US society has been undergoing a fractional distillation process for decades, separating segments of the population by shades of opinion and karma. Their segments are all at war with each other and the rest of us and reality itself, while our segments form a grand coalition that is bringing us all together and moving from strength to strength.
The fractional distillation of organic substances played an important role in the 9th-century works attributed to the Islamic alchemist Jabir ibn Hayyan, as for example in the Kitāb al-Sabʿīn ('The Book of Seventy'), translated into Latin by Gerard of Cremona (c. 1114–1187) under the title Liber de septuaginta.[1] The Jabirian experiments with fractional distillation of animal and vegetable substances, and to a lesser degree also of mineral substances, formed the main topic of the De anima in arte alkimiae, an originally Arabic work falsely attributed to Avicenna that was translated into Latin and would go on to form the most important alchemical source for Roger Bacon (c. 1220–1292).[2]
As the distillation proceeds, what is left at the bottom comes ever closer to purest and most corrosive oil of vitriol.
Oil of vitriol was an old name for concentrated sulfuric acid, which was historically obtained through the dry distillation (pyrolysis) of vitriols. The name, abbreviated to vitriol, continued to be used for this viscous liquid long after the minerals came to be termed "sulfates". The figurative term vitriolic in the sense of "harshly condemnatory" is derived from the corrosive nature of this substance.
