Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach

“In Reading gaol by Reading town

There is a pit of shame,

And in it lies a wretched man

Eaten by teeth of flame,

In burning winding-sheet he lies,

And his grave has got no name.”

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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