Collective Conscious

Hot Air responds to the Christ­mas bomb­ing attempt by spread­ing some good old-​​fashioned Christ­mas fear with this video of an explo­sive so pow­er­ful a sin­gle drop can destroy an entire water­melon. Hours later, our friend Ed Mor­ris­sey is informed by one of his own read­ers that the movie is both old and fake, and refutes the video’s claim with some qual­ity science-​​sleuthing:

Another exam­ple, of 4g PETN this time (remem­ber, this is 80 times the amount claimed in the hot air video).

After being con­fronted with the evi­dence, Mor­ris­sey dou­bles down, apologizing for feed­ing his read­ers crap while simul­ta­ne­ously defend­ing his deci­sion to do so:

[T]here’s still a smidgen of cred­i­bil­ity in the fact that we don’t know which chem­i­cals are being used here. (I wouldn’t have posted it if we did, obvi­ously; it’s a clas­sic Myth­busters blur-​​and-​​blur mix!) Some com­menters at Breitbart’s site also claimed that the video was fake, though, as well as very old. So apolo­gies, in that case, for rais­ing the alarm with bad info.

In any case, events like this Christ­mas attempt actu­ally make me feel safer — if faulty explod­ing under­wear is the best thing Al-​​Qaeda can throw at us after years of care­ful plot­ting, are the skies really as dan­ger­ous as alarmists like Michelle Malkin, Ed Mor­ris­sey, and other want us to believe?