Does believing you're the last sane man on the planet make you crazy? – Del Spooner, I, Robot

One of the silver linings to the Covid cloud is that we now know who "they" are. You know, the mysterious "they" who "say." As it turns out, "they" are lawless politicians, media propagandists, ignorant experts, and deluded educators. Everything "they" have been telling us for 18 months is nonsense. We know it. They know we know it. And still they speak.

They (as personified recently by President Biden) are getting increasingly shrill, frustrated that they have not yet made everyone insane like them.

But who is crazy – them, or us? It's hard to believe that mental illness could be as pervasive as it seems to be. We have a strong bias against recognizing mass hysteria. Here are some reality checks for those moments when it seems like you're the last sane person on Earth.

Absurdity #1: Doing the same thing and expecting different results

An unending need for more Covid booster shots would be proof the shots don't work. "C'mon, man! Get a shot! The shot will protect you! But not this shot, the next shot. No, I mean the one after the next one – that one will really...you know the thing...."

No, sorry. That's cuckoo.

I got vaccinated so that fearful people would be reassured that it was safe to be around me, and do business with me. And it does give me a sense (justified or not) that I'm safer. But if two shots aren't enough, then I'm done. More of what doesn't work won't work.

Absurdity #2: Believing contradictory things

"They" will say at 10:00 in the morning that everyone should get vaccinated, to protect us from The Covid. Then they'll say at 10:02 that the vaccinated should wear masks to protect us from The Covid. Well, which is it? If the shots are effective, no vaccinated person should wear a mask. Ever. Freedom from the face diaper is your reward for getting the vaccine – and it would be proof to the skeptical that the vaccines work. It undercuts their position to say, "vaccines work, but wear a mask."

These nutjobs may really believe the shots protect you, and simultaneously don't protect you. Somehow. They live in their own scrambled mental universe where something can be itself and its opposite in the same way at the same time.

As President Biden really said in his speech announcing (illegal) vaccine mandates, "We are going to protect the vaccinated workers from unvaccinated coworkers."

Huh? If your vaccination doesn't protect you from the virus, how is giving someone else the same ineffective shot going to help you? Total lunacy.

Absurdity #3: Liars demanding to be believed

This one hardly needs elaboration. The frauds who've told us one falsehood after another for a year-and-a-half always insist that they are telling the truth this time; that they have only our best interests at heart, and if we don't comply, they'll shoot. Because, compassion.

But to give just one example, answer this question: How many Americans have died from The Covid? Now, that should be a pretty solid number. Out of respect for those who have died, not to mention the interests of science and public policy, we should know that number within a small margin of error. But the CDC number is a myth, everyone knows it's a myth, and "they" know that we know it's a myth. The real number is not known, and because of the shenanigans they've played with incentives and data, it can never be known.

It's very cynical to lie to people about life-and-death stuff. Or more likely, psychotic. But liars will keep lying to you as long as you keep listening.

Absurdity #4: Insisting on inconsistency

"The vaccine is safe," they tell us. Yes, as far as we know now, it is – judging by the usual standard of safety for this sort of thing. We call many drugs and treatments "safe" if only a fraction of a percentage of users get sick and die from taking them. Nothing is absolutely "safe" for everyone. We don't expect that – that would be loony.

But if we were to apply that customary, sane, and normal standard to SARS-CoV-2, we would find that it, too, is "safe." Few people get The Covid; those who do get it usually don't get very sick from it; those who do get sick are not likely to die from it. Why is The Covid somehow different from every other danger that mankind has ever faced? Hint: it is not.

Then why is it treated differently?

If we were to apply our Zero Tolerance Covid Policy to other hazards, no one would ever get in a car again. And why don't we have masking and vax mandates for children exposed to the seasonal flu, which really does kill children? The fact that they do not think about The Covid like they think about anything else is a sign that they're not thinking straight.

If we're going to reclaim our individual and collective sanity, we'll have to deal just as rationally with the dangers posed by The Covid as we do the dangers posed by sugar, swimming pools, and SUVs. We'll take reasonable precautions, and then go on with our lives.

I wonder whether, if we had kept our heads in the early days of the pandemic instead of allowing them to inflate The Covid into the ultimate bogeyman, we would be over and done with all this by now. More natural immunity, fewer variants, no excuses for carpet-bombing the economy, no endless wars against normality and sanity.

It seems that they've "flattened the curve" out to infinity, and the most likely explanation is that they don't want the suffering and the disruption to end. "Never let a crisis go to waste" is the cry of a sociopath who will prolong a crisis, or create one if none turns up. And we have a lot of those folks.

We're sane. They're not. It's time we told them to "Sell crazy someplace else; we're all stocked up here."