Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
So … why is the dead man “eaten by teeth of flame” in his grave in the Reading jail (gaol)?
It’s because back in the day, when convicts were executed in Merrie Olde England they were sometimes thrown into a pit of lye, which completly dissolved their bodies like a “burning winding sheet”. This was seen as the ultimate insult to someone who had so violently abrogated the norms of society.
Now, times change, but the old always seems to become new again, first as tragedy, then as farce. For the tragedy, in the last decade or so, the cartel assassins in Mexico have taken to using lye to dissolve the bodies of their victims. From Slate Magazine:
The assassins typically use sodium hydroxide or potassium hydroxide, strong bases commonly known as lye. Heated to 300 degrees, a lye solution can turn a body into tan liquid with the consistency of mineral oil in just three hours. If your kettle isn’t pressurized, you won’t be able to heat the solution much above the boiling point of water, 212 degrees, and it might take an additional hour or two to complete the process. Narco-hit men did not pioneer this technique. Adolph Luetgert, known in his day as the “Sausage King of Chicago,” dumped his wife into a boiling vat of lye in 1897, then burned what was left. Police eventually found bone fragments in the factory’s furnace.
And now in 2017, history returns as farce—the State of California is looking to fight “climate change” in perhaps the most bizarre way to date:
They are proposing dissolving dead people’s bodies in a bath of lye.
According to the authors of the proposed law, this is to avoid putting CO2 into the atmosphere from the burning of people’s bodies …
I can only hope that such stunning innumeracy is not contagious. Consider how much gas (petrol) you’ve burnt in your life driving around. Consider how much fuel has been burnt to heat your house. Consider how much jet fuel has been burnt to move you around the planet. Consider the fossil fuel energy content of all of the meals you’ve eaten in your life.
Now, add all those up plus more … and then consider how little fuel it will take to cremate your corpus delecti …
This is just virtue signaling on an industrial scale.
w.
PS—When you comment please QUOTE THE EXACT WORDS that you are discussing, so we can all understand what you are talking about.
Is there no end to the lunacy of the Left?
At least they are not proposing to produce Soylent Green.
Surely the production of enough sodium hydroxide requires more energy than burning a corpse.
I was curious how lye is produced commercially. According to Wikipedia the process is one of ‘high energy consumption.’
Whence the energy to heat the body-containing solution to 300 degrees?
“sometimes thrown into a pit of lye”
No, the pits contained quicklime (CaO). Lye is NaOH.
In California it’s just a matter of time before they require people to capture their exhaled breath.
Big lye has been trying to get on the gov’t gravy-train for years. They finally figured out how.
As a former California lawmaker (a conservative one), this bill appears to me to be more about regulation than virtue signalling. The supporter of the bill is the Bay Area Funeral Consumers Association, likely folks who want the option in accordance with their environmental beliefs.
Opposition comes from the California Funeral Directors Association, who likely don’t care to have more regulation foisted upon them.
The bill outlines concerns for disposal of the waste products and any remaining pathogens.
I didn’t see the bill as establishing a requirement for this method of bodily disposal.
That said, with California’s cap-and-trade law newly renewed, one never knows when something voluntary might be turned into something permanent. It is California, after all.
The left is truly insane…..
I’m constantly amazed at the lunacy of the left .
Liberals want the darndest things! It takes more energy to make the lye than would be saved…
Planned Parenthood progressed.
This method is already being used for dead pets in Washington state, and probably elsewhere.
“For where a grave had opened wide,
There was no grave at all:
Only a stretch of mud and sand
Beside the prison wall,
And a little heap of burning lime,
That a man should have his pall.”
– The Ballad of Reading Gaol.
Willis, I am calling you out on this one, your link to Bill Test AB-967 contains no information for Lye, CO2 or emissions. Where are you getting this info? Prove me wrong, please.
Link here:
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=201720180AB967
Willis, typo? I suggest it should be corpus dilecti
You don’t get lye for free. It takes energy to produce it. More energy I suspect than you’d save by not cremating.
Seems like this law just gives people the option of hydrolysis which I find no problem with. The idea of doing it to save the planet is typical lunacy but, what ever floats your liquified body.
The amusing part of the law is where they can get permission to dump you down the drain or, which is really green, take you to a biomass plant for the production of energy.
Comforting to know you can power an episode of Housewives of Beverly Hills.
Don’t lye to me, this is going to hurt and leave me greatly diminished isn’t it.
I believe the Regressives have officially become a Twit-ocracy.
Not only does dissolving bodies in lye reduce the load on the environment, the fat from the bodies combines with the OH- ions and you get soap as a by-product.
Does anyone really believe that the oxidation of human biomass, reputedly less than ants on the planet, and 18% Carbon by dry weight (we have a lot of potassic bone mass, probably because carbonate would dissolve in the lactic acid we produce when we go deficit anaerobic. Plants are about 50% Carbon by dry weight); does anyone really believe dead humans are a significant contribution to the Carbon cycle?
Goons, we are talking goons here.
Enjoyed that
Thank you
Hope you don’t actually expect californian climatistas to make sense.