First, a trip down memory lane, then the absurdity of Texas and the new Terrorists, Republicans, who love death and misery.

Huh. No headline.

Well, anyway, it happened, and it is a strange, Coen Brothers-esque story, and people on my Facebook page are figuring it out. Bottom line: Trump people blew up the mosque to send the Muslims a message and make them want to leave the country.

First, the basic story, from today’s Star Tribune:

Michael McWhorter, 29; Joe Morris, 22 and Michael Hari, 47, are each charged with “using an explosive device to maliciously damage and destroy” the Dar Al Farooq Islamic Center in the predawn hours of Aug. 5, 2017, using a PVC pipe bomb made by Hari.

According to charges, McWhorter admitted to joining the men on a journey to the Minnesota mosque months before aiding a failed plot last fall to bomb an Illinois clinic that performed abortions. He claimed it was Hari’s idea to target the mosque and that the men didn’t intend to kill, according to an FBI terrorism task force officer’s affidavit, “but they wanted to ‘scare (Muslims) out of the country’ … because they push their beliefs on everyone else.”

“McWhorter also said they committed the bombing mainly to ‘show them hey, you’re not welcome here, get the [expletive] out,’” the agent continued.

The three were charged Tuesday after a confidential source alerted authorities that they were responsible for both bombings and McWhorter admitted his involvement in the plot, according to authorities. Authorities described the informant as someone Hari recruited into an “organization” that he led.

Then, Naomi Kritzer discovered that Hari is a contractor who was bidding to build Trump’s Wall of Mexico.

Illinois contractor bidding to build Trump’s border wall — with a tourist draw

Michael Hari, who recently launched his own global security firm from tiny downstate Clarence, wants to build President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful wall” on the Mexican border and believes he can do it better, and for billions of dollars less, than more established contractors.

A former sheriff’s deputy who most recently ran an agricultural food safety certification business, Hari is among more than 200 vendors interested in winning the mammoth and controversial construction project.

“We would look at the wall as not just a physical barrier to immigration but also as a symbol of the American determination to defend our culture, our language, our heritage, from any outsiders,” said Hari, 46, one of a handful of Illinois applicants.

A rallying cry throughout Trump’s campaign, the proposed border wall was outlined in a Jan. 25 executive order and took shape last month with the president’s 2018 budget blueprint and a request for proposals from U.S. Customs and Border Protection. The initial application deadline was extended from Wednesday of last week to Tuesday to accommodate questions about the design process, said Carlos Diaz, a Customs and Border Protection spokesman.

Then, she discovered this:

Food safety auditor calls FSMA unconstitutional

The owner of food safety auditing company Equicert is suing the government to declare the Food Safety Modernization Act unconstitutional.

Michael Hari is also seeking an end to U.S. Department of Agriculture food safety audits.

His suit, filed Feb. 14, calls the FSMA unconstitutional because “it holds farmers liable for food safety conditions which they cannot control and have no knowledge of or responsibility for causing,” according to a news release from Hari.

The FSMA mandates training, registration and on-farm practices, and the “federal government has never before sought to regulate farming in this way,” according to the release.

The legal complaint also alleges the federal government has no constitutional authority to operate an auditing service (which competes with private companies), and Hari is owed for “unlawful activity in competition with Equicert.”

How the Trump administration responds to his claims will be a “test of how committed the new administration is to eliminating unfair and anti-business and anti-agriculture regulation and legislation,” according to the release. The FSMA was signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2011.

Hari was featured in an April 3, 2017, Chicago Tribune article featuring several companies seeking contracts for building President Donald Trump’s U.S.-Mexico border wall. His idea featured a concrete structure loosely based on the Great Wall of China with a pedestrian walkway that would be open for the public.

“We would look at the wall as not just a physical barrier to immigration but also as a symbol of the American determination to defend our culture, our language, our heritage, from any outsiders,” Hari said, according to the Tribune article.

Muslim Advocates has this statement:

Muslim Advocates Responds to Arrest of Bloomington Mosque Bombing Suspects

Washington, DC – The following is a statement from Madihha Ahussain, special counsel for anti-Muslim bigotry at Muslim Advocates, regarding the arrest of three suspects in the August 2017 bombing of Dar al-Farooq Islamic Center in Bloomington and the planned bombing of an abortion clinic. In the aftermath of the attack, the White House responded by suggesting that the bombing was staged as a “fake hate crime:”

“We are relieved that law enforcement officials have made arrests and continue to investigate this case, and we urge them to conduct a full and thorough investigation into all possible motives for this horrific incident, including bias. We hope that the people of Bloomington can rest a bit easier tonight.

However, we cannot ignore the context in which this incident occurred. Anti-Muslim rhetoric from the administration and public officials has led to an unprecedented spike in hate violence against Muslims and mosque attacks, just like this one. In fact, after the attack, the White House gave tacit cover to the perpetrators by suggesting that the bombing was staged as a ‘fake hate crime.’ When the administration fails to swiftly condemn the bombing of a house of worship and instead makes excuses for the perpetrators, it sends a clear and unmistakable statement to the nation that these bombers – whoever they are – have a friend in the White House.

We applaud the members of the Dar Al-Farooq Islamic Center for their tenacity and strength in the face of these attacks and the people of Bloomington for their unity in the face of divisive violence.”

Part of the examination process involved asking the student how the completed degree program had changed is life. In this student’s case, one might expect the answer to have focused on the simple fact of getting a doubling in salary and promotion to the head of a major department because he now qualified, having the sheepskin in hand. But that was not his answer. I paraphrase:

“I hated the idea of taking all these politically correct courses this program requires. Then I took the courses, and realized that I’d been a narrow minded asshole most of my life. I’m still probably a narrow minded asshole, but not as much, and I appreciate things more. So-called ‘Liberal Arts’ is good for people like me. Thanks for making me do it.”

That program, by the way, was very heavy in liberal arts. Students would spend considerable effort, typically at the graduate level, focusing on their area of expertise, which was often quite developed in these older students with vast life experience. But at the same time they had to meet all the university liberal arts requirements, plus ones we added that consisted mainly of self reflection and integration of the other liberal arts study with each other and their core area.

The vast majority of engineers are not jihadist terrorists or suicide bombers.

But it turns out that among jihadists and suicide bombers, an alarmingly disproportionate share are engineers.

This is covered in Engineers of Jihad: The Curious Connection between Violent Extremism and Education by Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog. I’ve not read that book, but I have read Does Engineering Education Breed Terrorists? by Dan Berrett summarizing the research (hat tip Maggie Koerth-Baker).

(I’ll probably get the book and report back later.)

The researchers seem to have nailed down the data suggesting that more than expected terrorist bad guys have engineering backgrounds. All the objections I was thinking of as I read the article, related to how this apparent bias might have resulted as an artifact of the data, were addressed.

The explanations provided are multiple, and likely, several apply.

One possible expansion, which the data suggest explains part, but not most, of this phenomenon, is the concept of relative deprivation. You put sweat and tears and maybe some blood into developing skills and raising your own prospects, but then you fail because of external or contextual forces. Many of these engineer-terrorists became engineers in societies where they could not actually get jobs or status as engineers, and thus may feel bitter and disenfranchised. In countries where engineers do get high status and have a high employment rate, but otherwise provide a good number of terrorists (like Saudi Arabia) the percentage that are engineers is low. Looking across the data, this concept seems to explain part of the resulting pattern.

Another explanation has to do with the sort of person who becomes an engineer. I’m not going to go into this psychological argument here (read the article or book), though it is key to the discussion. I just feel this is pretty complex stuff and I’ll avoid forming an opinion until I see the book. Suffice it to say that the sort of mind set that makes one more likely to be drawn to engineering, or succeed in engineering training, has features that for a small number of individuals may lead to the determination to go blow oneself up and take a few perceived enemies with you.

That argument involves selection of those who go into the field, but a third argument involves what happens during the process of education. It is generally true that some professions, including engineering, have narrow liberal education requirements than other professions, such as the social sciences and humanities. As I demonstrated anecdotally above, taking liberal arts seriously can expand, change, and enrich minds, but if those requirements are reduced, then not so much.

This can be a vicious cycle of sorts. Large university units (such as a college with in a university, or a major program, controlling the details of undergraduate or graduate education) can move towards or away form liberal arts eduction over time as people “typical” of that subset of academia regularly make programmatic decisions. For example, a technically oriented college may have relaxed language requirements compared to the sister college in the same university system that focuses on social science and humanities.

Anyway, the argument here is that academic training matters. The leftist terrorist groups of yore (back in the 60s and 70s) involved operatives with a disproportionate number of humanities and social science education, while today, rightist (statist, jihadist) terrorists are more of the opposite bent.

But, again, that only explains part of the larger pattern. Yet it may be a factor, and that would be interesting.

The important thing about this study, and the reason I’m going on and on about it, is that it is an interesting and apparently well done look at the cultural and social nuances, and the role of lived experience, behind important geopolitical factors that matter. There is some good anthropology to be done here, if we can find some good anthropologists to do it (I don’t think there is much anthropology going on these days in this area, and what is done is mainly critical theory, so not much pragmatic use.)

You will know of Ken Cuccinelli as the anit-climate-science activist, who was involved in the fake scandal known as “Climategate.”

Lowkell at Blue Virginia writes:

…this is appalling even by Ken Cuccinelli standards. First off, he links to a climate science “skeptic” website. Then, he channels Rand Paul’s insane criticism of Hillary Clinton that she can’t say that BOTH global warming AND terrorism are threats to the world (and that global warming poses by FAR the greatest threat to the future of mankind, 1000s of other species, the oceans, life on earth in other words). Then, he posts this disgusting, repulsive “cartoon” …. remember, this lunatic was elected Attorney General of Virginia in 2009, then spent four years waging war against climate science (and climate scientists like Michael Mann), then came within a few points of being elected GOVERNOR of Virginia!…

I’m not going to post the cartoon. Go to Blue Virginia if you want to see it.