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Although many people consider him to be “the expert”, Dr. Anthony Fauci doesn’t have a very good track record when it comes to talking about COVID-19. First, he used a wildly-inaccurate model to predict how bad the virus would be. Then it was, “masks aren’t necessary”, then “masks are essential”, then “you should wear two or three masks”. He convinced the government to unnecessarily shut down the entire economy and championed a vaccine that isn’t really a vaccine. He has been wrong way more often than he’s been right.
Dr. Anthony Fauci is a liar, opportunist and a snake oil salesman. How untrustworthy is he? To answer that question, I’m going to tell you a story.
As you may know, I grew up on a dairy farm in Minnesota. Back when I was a kid, winters in Minnesota were much worse than they are now. I know everyone says that but, in my case, it really is true. The temperatures were lower, the winds were stronger, and it snowed more. A lot more. In fact, sometimes we’d have so much snow that we weren’t able to get a tractor out to the field until spring.
Why is that important? I’ll tell you why. Because cows never stop eating and they never stop producing manure. Which means that we had to clean the barn every day. When the weather was nice, this wasn’t an issue. The manure would go directly from the barn into a manure spreader which would then be taken straight to the field and the manure would be disposed of. For those of you unfamiliar with it, here’s what a manure spreader looks like:
But even when there was too much snow to get to the field, the cows were still eating and still making manure and we still had to put that manure somewhere. So, we’d pile it behind the barn where it would stay until after the spring thaw, and the ground finally dried enough for us to drive on it again. Some years, we’d have to pile up the manure for months before we could finally get back out in the field.
Once we could get back in the field, it was time to get rid of the pile of manure. We did that by loading up the spreader, driving it to the field, emptying it, and then coming back and doing it all over again until the pile was gone. This sometimes took days to accomplish.
Fortunately, there’s a machine called a “skid loader” which makes things easier. Several manufacturers make them but ours was made by a company called “Melroe” and the model was a “Bobcat”. There’s an image of one at the top of this post.
A Bobcat is a 4-wheel drive machine that you make go by moving two levers, one in each hand. Each lever independently controls two wheels. The right lever controls the right two wheels, and the left lever controls the left two wheels.
To make the Bobcat go forward, you push both levers forward. Pulling both levers back will make the Bobcat go in reverse. To turn, you push one lever forward while pulling the other one back. The bucket is controlled by using your feet. One foot moves the bucket up or down and the other tilts it.
One spring, when I was 16 or 17, it was my job to get rid of the pile. So, I used the Bobcat to load the spreader, towed the spreader to the field with the tractor and spread the aforementioned manure. Day after day after day.
One morning, after a night of heavy rains, I was back at work moving that pile. Everything was soaking wet from the rain and the manure had become particularly sloppy.
Keep in mind, this was before portable music of any kind, so I had nothing to offset the mind-numbing boredom that came with that job. Except, that is, to think about things other than what I should have been thinking about. In other words, I was daydreaming.
While I wasn’t paying attention, I had scooped up a bucket of slop and was heading toward the spreader to dump it in. While I was doing this, I had absentmindedly raised the bucket to nearly its fullest height.
Before I continue, there are two more things you should know about driving a Bobcat. The first thing is that higher the bucket is, the higher the vehicle’s center of gravity. When the bucket is low, the machine is quite stable. When the bucket is high, not so much. The second thing you should know is, as the bucket goes up, the angle between it and the operator decreases. This means the higher the bucket is raised, the more likely it is that something could fall out of it and land on the operator’s head.
I think you can see where this is going.
With the bucket almost as high as it can go, it was nearly directly over my head. No problem yet. Then I hit a little bump, a bump about the size of a baseball bat. Now I’ve got a problem.
The Bobcat’s two front tires hit the bump. This leaned me slightly back in the seat, and I pulled back slightly on the levers which made me move slower. Then, the front tires moved over the bump. That caused me to pitch forward and press slightly more on the levers, which made me move faster. Then, the rear tires hit the bump and I pitched forward even more and I went faster still.
Anyone who has driven a skid loader knows that the way to solve this problem is to stop touching everything. Just let go of the levers and take your feet off the pedals and the machine nearly always stabilizes itself.
Yeah, that would have been a good idea. But that’s not what I did. Since I wasn’t paying attention in the first place, I didn’t do the smart thing. No, I did the absolute worst thing. When I started moving faster, my natural reaction was to try to slow down. That’s what I did. I quickly pulled the levers backward which caused even more instability. And that made things even worse.
So, at this point, I’ve got about 27 cubic feet of sloppy, smelly, fermented cow manure sloshing around in a bucket six feet above where I was sitting. And most of it splashed out of the bucket and onto the top of my head.
After things stopped bouncing around, and the manure stopped raining down on me, I lowered the bucket, turned off the Bobcat, climbed to the ground, and went to find the nearest garden hose to clean off.
Now, I told you that story so I could tell you this:
When I stepped off the Bobcat that day, I was covered from head to toe with nearly a cubic yard of rancid cow manure. And I still wasn’t as full of shit as Anthony Fauci is.
