I plan to donate my corpse to science, where it might actually do some good.

Love you guys and gals!

OM. I do not have burial plans. I really don’t care one way or the other. On the other hand, my family feels differently, and I expect that my body will molder in a grave in a national cemetery. If that gives them any measure of comfort, I am content.

In my case I worded the letters “missing in action, presumed killed” and backed that up with details about the combat that indicated that we were pretty sure they did not survive. The thought was that if they later turned up on the roles of POWS, that would be a pleasant surprise. I didn’t want to give them false hope.

The remains of the four members of my unit who were killed in action were returned to their families in the years between 1985 and 1993. All were given welcome homes befitting of heroes and proper burial ceremonies. The families finally knew with some finality what had happened to their sons and gained the closure that comes with that knowledge.

Another pilot from the Midway Air Group that was shot down was reported to his family as “missing in action.” He had successfully bailed out but was killed by ground troops shortly after he reached the ground. Much as had happened during the Korean War, as told to me by Capt. O’Brien, his family spent many years searching for him. They could not give up the hope that he was somehow alive. Even when his remains were returned to the U.S., they refused to believe the remains were his. Most families have a need to see the body or remains in order to accept the finality of death of a loved one. The burial ceremony allows them a chance to accept the truth of death and pay respects to their loved one.

Even for those of us aboard the carrier, the finality of the loss of a squadron mate was hard to accept. You had just seen him a few hours before and then his plane didn’t return from a strike. Yes, there were on scene witnesses – other pilots on the raid. But details were always sketchy because in the fog of war and in the heat of battle events happen quickly and sometimes no one saw the missing plane get hit, a parachute, or even the impact explosion. So, an airplane doesn’t return and suddenly someone you knew like a brother is gone. You hope above hope that his name will turn up on the POW roles even though you are well aware that being a POW is just short of Hell on Earth. At least a POW has a chance of coming home. When we were pretty sure our brothers had been killed in action the Midway always paused ops for a short time for an at sea burial ceremony. It was a chance for us to pay respects and gave a sense that these honored men were not coming back.

Maybe this provides some small insight into the need of survivors to have some final knowledge of what happened to their loved ones.

From a Catholic perspective, burying the dead is considered a corporal work of mercy.

From the USCCB’s site:

The Corporal Works of Mercy are found in the teachings of Jesus and give us a model for how we should treat all others, as if they were Christ in disguise. They “are charitable actions by which we help our neighbors in their bodily needs”. They respond to the basic needs of humanity as we journey together through this life.

http://www.usccb.org/beliefs-and-teachings/how-we-teach/new-evangelization/jubilee-of-mercy/the-corporal-works-of-mercy.cfm

The other corporal works of mercy are:
To feed the hungry.
To give water to the thirsty.
To clothe the naked.
To shelter the homeless.
To visit the sick.
To visit the imprisoned, or ransom the captive.
To bury the dead.

These can be traced back to the Books of Isaiah and Tobit.

The spiritual works of mercy are:

To instruct the ignorant.
To counsel the doubtful.
To admonish sinners.
To bear patiently those who wrong us.
To forgive offenses.
To console the afflicted.
To pray for the living and the dead.

These can be traced back to the Books of Ezekiel, Deuteronomy, and 2 Maccabees.

cartharsis through that method is a fraud.. just as putting someone to death doesnt really help either..

their belongings will exist… most of their bodies are gone… teeth?

well read the forensics books as i have… icky if you can stomach it… stay away from de-gloving

how fast a body lasts depends on temperature and location… in the north sea it can last a long time, until the crabs and lobster and such show up… then its gone..

in warmer water, its gone faster… in fact, the bones are eaten too… heck, there are worms and things that eat rubber off of power and communication lines, carve tunnels in wood, and so on.

Bodies have been retrieved almost completely intact from waters below 7°C after several weeks, and as recognisable skeletons after five years

and

In tropical waters such as the Arabian sea, it’s a different story. Even a weighted body will normally float to the surface after three or four days, exposing it to sea birds and buffeting from the waves. Putrefaction and scavenging creatures will dismember the corpse in a week or two and the bones will sink to the seabed. There they may be slowly buried by marine silt or broken down further over months or years, depending on the acidity of the water.

yeah but there is more..
When a dead body decomposes in the ocean, scientists know little about what happens to it. To find out, some researchers performed an unusual experiment that involved dropping pig carcasses into the sea and watching them on video.

Gail Anderson, a forensic entomologist at Simon Fraser University in Canada who led the unusual study.

fascinating stuff… they started on land and once it became in on this, lots of people been putting pigs all over.

In the study, published Oct. 20 in the journal PLOS ONE, Anderson and her team used a remotely operated submarine to drop three pig carcasses into the Saanich Inlet, a body of salt water near Vancouver Island, British Columbia, at a depth of 330 feet (100 meters).

all well and good and what happened? was it what i said? 🙂

It didn’t take long for scavengers to find the pigs. Shrimp, Dungeness crabs and squat lobsters all arrived and started munching on the bodies; a shark even came to feed on one of the pig corpses.Scavengers ate the first two bodies down to the bones within a month, but they took months to pick the third one clean.

This kind of research helps solve mysteries such as the “floating feet” found wearing running shoes that have washed up along the West Coast in recent years. In fact, it’s quite normal for ocean scavengers to gnaw off feet, and the running shoes simply make the body parts float, Anderson said.

the area where the plane is thougth to have gone down is an area that is very active, and their bodies would never have lasted this long, and skeletons go too…

here is one from the study
Time Lapse: Decomposition of Pig Under Water
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4yDi_wWMVk

and another

Watching Pig Bodies Decomposing at Sea, for Science!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Bsq2ZUUWB4

my wife loves seafood… so i wont let her see how things really are… i expect things to be real, so it doesnt bother me… dont ask about lots of critters and things… you may not want to know if you let your imagination and such control your brain and ideas and then, being placed by yourself so far from reality, you become a snoflake and cant handle reality

at the medical school and hospital i work at, we have safe spaces, puzzles, coloring books all for the adults to play with at work… (and you wonder why medicine is so expensive? they run it the same way the feminsits ran the first magazines that went out of business before they got lots o mony from big alcohol and big cigs to turn women into sodden men with bad vices for money. they now collect to help stop what they created.. happy happy.. )

It is true that a dead body is not at all the same as the living person, although I’m puzzled by the term “artifact,” which ordinarily means an object made by humans. I don’t think that’s what Lurch was trying to say; I think he/she may have been attempting to indicate that the body, no longer animated by spirit, soul, personality–in other words, by life itself–becomes a collection of molecules destined to be broken down into component parts.

whether he (lurch) knows or not he is taking the communist/materialist position

americans think materialism is about their shopping.
but its communism. materialism is just another word in which your atheism is in full flower. your comment takes in that living matter is special, the socialists take the position that a rock, is a piece of matter and so are you and that you cant kill a rock and humans dont matter if you kill them they are just matter. there is no god, so there is no other metaphysical (invisable hand in more than just economics), just matter.

there are also no morals, as that is an artificial construct…

by artifact he is not referring to the body, but to the creation of man that the 120 dollars in raw materials that wanders around being important IS created by man and so an artifact.

IF you know the opposition, you win, etc etc etc

most of us dont care to know that there is a whole different take on things depending on which school.
so when obama talks about oppression, is he talking about the people, or the leaders lke him who are oppressed from acting?

when they talk about materialism, do they really mean the mall, or communism?

well, if you dont know their take and reasoning, you might as well be listening to things half in english and half in another language you dont understand!!!!!!!!!

which is why i see people miss things and so forth that they would easily understand otherwise.. .if it wasnt for the fetish assumption that they are like us and the differences are cosmetic and so, i can project and assume they want the same, they regard the same, etc.

but they dont. they have a completely different view
america thinks racism is about skin color
obama said it as about culture
trotsky invented it about culture

whats the clue here? obama doesnt think about things the way you do, he thinks the way trotsky does. so analysing him from a non trotsky soviet basis, your gonna be wrong wrong wrong.

The Representation of the Body under ‘Communism’

Today Communism is being commodified for consumption and this is part of the process of circulation of cultural stereotypes. It seems that Communism was the ‘lingua franca’ and yet for those of us coming from the ‘so-called’ Eastern European context, it is loosing its status of ‘lingua materna’. Ironically, Communism and its big brother Socialism were developed as clear patriarchal systems.

and

The body is a topos and a tropos, a figure, construction, artifact, movement, displacement. So the question ‘how to squeeze the body and fill it with oil and blue vitriol?’ is a not rhetorical, but strategic.

and

The body is an artifact cobbled from other artifacts rather than from a profound experience of life. In contrast to the mass media produced idea that the body connected with new media achieves a natural totality, processes of post-Socialist visualization of the subject and of his/her body in the media underline this artificial, mediatized, constructed and non-natural human body and his/her thoughts and emotions.

[notice how you always try to put the square peg in the round hole when they do someting from that other world and you try to interpret it as if it came from yours]

Dialectical materialism (sometimes abbreviated diamat) is a philosophy of science and nature, based on the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and developed largely in Russia and the Soviet Union.[1][2] Inspired by dialectic and materialist philosophical traditions, it accepts evolution of the natural world and the emergence of new qualities of being at new stages of evolution. As Z. A. Jordan notes, “Engels made constant use of the metaphysical insight that the higher level of existence emerges from and has its roots in the lower; that the higher level constitutes a new order of being with its irreducible laws; and that this process of evolutionary advance is governed by laws of development which reflect basic properties of ‘matter in motion as a whole’.”

The formulation of the Soviet version of dialectical and historical materialism in the 1930s by Joseph Stalin and his associates (such as in Stalin’s book Dialectical and Historical Materialism) became the “official” Soviet interpretation of Marxism. It was codified and popularized in text books which were required reading in the Soviet Union as well as the Eastern European countries it occupied. It was exported to China as the “official” interpretation of Marxism but has since been widely rejected in China in the Soviet formulation.

despite it being rejected the western progressives are stuck in the playbook of the 1920s and 1930s…
like race matters when so many are mixing… their rhetoric has no place in a country where they got rid of the dems miscongagination laws were removed!!!!!!!!!!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectical_materialism

‘Matter disappears’ means that the limit within which we have hitherto known matter disappears, and that our knowledge is penetrating deeper; properties of matter are disappearing that formerly seemed absolute, immutable, and primary, and which are now revealed to be relative and characteristic only of certain states of matter. For the sole ‘property’ of matter, with whose recognition philosophical materialism is bound up, is the property of being an objective reality, of existing outside of the mind. Lenin’s contribution

by the way, common core is just Stalins compulsory education
In the 1930s Joseph Stalin and his associates formulated a version of dialectical and historical materialism that became the “official” Soviet interpretation of Marxism. It was codified in Stalin’s work, Dialectical and Historical Materialism (1938), and popularized in text books used for compulsory education within the Soviet Union and throughout the Eastern Bloc.

Dialectical materialism as a heuristic in biology and elsewhere
Remember to pay attention to real objects in time and space and not lose them in utterly idealized abstractions. Remember that qualitative effects of context and interaction may be lost when phenomena are isolated”. And above all else, “Remember that all the other caveats are only reminders and warning signs whose application to different circumstances of the real world is contingent.”

life as something special and sacred, as religion is the opiate, is just and idealized abstraction that we like and we created and is self serving… 🙂

I doubt anyone is expecting actual bodies—that is, soft tissue. I think, however, that bones/teeth are still possible. Otherwise, traces of personal possessions might wash up. More airplane parts would be good, but above all the black boxes. If relatives have information from the latter about how the plane went down, it would help immensely.