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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29600 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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You have to dehydrate it first, but jerky is in fact flammable. We're not talking about a single body, we're talking about a pile of bodies with fuel and accelerants at the bottom.

SecureSignals keeps coming back to the assertion that "pile a bunch of bodies on a grate, put wood and accelerants below them, and ignite" is not a viable way to burn bodies, and that it is not viable because burning bodies is a strongly energy-negative process, as evidenced by normal cremations taking a lot of fuel. This would actually be a pretty good knock-down argument against the reliability of that testimony if burning bodies was in fact strongly energy-negative.

That jerky is 50% fat. And your theoretical argument claimed it would boil the water away, no need to remove it first. But ok, I'll grant it is possible within certain parameters and I learned something about jerky and the wick effect.

I don't happen to have any lean beef jerky on hand, but I do have some dried shredded squid, which has 0.5g of fat, 25g of sugar, and 16g of protein per serving (and also, according to the back of the packaging possibly some lead, mercury, and cadmium?!), and that burns quite vigorously. That's rather more sugar (and heavy metals) than I would expect my dried squid snacks to have.

I do expect that even lean jerky would burn pretty vigorously once it got going though. I'll actually run the experiment the next time I have some lean beef jerky (that is not, for some reason, full of sugar and heavy metals).

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