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.
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Mandatory EPA bureaucrats in the funerals? While mourning passed away family members and friends? No thanks, my beloved will be treated with respect and dignity all the way.
Surely human bodies are a renewable fuel and we should be extracting useful green energy from them (sarc).
“Greenanity” – the Inanity of Greens resulting from their wilful abandonment of commonsense and science in pursuit of their AGW religion.
I suspect that California leads in the UN’s Global Greenanity league with Southern Australia running a close second.
As a further thought I wonder if a creative individual would like to set out a clinical definition of “Greenanity” and send it off to various scientific journals for publication ……..
Quite a few people come to mind who could swiftly be diagnosed with this mentally crippling disease …. Al Gore being one of the front runners.
(See ‘Predatory Journals Hit By Star Wars Sting’)
Why not drop the bodies into a plasma gasifier and use the resultant gases to run the system for free?
The olde English death sentence must have been a problem for prisons, they were stuck with the body unless it got a Royal Pardon, “and that you be taken thence to a place of execution and be there hanged by the neck until you be dead; and that your body be afterwards buried within the precincts of the prison in which you shall be last confined after your conviction; and may the Lord have mercy upon your soul.”
there was similar-turn you to a few cups of liquid -being promoted by the UK funeral homes about 3? yrs ago
as an eco solution(literally)
i gather you could dilute n pour the residue on a tree or somesuch
A little late to the party, but here’s the whole book at archive.org: The Ballad of Reading Gaol — https://archive.org/stream/balladofreadingg01wild#page/n5/mode/2up
Use my electric arc crematory. It will turn your whole body into ionized gas. No greenhouse gas emission, no atoms left. And it’s solar PV powered. It’s as clean as it gets!
http://www.howitworksdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/electric-arc.jpg
I’ve had conversations with my lefty friends about urban cemeteries and “all that wasted space”. They are truly devoted to deconstructing the West.
I’ve read stories about criminals disposing of their victims in this manner and a ghoulish thought comes to mind.
How many human bodies would a given volume of liquid be able to absorb before it becomes unusable for that purpose?
One of our drinking buddies is a retired police officer that spent his years in narcotics and vice. One of the common crime problems is how to get rid of a dead body. Apparently freeing the body combined with a wood chipper is a handy solution. Might work well with all the new composting requirements.
Freezing not freeing
Been done; didn’t work. See here for an account. This event was also featured on an episode of Forensic Files, which you can watch on YouTube here. Supposedly this real-life crime inspired the corresponding scene in Fargo.
Richard Crafts murdered his wife Helle, stuffed her body into a freezer chest, then cut the frozen body into pieces with a chainsaw and fed the pieces into a woodchipper which spewed the chips into the Connecticut River.
This case generated a whole lot of discussion in Connecticut at the time. I worked in Newtown between 1984 and 1988; the murder occurred in 1986. As I recall the first trial ended in a mistrial and the husband was convicted in the second trial which ended late 1989; sentencing was the following January.
Correction: ” … spewed the chips into the
ConnecticutHousatonic River.”I’ll comment on the picture, from an episode of Bones that I seem to have missed. If the stuff in that bathtub is strong enough to dissolve flesh, those folks have seriously insufficient personal protective equipment. At a minimum, full-face shields would be required in addition to the goggles.
What was the acid used in an early episode of Breaking Bad? It dissolved the bathtub.
I am trying to find a reference to CO2 emissions involving this legislation. Is there such a reference quoting the bill’s authors or its supporters?
I’m not sure how one calculates the stoichiometry of a human body, but a tonne of lye is $450-600 and there is no need for embalming and other sevices, not bad for a funeral, but what do you do with the liquefied ‘hazardous’ remains? I guess neutralized, it could be used as fertilizer – very utilitarian.
The main unintended consequence would be that funeral directors may not be able to resist a lucrative side industry: getting rid of bodies for people. A ‘missing person’ will take on a more sinister meaning. We’ll need new forensics and the crime scene photographer will be out of a job.
At this stage, I can see it is past time to intervene on the types that sit thinking up “progressive” thoughts like this. They’ve been left unfettered too long. The stuff can only keep getting worse. Born before WWII, I thought I’d seen and heard everything about the depths to which twisted minds could sink. But I see it is just the beginning. They probably don’t reason the piddlingly amount of CO2 emitted in cremation. They like this stuff.
good
What is needed is the energy impact of forcing the poor and middle class out of California cities and NY to commute major distances. At this point it should be obvious that they are being forced out by city leaders with each and every dictate.
I think in the case of California it is more appropriate to say they are throwing them under the high speed train. That is the budget item that really drives all the political moves and science policy fraud.
Crazy. What men will do to stop man made climate change. Yet…there is no man made climate change. All my findings show that noted climate change is natural. Ehh…
I think no man dead or alive can change the weather….
Before worrying about funeral requirements, I worry about these assisted suicide – death with dignity laws. I forsee when they will become mandatory for the old and sick as a way to reduce government provided health care costs.