For the full episode, subscribe at / chapotraphouse CLIP from Episode 831 - Fan Gruel feat. David J. Roth (5/9/24) / chapo-trap-house #chapotraphouse #chapo
Fun fact: Shi Huangdi (the emperor who drank mercury) was being a crazy moron even at the time. Chinese apothecaries & metallurgists had charted out the hazards of mercury, and when Shi Huangdi rounded up the ones he hadn't already purged and said "Your job is to make me immortal", drinking mercury was never on the table. The academic consensus at the time was that immortality was a secret which had been lost to the mainland, and now only resided with the Immortal Masters living on a secret island to the east. While Shi Huangdi spammed naval expeditions to try and find that island, the plan was to buy time via various occult medicinal techniques - one of which was to have him use cups, bowls, and other dinnerware made exclusively out of a special alloy that were believed to purify food and drink served on them. Their version of doing cardio and cutting down on red meat, basically. Shi Huangdi eventually got impatient, barged in on the metallurgists, and demanded they explain how the special alloy was made. After half-listening, he went "Okay, so the weird liquid metal sounds pretty magical, which means it must be the active ingredient in your shitty dinnerware, which means that if I just chug it like water, I'll become immortal!" He then died of self-inflicted mercury poisoning.
My theory? RFK is a Trill symbiote. The worm in his brain contains not only his memories but the memories of many of history’s most notorious cranks, from Father Coughlin to Ayn Rand to L. Ron Hubbard. Alas, I fear the death of the worm marks the end of this direct link to ancestral crank knowledge.
First, ivermectin penetrates the mammalian brain poorly, so it does not exert any pharmacological effects via mammalian ligand-gated ion channels in the brain unless it is used at high, potentially toxic doses or the blood-brain barrier is functionally impaired. So, I believe the problem is not the brain worm: Mercury poisoning, how did this happen!
This worm story is clearly just a psyop hitpiece by Big Pharma(TM)!!! They miss all the easy profits they were raking in from ivermectin sales that dried up as soon as they figured out exactly how hard to price-gouge the suckers. Now they need to go back to its on-label purpose, so it's time to drum up fear about brain worms. The nice thing about insane conspiracy theories is that there are no boundaries to making things up, even if it's the complete opposite of what someone hoped to spread.
He did travel to south east Asia at some point and ate some bad pork is the suspicion I read in an article. But the thing causing his memory issues was probably caused by mercury poisoning.
