Today's paper was all covered up with news of this Huge Plot To Blow Up Airliners, as one might expect.

It got hysterical when they started discussing binary explosives. Said the paper, the terrorists could mix ANFO, the blend of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil that was used to destroy the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, on a plane.

Give me a Fucking Break, okay?

ANFO is a mining explosive. You make it in a trough by saturating explosives-grade ammonium nitrate (the crystals are graded for size) with number-two diesel. And generally, you use a wooden stirrer that looks like a hoe to stir it up. Then you drill a big hole in the thing you want to blow up, put a stick of fuzed dynamite in the bottom of the hole, and pack as much ANFO as you can tamp in there into the hole. Finally, you get back 100 yards and set off the dynamite, which sets off the ANFO. It's not exactly a secret how to make this explosive, but it's not for small-scale use.

(Timothy McVeigh's ANFO was formulated with nitromethane for added kick. This is why it's so damn hard to buy nitromethane anymore.)

So let me see...you really expect me to believe that the terrorists can get all of these things onto the airplane:

a bag of ammonium nitrate prills
a can of diesel
maybe some nitromethane, if you want a nice potent ANFO bomb like Timothy McVeigh had
a stick of dynamite and a detonator for it
a trough
a stirring device
a tamper
something to tamp it into, like a concrete form tube

Then you expect me to believe you could open the bag of ammonium nitrate, open the diesel, dump AN into trough and diesel on AN, stir the product together, build a bomb and set it off without all the rest of the passengers beating you half to death, then throwing you out the back of the plane?

You couldn't bring any of that shit onto the plane BEFORE George Bush invented terrorism, so what makes supposedly rational journalists believe you could do it now?