Interesting— the online life of exploding underpants guy:

In online posts apparently by Detroit suspect, religious ideals collide

“I have no one to speak too [sic],” read a posting from January 2005, when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was attending boarding school. “No one to consult, no one to support me and I feel depressed and lonely. I do not know what to do. And then I think this loneliness leads me to other problems.”

I think I like Attackerman’s take on this guy so far:

I was on TV with Pat Buchanan today and Pat talked about this guy like he was a supersoldier. But he’s a pathetic and weak-willed manchild, the Little Lord Fauntelroy of attempted murder.

Now of course it doesn’t do much good to just sneer at Abdulmutallab. I think it was Lionel Tiger who diagnosed al-Qaeda after as demonstrating classic “pro-social” behavior to prey on outcasts and invest their lives with meaning. Once Abdulmutallab was what you might call an at-risk youth. On the one hand, the challenge is to figure out how to break the recruiting message that al-Qaeda sends to such youth so they can find their identities through homicidal impulses. On the other, if sniveling failures like Abdulmutallab is who al-Qaeda is whittled down to attracting, then that bodes well for us.