Saltpeter

 Woke up this morning with a strange word in my mind: Saltpeter.

It is a chemical once obtained from the bottom of empty wine barrels, used by alchemists and those who fiddled around with any natural chemical they could find in their medieval world mindset.

Popular thinking at the time, and evidently still is thought, that the men in the military were given the potassium nitrate in their scrambled eggs to keep their minds on the job, not on  women because it was thought that the use of saltpeter, a chemical used in fertilizer and gunpowder, would subdue the male libido.

In other words, it was anti-Cialis or Viagra. While those drugs make the erectile function, saltpeter supposedly did away with sexual desire.

Yeah, right. 

It was used to preserve meat here in the US previous to 1980, it has been removed from such use. Back in the days of the "how can we keep meat from spoiling", or how can we get the biggest bang for our military buck, it was used. There are also suggestions that certain navies used it to keep their sailors ready to fight, not to ----. To keep their minds on the job of firing cannons, not using their own guns. 

Perhaps it had the desired effect back in the day and it was not talked about, much like UFOs still are, because of what it might do to the fighting forces. It has no effect on females, by the way.

So, in my brilliance first thing this morning, I considered a national Give "Em Saltpeter every morning as women are now forced to take birth control meds in order to get around the unwanted pregnancy thing.

Here I thought I had managed to solve the destruction of Roe v. Wade problem perfectly.