From Ashes To Ashes...with maybe a little sugar and flour added!

I ran across this little paragraph in a previous post. The news story it refers to somehow missed my scrutiny during my Christmas travels (supposedly this story broke close to Christmas while I was away). Without any further ado, here's the paragraph:

"The recent photo-op of him dropping what he says are the ashes of Madelyn Payne Lee Dunham into the sea is phony. Human ashes are not snow white. Human bones do not burn and are not turned to ash when cremated. The bones are ground up to the consistency of sand and small pebbles. The color is a gray/tan, like weathered pine wood. The container he is pouring from is half the size necessary for human remains. The container he is pouring from is about the size of a container for a medium sized dog’s ashes. Obama is pouring flour or sugar, not human ashes."

The photo op, oh yes, it was an operation no doubt. The photgraph below may not expose any errors to the average person. But aahaa! ole Storm'n Norm'n caught it instantly! I have no qualms with the author of the above statement that these so-called ashes are flour and sugar for they very well could be...but ashes they definitely are not! Lets take a close look at the picture below and I'll go on to fill you in with the rest of the story. (Additional photos can be seen at Political Peon )

Obama and his half-sister look out onto the water where they scattered their grandmother's ashes.

The first thing that struck my eye was the color...ashes from cremations and/or medical waste such as amputations etc., are not white. Grey is what I have seen for the most part and rarely, some black color may be observed. Grey almost always wins out as the dominate color.

The second observation was the condition or shape of the flow of ashes exiting the urn. It seems a bit heavy to me (possibly the sugar as stated above). All ash from creamtions is very light and can be disturbed with the slightest wind current. Most incinerators utilized for animal cremations (and that's where I have most of my expertise [occasionally witnessed human body parts creamated]) reach temperatures necessary to burn bone to a powdery ash. And that includes thick bones like the trochanter (knob-like head of the femur). Rarely have I seen bone fragments in the ashes.

So it appears that Obama has pulled another fast one. I think I'll go along with the sugar and flour mix...looks good to me!

Meanwhile, I pulled up part of an abstract from a research project conducted by the pros at University of Calif at Santa Barbara (UCSB). This puts a little credence into what I had to utter.

At temperatures above 300ºC most specimens shift in color from black to tan and

then to grey (Figure 1). The colors of samples exposed to temperatures above 300ºC

begin to develop divergent colors depending upon the environmental conditions they

were exposed to during burning. Bones burned in air began to become gray at about

600ºC and often took on a purple tint at the highest temperature (1100ºC) used in the experiment.

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