On "Revisionist" error nitpicking (1)

On "Revisionist" error nitpicking (2)

On "Revisionist" error nitpicking (3)

On "Revisionist" error nitpicking (4)

On "Revisionist" error nitpicking (5.1)

On "Revisionist" error nitpicking (5.2)

On "Revisionist" error nitpicking (6)

On "Revisionist" error nitpicking (7)

As discussed in the blog There’s no history in "Revisionism" (I’m still waiting for Jansson to answer my three questions in the blog’s update, by the way) "Revisionists" have a big problem.


They are not able to produce a consistent, evidence-backed account of how what they claim is a body of false or manipulated evidence is supposed to have come into being. Neither are they able to produce a consistent, evidence-backed account of what they claim did happen to Europe’s Jews under Nazi domination, where they venture to make such claims at all. They cannot even, for instance, provide a single name of a Jew who was "transited" through Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka and Chełmno/Kulmhof, the four extermination camps they claim were mere transit camps, to the areas of what was then known as the Reichskommissariat Ostland, the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, or to the Soviet territories under German military administration, in the years 1942 or 1943 – and this although one could reasonably expect such names to be all over the place if such "transit" had taken place. In short, they cannot provide a historical record to hold against the historical record they reject for ideological reasons.

This inability means that "Revisionism" (not to be confused with revisionism in the proper sense of the term) is not only intellectually bankrupt, but also doesn’t qualify as historical research. It contains an element of historical research known as source criticism, but that element is not used properly to help piece together as accurate as possible a picture of past events (which, after all, is what historical research is all about), but rather improperly to cast unreasonable doubt on a rejected historical record by attacking selected parts of it, often with distortion and mendacious omission involved. Unproven and unreasonable claims of physical or logistical impossibility, which David Cole has called "the last filthy hiding place of denier cockroaches", are part of the error nitpicking that "Revisionists" are reduced to because they have no case.

Error nitpicking being thus the (remaining) life-blood of "Revisionism", it’s no surprise that they apply it to the arguments of whoever rattles their cage (especially when the cage is rattled as intensely as it was by the HC critique), interspersed with accusations of deceitful intent, which are at best due to "we are being lied to" paranoia but usually somewhat-less-than-honest rhetoric.

If I remember correctly, Mattogno proclaimed a more constructive approach that he called "affirmationism", as opposed to negationism. However, his book The Case for Sanity, which is being refuted by my fellow blogger Hans, contains little if anything in the way of putting together an "affirmative" account of what happened at Auschwitz-Birkenau, namely to the overwhelming majority of Jews deported there. It essentially consists of "Pressac this, Van Pelt that" error nitpicking – i.e. of what Mattogno is reduced to because, unlike Pressac and Van Pelt, he has no case for Auschwitz.

Another dedicated practitioner of error nitpicking in the "Revisionist" movement is my good friend Jansson, whose blogs A sample of Muehlenkamp’s deceptions about his “empirical” evidence on cremation and Muehlenkamp mangles mass cremation calculations will be discussed in this blog series. I will show that Jansson’s error nitpicking, besides being the last resort of someone who has nothing constructive to offer, is neither of much (if any) relevance nor necessarily pertinent, to put it politely.

The first of the aforementioned blogs starts with the following hefty accusations:

Roberto Muehlenkamp’s favored methodology consists of long strings of extrapolations absent any empirical cross-checking, a system which allows him to fiddle his figures so as to obtain the results desired. For the sake of appearances, however, he does have to cite empirical results from time to time, but he does so only to distort and misuse them. Another tactic he favors is to cite empirical results of the wrong type, and pretend that they apply to an entirely different situation.

The first accusation is simply taken out of thin air. Jansson doesn’t offer any evidence to support it, and he cannot because there is none. It’s just mendacious bitching.

The same can be said of the second accusation, for the sources supporting my arguments are too numerous and solid to warrant even the suspicion that they are there just for the sake of "appearances".

As to the accusation that I distort and "misuse" (whatever that is supposed to mean) my sources, Jansson claims to be offering an example of such behavior, but as we shall see the supposed example fails to support his accusation.

The same goes for the last accusation, regarding which the baseless and arguably self-projecting claim that I proceed according to a "tactic" should be noted. There is no such tactic. There are just attempts, which may be more or less well succeeded, to find data from situations and procedures as similar as possible (exact matches there are none, the Dresden pyres being what comes closest) to corpse incineration at the AR camps.

Before I address Jansson’s nitpicking, I’ll provide an overview of what is at issue here, especially for those of our readers who are not familiar with the subject (details can be found in this blog).

The issue under discussion is fuel requirements for cremating the corpses of the murdered deportees Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka and Chełmno/Kulmhof extermination camps. Mattogno, who conducted various experiments burning small amounts of animal flesh, claims that he used 3.5 kg of dry wood per kg of cremated flesh and holds that this ratio reflects wood requirements when burning animal carcasses or human corpses. Based on this ratio, and on unrealistic assumptions regarding the deportees’ weight (addressed here), Mattogno claimed that enormous amounts of wood would have been required to completely cremate the corpses in at least two of the mentioned camps (Bełżec and Treblinka), and that obtaining, storing and burning these enormous amounts of wood was logistically impracticable and is not borne out by the known evidence (which interests Mattogno whenever he can use it in support of his arguments, while he dismisses it as inconclusive or unreliable when he cannot).

Let us assume, for a moment, that Mattogno is right about the fuel requirements.

Would this mean that all documentary, eyewitness and physical evidence whereby the camps in question were extermination camps is either inconclusive or false, namely that dozens of witnesses hallucinated or lied even when on the stand and subject to hostile cross examination before courts of the German Federal Republic, which conducted their proceedings according to the defendant-friendly procedural rules of a democratic state of law?

Would this mean that the presumably very large paper trail that would have been left by transporting a total of ca. 1.5 million people via these camps to the aforementioned occupied territories of the Soviet Union (i.e. the areas of what was then known as the Reichskommissariat Ostland, the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, and the Soviet territories under German military administration), and especially by placing them into ghettos or labor camps in these areas, clothing and feeding them and using them for whatever purposes they are supposed to have been used for, mysteriously vanished without a trace, even though the Nazis (unlike as concerns documents related to deportation to these camps and what happened there) would have had every reason not to destroy this "transit" documentation, but instead to carefully preserve it as proof against accusations that they had murdered these people?

Would this mean that the reason why not a single name of a "transited" deportee can be produced (while on the other hand the names of a great number of deportees considered to have been murdered at these camps is included in Yad Vashem’s Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names, in the online directory of names that is included in the online version of the German Federal Archives’ memorial book Opfer der Verfolgung der Juden unter der nationalsozialistischen Gewaltherrschaft in Deutschland 1933-1945, dedicated to the Jews living in Germany who fell victim to Nazi persecution and mass murder, and in the Dutch archives as concerns Dutch citizens of Jewish faith deported to Sobibór) is that ca. 1.5 million people mysteriously vanished from the face of the earth after having been "transited" through these camps, without anybody noticing (there would have been a great many people, e.g. railroad workers, German officials and local inhabitants, who would have seen or come into contact with the "transited" deportees)? That the Soviets killed them all without leaving a shred of evidence to such enormous mass killing, even though the former Soviet archives contain detailed information about the 1937/38 purges, the Gulag labor camps and other Soviet crimes? Or that they mostly survived but for some inexplicable reason chose to remain unknown as former "transited" deportees (apart from having somehow managed to avoid being recorded), even if that implied renouncing to compensation they would have been entitled to claim from the German Federal Republic?

The only logical and reasonable answer to all these questions would be "no".

This, in turn, would require an explanation compatible with both Mattogno’s fuel requirement calculations and the body of converging evidence whereby these deportees were murdered and cremated. The explanation would be that cremation was done with much lower amounts of fuel than required to achieve complete combustion according to Mattogno, and that this (as is, by the way, suggested by eyewitness testimonies regarding Treblinka, namely testimonies underlying the description by Yitzhak Arad, on pp. 173f. of Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, whereby when the pyres stopped burning there were "only" skeletons or scattered bones on the roasters, and the testimony of Pavel Vladimirovich Leleko, whereby "The parts of the body that had burned but had preserved their natural shape were put into a special mortar and pounded into flour.") led to combustion being rather incomplete (perhaps even like in the burning of dead cattle shown in this video), to much subsequent crushing work having to be invested in order to further reduce the cremation remains, and to high amounts of incomplete combustion remains having been either reburied in the camps’ emptied mass graves or scattered throughout the surrounding areas (the latter an assumption compatible with postwar crime site investigation reports and more recent reports about archaeological investigations). That’s all that Mattogno’s being right about fuel requirements would imply.

But before we even get to this point, Mattogno has to prove that the results of his backyard burning experiments reflect fuel requirements in mass cremation of human beings by the methods reported to have been applied at the extermination camps, namely or especially by placing the corpses on grates made of rails and making them burn with a strong fire lit underneath these grates and with the help, if necessary, of flammable liquids poured over the corpses prior to ignition.

Mattogno could prove his point by demonstrating that his fuel requirement calculations apply to the only documented parallel case of human mass cremation (the pyres on the Dresden Altmarkt after the air raid on 13/14 February 1945) and/or to all documented cases of individual or mass cremation of animal carcasses in the context of food-and-mouth disease or other epidemics. But he cannot provide such proof.

As concerns Dresden, he cannot demonstrate that the amounts of solid fuel (wood and straw) used in the Altmarkt pyres correspond to the ratio he maintains – in fact pictures taken on the Altmarkt by Walter Hahn show that the amounts of solid fuel used were rather small. He may claim that the corpses were just superficially charred, but this claim is contradicted by documentary evidence expressly mentioning "ash" or "ashes" as the remains of cremation, one of these documents being an instruction, obviously issued by the city’s administration, on how to handle the boxes or sacks into which these cremation remains were filled in order to take them to the cemetery (instead of burying these recipients with their contents as suggested by an SS-Brigadeführer, their contents were to be poured into the graves so that the recipients could be reused). And as concerns the comparatively modest amount of gasoline (by the standards of Mattogno’s claims regarding fuel requirements) that I calculated as having been used on the pyres, Mattogno (as pointed out in this blog) seems to be amusingly arguing that this amount is too high, and so apparently is his epigone Jansson, see here and here.

Regarding cremation of animal carcasses, I provided several sources suggesting that complete combustion of carcasses or human beings in individual or mass cremation is possible using fuel at much lower fuel to body mass ratios than are claimed by Mattogno, the fuel amounts having been calculated by me on the basis of information contained in such sources where not expressly stated in the same. The source that I considered to describe carcass cremation procedures that most closely resemble the pyres at the extermination camps and at Dresden, as the method employed was a grate placed over a pit on which the carcass was placed and under which a fire was lit, is a report by German veterinarians Dr. Lothes and Dr. Profé about their successful and fuel-efficient carcass burning experiments in the early 20th Century, presented and discussed in the blog Animal Carcass Burning Experiments by Dr. Lothes and Dr. Profé. Accordingly, I used the fuel to body mass ratio that becomes apparent from Lothes and Profés writing (about 0.56 kg of wood or wood equivalent per kg of carcass) for my subsequent calculations of fuel requirements.

Before pointing out this source and explaining why I decided to use it for my subsequent calculations, I had referred to several other sources (one of them being Mattogno’s own reference to another "Revisionist" source) which, either expressly or according to my calculations based on the amounts of several types of fuel mentioned in the respective source, point to fuel to carcass ratios in the order of 1:1 or 2:1, as opposed to Mattogno’s 3.5:1 ratio.

Now, Mattogno and his epigone Jansson can make a big fuss about actual or supposed errors in my fuel amount calculations, but unless correction of actual errors leads them to their desired ratio of 3.5:1, or at least to a much higher ratio than the one I calculated, such fuss is an exercise in futility.

They can argue that carcasses of beef, sheep or swine are different from the corpses of human beings (especially of malnourished ghetto Jews) as concerns fat content (Jansson tried that line in his blog discussed here), but as that would also preclude their own use of carcass cremation sources in support of their arguments, at least Jansson seems to have realized that he should better not argue along this line.

They can also argue (as Mattogno has done) that Lothes and Profé's experiments did not result in complete combustion, but that would contradict the veterinarians’ report, which mentions complete combustion on three occasions and regarding the first of their six experiments even goes into the detail of stating that "only a weakly smoking heap of ashes was left" of the burned carcass at the end of the combustion process. Besides, incomplete combustion of at least some of the bodies is what is reported by Treblinka witnesses, as mentioned above.

They can further argue that differences between carcass cremation cases considered and mass cremation at extermination camps (or at Dresden) forbids applying fuel to body mass ratios from the former to the latter, but that argument not only applies (and even more so) to Mattogno’s backyard beef burning experiments as well, but also gets them nowhere unless they can demonstrate (and not merely claim or argue) that these differences account for the differences between the fuel to body mass ratios they postulate for the human cremation pyres in question on the one hand and the fuel to body mass ratios in the carcass cremation cases in question on the other.

Theirs being the burden of proof for the fuel to body mass ratio they claim, Mattogno and his epigone Jansson are thus in a very difficult situation.

Now to Jansson’s error nitpicking, which refers not to the source I based my calculations on (Lothes & Profé) but to the sources I pointed out before and to my argument that burning bones alone requires less fuel than burning a whole body. As I consider this nitpicking to be of little if any relevance for the reasons stated above, I will address it as briefly as possible, ignoring Jansson’s abusive acrimony and other rhetoric except where he accuses me of having argued in bad faith or insinuates that I lack a quality he obviously would like to but doesn’t find in himself.

Misrepresenting the context of an argument I had made in the blog Friedrich Jansson freaked out …, Jansson claims that, in support of my supposed belief that bones are more combustible than fat (as I "defended Sergey Romanov’s absurd argument that human fat cannot sustain a fire in this manner when it is in the form of a large puddle in a pit" - never mind that I expressly conceded that Sergey had not considered the possibility of fat being heated well below its flash point, and as we’re talking about fat, has Jansson already addressed my arguments starting here?), I had deliberately or due to "illiteracy" misrepresented a technical report containing instructions about the covering of a deceased carcass with a black polyethylene sheet until decomposition has reduced it to its bones, and then deactivating the cover by burning all the bones and the polyethylene that served as a cover.

The source in question states that the following material is required for deactivating the cover:

◦5000 c.c. of diesel fuel 

◦Safety matches

The deactivation procedure, after the carcass has been reduced to its bones alone, is described as follows:

We suggest that every possible safety measure be taken before starting the fire. Light the fire on a windless day.
1.Make three openings in the black polyethylene sheet: A) head, B) middle part and C) rear; pour diesel fuel into the openings (5 litres distributed between the three openings).
2.Carefully set light to the openings. Thoroughly burn, several times if necessary, until no bones are left, scraping together the remains of the bones and adding more fuel until combustion is complete.

Understanding the term "more fuel" as meaning more fuel beyond the 5 liters of diesel mentioned in the list of materials required, Jansson makes a fuss about my not having mentioned that additional fuel. My reading of these instructions was another, however. As the list of materials required mentioned no fuel beyond the 5 liters of diesel, I understood the "more fuel" as being included in the 5 liters of diesel, a part of which was to be poured into the openings before ignition while the rest was to be added later until combustion was complete. To be sure, the text is formulated in a manner that could also lead to another interpretation, but as no fuel beyond those 5 liters of diesel is mentioned in the list of materials required, I don’t consider my interpretation to be far-fetched. It seems to also have been the interpretation of the reader whose description of the procedure pointed me to the aforementioned technical report, who I first quoted in the blog Belzec Mass Graves and Archaeology: My Response to Carlo Mattogno (4,2), as follows (emphasis added):

Lastly, the Argentines have had some success with an alternative method of carcass disposal as trees are markedly absent in their enzootic areas and therefore carcass burning is essentially impossible on site. Instead they soak the carcass and surrounding immediate area with 5-10 percent formaldehyde to decontaminate the area and discourage scavengers; then they cover the carcass with a heavy-duty tarpauline and securely peg it down. Over 240-260 days the carcass decomposes. They then burn off the tarpauline and the remaining bones and grease using 5 L of diesel. For details go to Elimination of the carcasses of animals that have died from anthrax."

So this reader also mentioned only 5 liters of diesel as the fuel used to burn off the tarpaulin and the remaining bones, which means that either both this reader and I are "illiterates" and only Jansson can read, or our reading of the report is the correct one and Jansson’s is not, or both interpretations are defensible because the source is not sufficiently clear. Readers of this blog may decide which of the three they think applies.

Jansson then hollers that the instructions in question are not empirical for the following reasons:

An empirical report would give an account of a real-life attempt to burn bones in this fashion, with the details on the quantity of fuel used and the precise results attained. The document which Muehlenkamp cites offers nothing of the sort.

Apparently Jansson believes, or expects his readers to believe, that the instructions in questions were concocted independently of practical experience rather than based on such experience, which is unlikely and was also not the understanding of the reader who led me to these instructions, who mentioned that "the Argentines have had some success with an alternative method of carcass", i.e. that the recommended method was not theoretical but had been successfully tested.

Thereafter, as in the blog discussed here, Jansson’s infantile mind and hysteria (again) get the better of him, leading him produce the following junk:

It would be very easy, however, to test Muehlenkamp’s belief that bones burn very easily, and that one need only light them on fire to see them continue to burn until nothing but dust remains. Simply buy some bones from the butcher or supermarket, pour some liquid fuel over them, light them on fire, and observe the results. Do they burn to ash? If Muehlenkamp had any courage in his convictions he would perform this experiment, but he will not – because deep down he knows that he’s talking nonsense, and that the bones certainly would not behave in the manner which he claims.

The experiment suggested by Jansson is not without interest, provided that I can find a place with enough privacy where there is also not the risk of causing a forest fire (such fires are a major problem in the country where I live when the weather is hot and dry).

As to Jansson himself, he must be leading a very sheltered and comfortable life if his measure for courage is whether someone is willing to carry out a burning experiment, moreover for the sake of a discussion with an ideologically motivated charlatan. And what is more, someone who is obviously afraid of historical facts inconvenient to his articles of faith, and who presumably is named Friedrich Jansson like "Thomas Dalton PhD" is named Thomas Dalton, is not exactly suited to lecture about courage someone who writes under his real name and who, among other things, went to Sobibór on his own in October 2008 expecting an encounter and possible confrontation with some of the lowliest scum in "Revisionist" cloud-cuckoo land (which didn’t materialize because said scum, who uttered stuff similar to Jansson’s except that he did so in a more vulgar manner, turned out to be coward who chickened out of the encounter, as I mentioned at the beginning of this blog).

So, Mr. Jansson, do yourself the favor of keeping your trap shut about "courage" in the future.

And as we’re at it, have you already performed such experiments yourself? Not that I know, unless of course you are the clown with the wool cap in the video discussed here. Are you, Mr. Jansson?

As to my supposedly knowing "deep down" that I’m "talking nonsense" (something I’m sure applies to inveterate liar Jansson), whence am I supposed to know that?

From the e-mail sent to me by the Sales Manager of Air Burners LLC, quoted in this blog? Said mail informed me, among other things, that

Bones have a BTU of about the same as brown coal (ca. 11,000 BTU per pound). If you were to incinerate a lot of bones, much less wood waste would be needed.

From a page about various disposal methods for various types of waste in Aschaffenburg county, Germany, referred to in this blog and unfortunately not online anymore, in which it was stated that bones of animals may be burned in the Gemeinschaftskraftwerk Schweinfurt – a power plant that produces electricity and heating by burning trash and coal – at no expense, instead of being expensively disposed of in special installations, because bones have about the same heating value as brown coal?

Or from this video showing the burning of cattle bones and horns in Lagos, Nigeria, with what doesn’t look like much external fuel to me?

Let’s hear, Mr. Jansson.

Jansson’s next bone of contention is my having stated the following in the blog Friedrich Jansson changes the subject, based on a list of examples first given here:

These examples show that it is possible to cremate pig carcasses, other carcasses or human corpses with much less fuel expenditure, in terms of the ratio between wood or wood equivalent weight and carcass/corpse weight, than in the case mentioned by Jansson. The ratio may be 2:1, less than 2:1 or even as low as 1:1 according to these examples, versus 4:1 in Jansson’s example.

This is supposed to be wrong because the sources pointing to a fuel to body mass ratio of 1:1 refer to air curtain incineration, which according to Jansson is not open air burning (though it also takes place in the open) because there are "dramatic differences between the two".

I don’t think the differences are as dramatic as Jansson makes them out to be, and while data from air curtain incineration may not be exactly applicable to open air burning such as was practiced during the 2001 FMD epidemic in the UK, it’s also true that neither this kind of open air burning nor air curtain incineration are exact parallels to the cremation pyres at the AR camps, but only procedures with some similarities to and other differences from what was done in these camps. The experiments of Lothes & Profé, which used a grates method similar to that of the AR camps and thus are the ones I consider to most closely resemble cremation at this camp (after the Dresden Altmarkt pyres), show that it is possible to achieve in open air burning fuel to body mass ratios even below 1:1, or at least that this was possible in the early 20th Century, when fuel requirements were not influenced by concerns about undestroyed pathogens spreading from a carcass pyre across the land or other environmental concerns (e.g. about the amount and type of smoke generated), the way they presumably are today (needless to say, no such concerns whatever would have influenced the cremation procedure and fuel requirements at the AR camps). Besides, unless Jansson can provide a demonstration of the precise impact that differences between one and the other burning method have on fuel requirements, his considerations about the "dramatic differences" between open air burning and air curtain incineration won’t get him anywhere.

Apparently aware of the insufficiency of his "dramatic differences" argument, Jansson also calls into question the 1:1 ratio I mentioned, arguing that a) the Sales Manager of Air Burners LLC who provided this information had an "obvious interest in presenting the product he is paid to market in the most favorable light possible", and b) the 1:1 ratio is "contradicted by those experiments with air curtain incinerators that have actually documented fuel consumption".

As to argument a), I didn’t write to the sales manager as a potential customer, and I have no reason to assume he saw me as such. Even if that were not so, this would not necessarily mean that the sales manager deliberately overstated the performance of his products, for doing so would also imply the risk of incurring in warranty obligations or other liability in the hypothetical case of my purchasing such products in reliance on their stated performance and then finding out that actual performance fell short of it. What is more, the 1:1 ratio was not only mentioned by the sales manager. A "wood/carcass ratio of from 1:1 to 2:1" is also mentioned on page 8 of the Texas Animal Health Commission's General Guidelines for the Disposal of Carcasses, published in January 2005. Maybe conspiracy theorist Jansson will now speculate that the TAHC was lobbied at or bribed by manufacturers of air curtain incinerators to include this information in their guidelines.

As to argument b), while there is at least one experiment with air curtain incinerators in which the fuel to body mass ratio was higher than the range stated in the TAHC’s Guidelines, namely the one mentioned on p. 135 of MGK’s Sobibór book and in this footnote, there is also at least one experiment (the one carried out at Pilot Point, Texas, on December 19-20 December 1994, described in the USDA/TAHC report mentioned in this blog), in which the fuel to body mass ratio was within or even below the range mentioned in the TAHC’s Guidelines (0.58:1 or 1.74:1, depending on how one interprets the information in the aforementioned USDA report (see this blog).

Not knowing what more to accuse me of in this context, Jansson (who, like all conspiracy theorists, thinks he hears the grass grow) claims that I made "attempts to insinuate that air curtain incinerators is more fuel intensive than open-air burning" when I wrote that "air curtain incinerators are not noted for fuel efficiency, according to the TAHC’s aforementioned General Guidelines for the Disposal of Carcasses, whereby air curtain incineration is “fuel intensive”", and adds his wisdom about why "open air burning can be expected to be, in general, less fuel efficient than air curtain incineration".

The "in general" restriction at least is not unjustified, insofar as Lothes & Profé’s experiments show that open air burning can be more fuel-efficient than air curtain incineration, if carried out according their method and presumably without restrictions imposed by environmental considerations that apply in the present day but did not apply in the early 20th Century.

As to the insinuation attempt that Jansson accuses me of (he later also calls it "rhetoric", one of his own favorite tactics in discussion), Jansson failed to mention the context in which I made this statement, which was the following:

MGK (Sobibór, p. 135) claim that the only reliable data regarding fuel requirements in (open-air) carcass burning refer to the use air curtain burners, devices for the cremation of carcasses that consist of a burner and a powerful blower linked to an enclosure of refractory material or to a ditch into which the carcasses are placed. They mention a case in which the burning of 16.1 tons of carcasses required 49 tons of timber with an average humidity of about 20 percent, a wood weight to carcass weight ratio of 3.04 to 1. However, air Curtain incinerators are not noted for fuel efficiency, according to the TAHC’s aforementioned General Guidelines for the Disposal of Carcasses, whereby air curtain incineration is "fuel intensive" (p. 9).

Apart from suggesting that MGK and their epigone Jansson differ in their opinions on the applicability of air curtain incineration fuel to body mass ratios to open air burning, the above shows that my argument was meant to counter MGK’s mention of what may have been (if compared with the Pilot Point experiment) a badly organized or executed air curtain incineration experiment, and not to "insinuate" anything.

What is interesting in this context is that the source in which air curtain incineration is called "fuel intensive" on page 9, i.e. the TAHC’s aforementioned Guidelines, is the same source that mentions a "wood/carcass ratio of from 1:1 to 2:1" on the previous page. Apparently such ratios are considered fuel-intensive, and lower ratios are considered desirable, and even achievable.

Summing up the first part of this series, the conclusion is that Jansson’s error-nitpicking in the blog A sample of Muehlenkamp’s deceptions about his “empirical” evidence on cremation, apart from not being exactly of much relevance, is also not exactly pertinent, to put it politely.

The second part of this blog series will address Jansson’s blog Muehlenkamp mangles mass cremation calculations. Stay tuned.