Despite what you’ve heard, cow farts aren’t the problem; 95 percent of cow methane “comes out as burps, and the majority of those get released through the nose.”)

Brothers Francisco and Patricio Norris founded Zelp — Zero Emissions Livestock Project. Their 3.5-ounce rubbery mask, which sits above the cow’s nostrils, supposedly cuts bovine methane by 60 percent. According to Bloomberg, “a set of fans powered by solar-charged batteries sucks up the burps and traps them in a chamber with a methane-absorbing filter.” Then the methane is turned into co₂ — which apparently is an okay emission all of a sudden.

The London-area company is reportedly in talks with U.S. meat processors, which would be charged annual subscriptions of $45 per cow mask. A lot of moo-lah, sure, but Zelp’s market research claims climate-conscious customers will pony up as much as 30 percent more for “lower-emission beef.” Bunch of dupes will be paying through the nose.

Swamp Gas

In what he called a “lucky dip,” a researcher collecting seafloor sediment cores in West Antarctica found the remains of a 90-million-year-old rainforest. Ulrich Salzmann, professor of paleoecology at the University of Northumbria in Great Britain, admitted to upi that he and his research partners weren’t expecting undersea “forest soil”  near the South Pole.

The samples included “roots, pollen, spores, and the remains of flowering plants,” from which the scientists extrapolated what the ancient forest looked like. “This was a swampy forest, dominated by needle-leaved conifer trees with many ferns,” declared Salzmann.

If you thought evidence of non-human-caused climate change would provoke these guys to re-evaluate anything, you would be wrong. According to the researchers, their findings “will help climate scientists perfect the models designed to predict the effects of today’s human-caused climate change.” Because that’s where the grant money is.

Latest Buzz

The moment the coronavirus curve started to flatten, the media went buggy over “murder hornets.” In May, The New York Times weighed in: “Tracking the ‘Murder Hornet’: A Deadly Pest Has Reached North America.” “ouch!” warned The Sun, reporting that the “virus-stricken U.S.” was being “invaded” by a two-inch-long menace that can “kill with a single sting.”

The Times, knowing that leftists are already panicked about America’s supposedly disappearing bees, went all horror movie. The hornets’ “mandibles shaped like spiked shark fins [can] wipe out a honeybee hive in a matter of hours, decapitating the bees and flying away with the thoraxes to feed their young.” Congress flew into action, with Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D, AZ) rolling out “The Murder Hornet Eradication Act.” It got so bad that scientists advised calm. “They are not ‘murder hornets,’” entomologist Chris Looney told abc News. “They are just hornets.” And not one has been spotted in the U.S. since last December.

So, right on cue, usa Today ran this screaming headline: “Forget Murder Hornets. Giant Gypsy Moths Could Bring ‘Serious, Widespread Damage’ to the U.S.” Immediately after that The Hill reported, “Georgia Officials Warn of 4-Foot-Long Invasive Lizards that Eat ‘Anything They Want.’” Folks, these people want you to stay inside forever.

Spacing Out

According to National Geographic, next year nasa plans to slam a spacecraft into an asteroid. Why? Well, practice.

There’s a lot of space material whipping around out there, and some of it is whipping toward us. National Geographic says every year, one or two space rocks “large enough to cataclysmically impact a continent” pass by. nasa wants to learn how to deflect these things. (Remember the dinosaurs.) The test rock nasa picked is a tiny, 500-foot-wide moon that orbits an asteroid about seven million miles from earth. The asteroid is Didymos, orbited by “Didymoon” — hence, nasa’s name for the mission: dart, Double Asteroid Redirection Test, scheduled to launch in July 2021. The plan is to slam a refrigerator-sized spacecraft into Didymoon at 14,700 miles an hour, and then measure what happens.

The dart goal is alter the orbit of the little moon slightly. nasa doesn’t want to mess with the orbit of Didymos itself, for fear of accidentally nudging it into our path. If that happened, we’d need a Plan B, like detonating a nuclear bomb “to push it off course.” But I’m sure everything will be fine.

Bye-Bye, Butter Maiden

Mia, the familiar Native American woman gracing Land O’Lakes dairy products since 1928, is gone. Long known as the “butter maiden,” according to Smithsonian Magazine, Mia was replaced on all Land O’Lakes packaging with a big blank space and the motto, “Farmer-Owned Since 1921.” Company bigwigs say they simply want to focus on their farming roots, but who can blame them for not wanting to deal with the usual “racist-sexist-xenophobic” attacks during their 100th anniversary next year?

“It’s a great move,” says Brown University’s Adrienne Keene, a Cherokee Nation citizen. “It makes me really happy to think that there’s now going to be an entire generation of folks that are growing up without having to see that every time they walk in the grocery store.” A horror, to be sure. Others, including the son of the Ojibwe artist who redesigned Mia in 1954, insist she was never a stereotype. In any event, the butter box now looks weirdly incomplete.

No, I’m not going to say that the logo and mascot wars have claimed another scalp. Won’t say it. So don’t go on the warpath.

Bessie Burp Barriers ©2020 Getty Images/Bloomberg/Contributor; Swamp Gas illustration ©2020 J. McKay/Alfred-Wegener-Institut, CC-BY 4.0; Latest Buzz, Reef Relief and Bye-Bye, Butter Maiden illustrations for The Limbaugh Letter ©2020 Allison Smith/AMOS Ink; Spacing Out photo illustration ©2020 NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory