f a baseball bat and they shove it up your nose until it hits your brain and you feel it? Like as you're getting tested you're like, "Oh, I think I'm forgetting my second grade experience. I don't remember my friend Bob from..." Yeah, it's basically giving you brain damage as you're getting... No, it's not. No, it's not. I shouldn't even say that. Somebody's gonna believe it's true. No, it doesn't give you brain damage. But it turns out that you can get the same results from gargling. So apparently the other model that they could have done is take a swig or something and spit it into a cup. So for a year and a half we've had sticks shoved up our nose to tickle our brains. Didn't need it. I didn't need it. Just spit in a cup. I would have done it too. So thanks to Adam Dopamine on Twitter for alerting me to that update.

So I saw a fascinating thread on Twitter that I will call to your attention. Just look at my Twitter feed to see it. I just put it there this morning so you'll find it. And it's about Africa and alcohol. And it's a story that I had never heard. Now there's a little pushback on Twitter from people who know me. I have not read Norm's autobiography. You can stop asking. So there's a little pushback about whether this is accurate or maybe it's just anti-European racism, reverse racism kind of thing. So I will say that I can't vouch for the historical accuracy of it. It's presented by somebody who seems to know what they're doing. But the idea was this. That apparently a lot of the colonists, and I don't know how universal this essentially planned any of this was. I don't think it was centrally planned. But they would use alcohol to colonize parts of Africa. And they would do it a couple different ways. One is that they would get the locals addicted. They would just addict them to alcohol. And then when you're trading your alcohol for their whatever they have, you're going to get a good deal because they kind of have to give it to you because they're addicted. So they actually turned the locals into alcoholics.

But the second thing they did is since the locals did not have a culture and history of alcohol they would typically drink too much because, you know, it just wasn't part of their history and the knowledge of how to handle it. Right? And they would get a little wild as people do on alcohol. And then the colonists would use that, reportedly, as their excuse to take over because they'd say, "Well look at these savages running around all drunk. They can't run themselves. They need a little help." So part of the scheme for taking over these places involved alcohol. Apparently the first factory in Africa was a distillery.

Now the pushback is maybe it wasn't some universal centrally planned white thing to get rid of black people or someth