VoteRonPaul2016

Mises, Bastiat, Rothbard, NAP, write in Ron Paul / Qua patres difficillime adeptisunt nolite turpiter relinquere

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

The Romans put lead in their wine on purpose, because it made it sweeter.

The method is written down in Cato, Columella and Pliny. In the autumn, unfermented grape juice went into a cauldron over a slow fire and was stirred for hours until it boiled down to a half, which they called defrutum, or a third, which they called sapa. Pliny advised doing it when there was no moon, with a few walnuts thrown in to soak up the smoke. Columella was precise about the pot. Use lead, he wrote, because a bronze one throws off a green rust that spoils the flavour.

What the lead actually did was dissolve. The acid in the grapes ate into the cauldron and came out as lead acetate, a compound so sweet that later chemists named it sugar of lead. Roman cooks could taste the difference, and the lead pot won.

Sapa went into the wine to sweeten and keep it, over pears and quinces, into the sauces. Scores of recipes in the cookbook of Apicius call for it. Chemists who have boiled it up the Roman way have found between a quarter of a gram and a full gram of lead in every litre. Mixed at Columella's own proportions, that puts around 20 milligrams in a litre of finished wine, about two thousand times the legal limit for British tap water.

The people drinking the most of it were the ones rich enough for good wine and fancy cooking. Slaves and legionaries drank posca, sour wine cut with water.

Rome was warned. In the reign of Augustus its greatest engineer, Vitruvius, wrote that water from clay pipes was far more wholesome than water from lead, and pointed to the plumbers, whose skin had gone a deep, deathly pale. Pliny called the vapour off a lead furnace deadly. The cauldrons stayed. Nobody wanted to go back to sour wine.

And the rest of the empire got its dose anyway. In 2025 scientists working through the layers of the Arctic ice found Rome's lead in it. Mining and smelting silver for the coinage had put so much into the air that children's blood lead rose right across Europe, enough, they calculated, to take 2.5 to 3 IQ points off the whole empire.

Britain repeated it in the 1700s. Every autumn the cider country of Devon came down with gripping colic, then palsy. In 1767 a Devon vicar's son, Dr George Baker, showed that the county's cider presses were lined and jointed with lead, found lead in Devon cider and none in Herefordshire's, and read his paper to the College of Physicians. Devon called him a faithless son of the county. His critics said the lead came from shot left in the bottles and the colic from acid humours. The lead came out of the presses anyway, and within a generation the Devon colic was all but gone.

Rome ignored Vitruvius. Devon called Baker a traitor. The petrol industry cut Clair Patterson's funding and kept him off the national panel on lead.

Every age has a sweetness it will not give up, and a Vitruvius it would rather not hear.

[VoteRonPaul2016 @jonflombee]

@RobertKennedyJr Please list your own personal achievements

[VoteRonPaul2016 @jonflombee]

@DerrickEvans4WV I would agree with you except this is 5th Gen bs
Look behind the curtain

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

In December 1958 the Polish embassy in Beijing refused to let the sparrow killers onto its grounds, so the Chinese surrounded it with drummers and kept the drums going for two days until every bird sheltering in the garden had dropped dead from the air, and the diplomats cleared them up with shovels.

That is how thorough it was. The campaign had been running since the spring. Every village, school and factory was turned out with gongs, pans and firecrackers to keep the sparrows flying until their hearts gave out. Nests were torn from eaves, eggs smashed, chicks killed, and children went through the fields with slingshots and were paid by the bird. The dead came in by the basket, strung on wires, piled on carts, and the totals went up the chain as a harvest. Something close to two billion sparrows in two years. The embassy garden was the last place in the capital with birdsong in it, and the drums got that too.

A zoologist called Zhu Xi had told them before it started that a king had tried this and lost. Frederick the Great of Prussia had put a bounty on sparrows in the 1740s to save his grain and his cherries, and the sparrows went, and the caterpillars they had been eating stripped his orchards to the stalk, and the king cancelled the bounty and paid to have sparrows brought back from neighbouring states and let loose. The whole episode was in the library. The ministry had a figure for what a sparrow ate and no figure for what it did, and a man with the second figure was told to sit down.

The locusts arrived on schedule. Then the grain borers. A sparrow takes a few grains from a field in autumn and feeds its chicks nothing but insects all spring, and with the sparrows gone the insects had the rice and the wheat to themselves. The counties with the most sparrows to lose saw their grain fall the furthest, and the rice and wheat that had been holding the country up went down together.

That was 1959, and the state took its grain quota anyway, on the harvest that had been reported. What was left in the villages was not enough, and the famine that followed over the next three years is the largest in human history: tens of millions dead, the estimates running from fifteen million to forty-five, whole counties in Anhui and Sichuan where the living could not bury the dead. The sparrows were one cause among several and the economists who have gone back to the county records put the bird's share at something over two million people, with another four hundred thousand never born. Two million, from a campaign against a thing that weighs an ounce.

By 1960 the ornithologist Tso-hsin Cheng, who had been cutting open dead sparrows and counting the insects in their stomachs, got the bird struck off the list and bed bugs put in its place. There were almost no sparrows left in China to pardon. So the government did what Prussia had done two centuries before: it bought a quarter of a million sparrows from the Soviet Union and shipped them east in crates, to be released into a country that had drummed every one of their relatives out of the sky.

The animal that does the invisible job is always the one on the ledger as a cost. Take the sheep off a chalk down and the orchids are under scrub in twenty years. Fence the cattle off a Welsh hill and the bracken takes it. Empty a savannah of its herds and the grass goes to fire. All of it written down, all of it in the library, all of it available to the next committee with a figure for what a cow eats.

Beijing paid Moscow for the birds in hard currency. The men who had said so in 1958 were still not allowed to say so in 1960.

[Shannon Joy @ShannonJoyRadio]

🚨🚨Will be LIVE tweeting all morning from #BillGatesOnTrial Leeuwarden. The trial was to begin 30 minutes ago but ALREADY there are delays.🚨🚨

Journalists who were registered to be IN THE ROOM are being turned away by apparently (irritated) judges along with many unregistered journalists.

"Nobody is in the courtroom yet - the court and security people are being hostile." - @sasha_latypova

There has been A LOT of very shady attempts to sabotage this trial already. WOW. #TheNetherlandsTrial
@garethicke @JaymieIcke

[Mary S. Holland, Esq. @maryhollandnyc]

Bill Gates told a Dutch court it couldn’t touch him over the COVID shot. The judge disagreed and made him pay the claimants’ legal costs. The full hearing opens TOMORROW in Leeuwarden.

Watch live.
https://t.co/Evt8c2VWzW

[Being Libertarian @beinlibertarian]

Put one in Mar-A-Lago and we’ll talk

[VoteRonPaul2016 @jonflombee]

@GutterGroyper @Tomhennessey69 They said that about the Scots & Irish too not so very long ago

[VoteRonPaul2016 @jonflombee]

@Tomhennessey69 In other news July 19th was the anniversary of the execution of 5 “witches” who clung to their innocence and were executed in Salem Mass

[VoteRonPaul2016 @jonflombee]

@AshtonForbes @Austinxt3y Sus

[VoteRonPaul2016 @jonflombee]

@certaresnovis https://t.co/pxeAA3kDIq

[Outrage Factory @outrage_factory]

@anttsinc Americans have no idea what a "red notice" is because its not an American term.

Interpol issues red notices, not the US government.

US State Department issued a worldwide caution 2 days ago, which have been issued at least 5 times since 9/11, including most recently in March.

[VoteRonPaul2016 @jonflombee]

@Cowchicky https://t.co/pxeAA3kDIq

[Outrage Factory @outrage_factory]

@anttsinc Americans have no idea what a "red notice" is because its not an American term.

Interpol issues red notices, not the US government.

US State Department issued a worldwide caution 2 days ago, which have been issued at least 5 times since 9/11, including most recently in March.

[VoteRonPaul2016 @jonflombee]

@BGypsy66 https://t.co/pxeAA3kDIq

[Outrage Factory @outrage_factory]

@anttsinc Americans have no idea what a "red notice" is because its not an American term.

Interpol issues red notices, not the US government.

US State Department issued a worldwide caution 2 days ago, which have been issued at least 5 times since 9/11, including most recently in March.

[Thomas Massie @RepThomasMassie]

Today, I introduced a resolution to honor the crew of the USS Liberty. 59 years ago, Israel attacked the ship, killing 34 Americans and wounding 174.

The President should declassify and publicly release all files related to Israel’s unprovoked attack on the USS Liberty.

[Ben Swann @BenSwann_]

“Congress has blocked the amendment @RepThomasMassie and I introduced to stop the integration of our military with Israel’s. It is unconscionable to not even have a vote. We will be continuing on and will not be intimidated by the pro-Israel lobby.”

-@RoKhanna

[VoteRonPaul2016 @jonflombee]

@shelbystardust @NickKristof @CKikila @elonmusk This tho

[Tom Woods @ThomasEWoods]

Shelby, if she earns $40K a year, is in the top 5% of earners globally. She could disgorge her own excess wealth and send it abroad. She does not. It is always someone else. Her role is to demonstrate her moral superiority through tweets

[Tom Woods @ThomasEWoods]

Shelby, if she earns $40K a year, is in the top 5% of earners globally. She could disgorge her own excess wealth and send it abroad. She does not. It is always someone else. Her role is to demonstrate her moral superiority through tweets

[Michael the Libertarian 🇺🇸 ☭⃠ @Bl00dOld]

It’s not often you can say that you’ve met your hero. I have. I met who I view as one of the greatest living Americans, @RonPaul at the @RonPaulInstitut conference today! I met so many awesome people too!

[Dave Smith @ComicDaveSmith]

@Bl00dOld @RobbieTheFire That’s awesome!

[VoteRonPaul2016 @jonflombee]

@Bl00dOld @ComicDaveSmith @RobbieTheFire Dude!