Great job by the FBI, one can only wonder at this point what he planned to do with them. See the bolded paragraph below. "The FBI found the largest cache of "finished explosive devices" in the bureau's history during the arrest of a Virginia man earlier this month, according to court documents." "Federal prosecutors are seeking to keep the man, Brad Spafford, in custody after his Dec. 17 arrest for allegedly possessing an unregistered short barrel rifle. While executing a search warrant at Spafford's 20-acre farm in the county of Isle of Wight, investigators found "a stockpile of more than 150 homemade improvised explosive devices" that were assessed to be pipe bombs, according to prosecutors. They said some of the pipe bombs were labeled "lethal" and "preloaded into an apparent wearable vest." "According to court documents, which were first reported by the website Court Watch, the investigation began in early 2023 after Spafford's neighbor told authorities that Spafford was stockpiling weapons and had lost three fingers on his right hand." "The neighbor also told authorities that Spafford was using photos of President Biden for target practice at a local shooting range. The neighbor said Spafford believed that "political assassinations should be brought back" and that "missing children in the news had been taken by the federal government to be trained as school shooters." After President-elect Donald Trump was nearly assassinated in July at a Pennsylvania rally, Spafford allegedly told his neighbor that "he hoped the shooter doesn't miss Kamala," prosecutors said." FBI says it seized largest cache of homemade explosives in its history at Virginia home
If i live to be a hundred I don’t think I’ll ever understand people like this or the guy who drove his truck into the crowd or the ones who shoot up a schoolhouse. They are just horribly broken people. I have never much trusted emotion in myself but what vile emotion grew in these men until it just overwhelms their humanity? What have they suffered to cause them to want spread the suffering to complete strangers? And Why is it always (99.999%) men? What do we do to our boys that causes such depravity in our men? I guess i’ll have to live to be 101. Until then, i know nothing and understand less but thanks to the FBI for nabbing this broken person in time. Until the next one.
Very sad to see someone go off the rails like that. You have to wonder if he had some kind of mental illness or something. Maybe paranoid schizophrenia or something like that. Or he could just be one of those people who indulges all kinds of conspiracy theories for a hobby and went overboard.
I can understand it. There is a good lesson to be learned from this story and applied to our own lives. What we see in this story is a man who has become fixated on some kind of perceived evil outside of himself, and because his gaze is continually fixated on that and obsessed with it he never spent any time looking at and examining the evil in his own soul. His obsession with the evil in the outside world blinded him to the evil decaying in his own heart. That is true regardless if he has a mental illness or not because he still was premeditating murder in his own heart. There is no excuse for that, even mental illness. There are plenty of people who are mentally ill that do not engage in premeditated murder. I think if we are honest we all would admit that this distracted and preoccupied heart that neglects to do a thorough self-examination of its own condition is a temptation that is common to many of ourselves. We may not go to the extreme that this man did in plotting a terrorist attack against our fellow countrymen, but the neglect of the distracted soul that is fixated on problems in the outside world is certainly a problem of our own day and age. Social media and the internet have probably amplified this kind of temptation in our society more so than in past generations, given how people can congregate in digital spaces and feed one another's distractedness. I wonder how much of a factor that was in this man's life. These digital spaces allow an already distracted soul to congregate with other distracted souls to ensure that their distractedness grows stronger and stronger each day. This story is a clear demonstration that these distractions are perilous to the human soul. It is something all men need to guard against lest they become like this man, too distracted and obsessed with the evil in the world outside of their own heart to tend to the decay in their own soul. I suspect that some people are so enslaved and fixated on this kind of distraction that they have never even had a true glimpse of their own soul. Imagine what a man or a woman who has never peered into a mirror sees the first time they set their eyes on their own reflection. They would see so many flaws in their own appearance that must be dealt with at once. This is why Bible reading is important. It is the mirror that allows us to see the reflection of our own soul. The Bible is a mirror upon which a man can peer into it and see his own soul as it really is. It shows him the problems of the soul that must be dealt with immediately. I bet this man had not picked up a Bible in a long long time and gazed upon the reflection of his own soul. If he had, then I suspect he would have charted a different course than the one he chose for himself.
^ agree mostly. Not at all sure the Bible is the cure-all your post implies as there have been depraved individuals who have read the Bible/Quran/Talmud/ and committed atrocities nonetheless - sometimes because that was their take on what the message was. But your suggestion of introspection is dead-on imo. I read somewhere that jihad initially referred to an internal struggle between good and bad everyone should be aware of within themselves. Whether that is what jihad meant initially is immaterial but the idea is an excellent one and one that i fail to do often enough.
You are correct about the Bible not being a cure all. A mirror never cured anyone of anything, but what a mirror does is expose problems that need to be dealt with. There are some people who wake up in the morning, look in the mirror, see their own flaws, but they do nothing about it. They forget all of the flaws they saw in the mirror, and they continue on their way. While there are others who look in the mirror, see their flaws, and they are moved with urgency to do something about it. The Bible is only effective when it is obeyed and heeded. It is not profitable for salvation when one does not obey it. You are correct about this. Although, I suspect there are even positive effects that come about on those who do not respond to it in a way that leads to their salvation. It might for example help restrain someone from giving into murderous passions.
During the last week there have been terrorist incidents in New Orleans and Las Vegas, a potential terrorist attack by a guy from Gainesville and the discovery of the cache of explosive devices in possession of the guy in Virginia In view of those incidents should the Senate confirm Kash Patel, Trump's nominee for Director of the FBI, who has proposed dissolving the Bureau's Intelligence Division on day one of his tenure?
Presenting both of these comments without any endorsement - express or implied - as to my own personal feelings on them. What you’re going to get from the MAGA movement right, as the flip side of that argument, is “maybe the Bureau could have discovered some of this crime if it would devote its time to investigating actual threats rather than trying to identify every person seen in a picture from the Capitol 4 years ago,” and that this actually highlights the need to confirm him. (And, as I understand it, the argument isn’t that federal law enforcement should go away entirely, but rather that it needs a radical restructuring to disrupt its bureaucracy and engrained tendencies.)
I was impressed with how his defense attorneys claimed that he was not a danger to society because he had not committed a violent crime yet. I don't know how those guys sleep at night.
On their backs or ides, primarily....a few on their stomachs. What did you expect them to say, "Please, Judge, for the love of God, keep this psycho locked up"?
