Explosives at Michigan mosque

Or perhaps slightly more accurately, 

Man arrested with explosives at Michigan mosque

Short form: 

63-year-old Roger Stockham  “had a large but undisclosed quantity of class-C fireworks including M-80s” in the parking lot of the “Islamic Center of America.” The AP article makes a point of mentioning that Stockham has “a long history of anti-government activities.”

A couple things:

1) Modern M-80′s suck. They used to be the equivalent of quarter-sticks of dynamite, used by farmers to blow stumps out of the ground. Now, by law, they are gardenvariety firecrackers in a large package. Makes a loud noise, blow the occasional dumbass’ fingers off, that’s about it.

2) The implication is that Stockham is Yet Another Violent Tea Partier/Palin-American. However… he’s a signatory here: http://www.standwithbradley.org/ , in suppoort of the treasonous Bradley Manning

And has one post here: http://www.bradleymanning.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=98 , where he calls for the execution of the crew of an Apache attack helicopter involved in the mistaken shooting up of a Reuters news crew in Iraq.

His rather uninformative Myspace page gives these:

Happy with how much I’ve lived. Ready for it to be over, but have a policy I contend with often: So long as I am alive, I can’t play dead.

Flew helicopters in Vietnam and after in Indonesia. Four ex-wives. On meds and doing better than my history would predict.

And an interesting news article fromthe Merced Sun-Star of September 1, 1979, describes one Roger Stockham, Muslim Convert, as attempting to hijack an airliner from Los Angeles to Iran. Not sure it’s the same guy, but in 1979, the hijacker Stockham was 32 years old… making him 64-ish today, which lines up.

And in 1985, the LA Times reported that a Roger Dale Stockham, 38 (making him 64-ish today), who also went by “Roger Hemaredin,” was wanted for planting a pipe bomb at Nevada’s Reno-Cannon International Airport. 

From these meager details, Stockham’s “anti-government activities” are of the “I hate the Iraq war” variety, which puts him more on the Left than the Right. His Myspage page seems to indicate that he’s sick (either mentally or physically) and ready to die. So… what the hell was he doing? If his sickness was mental (which the 1979 article certainly suggests)… then, well, he’s just another nutjob, who could’ve been stopped if only we had Common Sense Firecracker Laws. His car was clearly a high-capacity storage system for firecrackers. Who needs more than ten firecrackers?

If on the other hand his sickness is physical (he is 63, he could well be suffering from any number of terminal or just plain unplesant ailments), then perhaps his goal was to go out stirring up trouble. If he has watched the news recently, he knows that any human-caused tragedy will be immediately siezed upon by the press in order to smear the right, and that would certainly be the case if he’d managed to carbomb a mosque. By the time the truth came out about him – whatever that truth might be – the story would already be set that here was a rightwinger taking out innocent Muslims.

His past activities seem to indicate he’s of the “mad bomber” variety, emphasis on the “mad.” He clearly demonstrated some serious psycholoopiness. Couple being a nutjob with being a Muslim convert (hell, a convert to *any* religion… people who convert in adulthood to very different religions have an increased tendency towards fanatacism, never mind *crazy* people who convert) and a history of tryign to blow stuff up, and you get one awesome soup of nuttery. Why would he go after a Mosque? Dunno. As a Muslim, maybe he saw them as being heretical (the whole “Sunni vs Shia” thing, maybe). Or maybe he’d converted back out of Islam, and now sees Islam as Satanic. Without more info, it’s hard to say.

Fortunately, he ain’t dead. And it’s just barely possible that the truth might come out in this case.

UPDATE: Check this out: http://ceinquiry.us/2011-01-30-roger-stockham

A collection of Stockhams run ins with the law. The guy was a real piece of work, and had serious psychiatric issues, which he was on meds for. In 2005 he was certified “recovered from his mental disease,” and safe to be let out into the public. Clearly, that wasn’t quite right.