Pat Dollard

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News Busters:

A scientific study was recently performed to determine if Rush Limbaugh’s voice would kill beetles:

Beetles are destroying ponderosa, pinyon, lodgepole pines and other trees important to the ecosystem. The beetles have their place in the ecosystem too, of course, but climate change and human activities have allowed beetles to take over more than they should.

To combat such infestations, scientists thought up the “nastiest, most offensive sounds” they could. Those included recordings of Guns & Roses, Queen, Rush Limbaugh and manipulated versions of the insects’ own sounds.

If you think this is a satire from the Onion, it’s not, for the following was actually reported by Discovery.com Wednesday (h/t Colby Hall):

The project, dubbed “Beetle Mania,” concluded that acoustic stress may disrupt the tenacious insects’ feeding and even cause the beetles to kill each other, according to a presentation recently at the National Meeting of the Entomological Society of America. [...]

Richard Hofstetter, an entomology professor at Northern Arizona University who worked on the project, told Discovery News that “the most annoying sound” his colleague, Reagan McGuire, “could think of was Rush Limbaugh or rock music.”

McGuire started to pump the sounds of Limbaugh into portions of infested tree trunks brought into their lab, but Hofstetter said McGuire “could not bear listening to Limbaugh, so he ended up playing Rush backwards, which still kept the voice and intonation the same, but the words were meaningless.”

In the end, Limbaugh’s voice didn’t accomplish what these “scientists” hoped:

He and his colleagues found that while Limbaugh and the heavy metal initially bothered the beetles, the insects mostly ignored the sounds after a while.

Your tax dollars at work — maybe even stimulus dollars!

Makes you wonder why they didn’t try any liberal voices.

Any suggestions?