Death Rites are One of the Features Common to Every Human Culture

The title is according to E. O. Wilson's On Human Nature, wherein he actually cites it to some other guy. Pretty neat, huh? But this important work was written in the 70s. Had it been able to predict the future as your Authors can, it would have certainly gone further into what will become the sweetest funeral rites of any culture. Namely, the culture consisting of the entire world.

The macro-culture of all of humanity - that is to say, the features shared by every culture - will be transformed by the zombie crisis of the year 2xxx. According to Romero canon, anybody who dies will be reanimated by, uh, radiation. This applies even if they were not attacked by a zombie. It necessarily follows that after quelling the zombie horde and regaining stable footing of civilization, humanity will have to instate new death rites that are swift and entail complete destruction of the body, so that the deceased will not reanimate.

Of course, humanity has their own way of twisting customs past their original functionality. What follows is what this will evolve to after many decades.

• Anybody who finds the deceased (henceforth referred to as the executor, with apologies to Tassadar) must first be sure that the deceased is in fact dead. Any child can tell you that this is a simple matter of examining whether the tongue is sticking out, and whether the eyes are replaced by letters X.
• The executor then pushes the deceased up against a wall or some other sturdy object, while shouting "YOU ARE DEAD!" in a scary voice.
• The executor draws a ceremonial dagger that all people carry. With it, he deeply cuts the throat of the deceased to ensure a severed connection from body to head.
• With the same dagger, the executor carves a large rectangle into the torso of the deceased, effectively disembowling him. The executor proceeds to rip as many organs and guts from this hole as he can in one rough grab, and to dump them upon his own head to experience spiritual bonding with the deceased. There is no greater sign of respect than to show that the dead's entrails are fit to be the finest headwear.

The preceding steps are, as it is plain to see, the very logical conclusion of cultural evolution after the zombie crisis. The strange bit that seems to stray from the functionality is that, in most cultures, it eventually becomes normal for the executor to slit his own throat, eviscerate himself, and dump his organs upon the head of the deceased. Perhaps this reciprocation is to show that the deceased, too, once respected the executor. Nonetheless, it makes encountering a corpse seem much more troubling from our cultural perspective.

Two final notes:

1. Assassins with two targets have a much easier job when this custom is about. They need only wait until the targets are near each other and relatively secluded, and then kill one of them from afar. The custom is so ingrained that the other target would proceed to perform the fatal funeral rites.
2. In order to protect one's loved ones, someone who wishes to commit suicide would likely commit what is considered a "complete suicide" - that is, do so in some manner that results in his own throat already cut and his own viscera already atop his own head. This way, since the executor and the deceased are the same person, both the first part and the reciprocation of the custom have already been carried out, and any discoverer is safe.
   

On a Novel Method of Conducting a War, or: Sleepytime Warfare

There are few who will deny that warfare is a grim and grizzly affair. This is for a number of reasons, but if one primary downside to war could be isolated, we think everyone knows what it would be.
Perhaps it was John Hammond, of Jurassic Park fame, who put it best: "People. Are. Dying."

So war is nasty. Most who realize this call for an end to war in general, but experience has shown this to be impractical due to the insidious nature of global politics and, arguably, human nature itself. People will always say "give peace a chance," and then leaders will say "okay, sounds good," and then later double back and explain that "it's just pretty necessary right now is all."

If war is a feature that refuses to be removed from existence, we propose an alternate solution: to change that feature rather than fail to remove it. If dying is the nastier part of war, then war without death would be a desirable alternative. This can be accomplished with chloroform.

Chloroform warfare would involve two sides battling with supplies of rags and chloroform. Unarmed combat would ensue, resulting in no more than some bruises and at most a broken limb, in order to force one's rag into the opponent's face and cause him to fall asleep. At the end of the battle, the winning side would have more people awake and therefore be able to drag the opposing side away from their fortification or what have you.

Administering chloroform is a delicate operation. Too little causes mere dizziness, and too much can cause death. Two likely opposing arguments are:

1. That soldiers may still kill their opponents, be it through lack of skill or under orders to reduce the number of enemies for a later battle.
   
2. That some sort of chloroform arms race would ensue and armies would attempt to build better and better means of deploying the stuff, i.e. chloroform bombs and grenades, launchers, etc.

This is why each soldier's chloroform must be imbued with a unique tracer, and killing is strictly outlawed in such a war. The charge would be murder, or perhaps manslaughter if the soldier can prove the death was accidental. Indeed, many opponents of war would be happy with this, as they already often say that a war-killing and murder are one in the same. Note that tracers would be benign and degrade within a few months.

The resulting procedure is as follows: when a man is found dead on the battlefield, an autopsy is performed to determine if he indeed died of chloroform overdose. If so, the tracer is found. It is possible that, say, soldiers A and B both chloroformed this man. Perhaps soldier A did first, and did so properly, and soldier B, perhaps having a personal grudge against the victim, arrived and gave him more. The tracers would coat the lungs in the order in which they were administered, and in a quantity proportional to the amount of chloroform. It could therefore be seen if soldier A overdosed the victim, or of he dosed him properly and then soldier B administered an unnecessary dosage that pushed him into death.

If no tracer is found, but the cause of death is chloroform, the commander of the opposing outfit is charged for allowing one of his men to use untraced chloroform. This would keep commanders on their toes about regulating all chloroform in their unit. Some may call this unfair, as it is hard for one commander to keep a close eye on every one of his men, but it is a lot more fair than people dying in war the way it happens today. Becoming a commander of any sort should be a big responsibility, and anyone who becomes one should either really want to despite the risk, or be afraid of their responsibility (also because of the risk) and therefore more careful and watchful with their power. It is likely that units would be smaller and armies would self-regulate very strictly because of this.

There would likely be some kinks to work out as the world got accustomed to this new system of warfare. This is inevitable but necessary; to once again borrow from the wisdom of John Hammond, "When they opened Disneyland in 1956, nothing worked!"