“I think that our country needs a spiritual cleansing. I really think we need a revival in this country — and I do need your prayers and I do need the strength to go on with this, because this isn’t always easy.

[…]

I think our country’s problems are deeper than political — that we need spiritual leaders to come forward. We need something beyond just the politics of the day and, you know, I see it everywhere — something really depraved is rising in the country.”

Here’s the Los Angeles Times’ latest report on the incendiary gas canisters that ended the standoff with mass-murdering ex-cop Christopher Dorner: In Wake of Dorner Shootout, Questions Over Use of ‘The Burner’.

Dorner, the fired Los Angeles cop suspected of killing four people in a campaign of revenge, had been holed up in a cabin near Big Bear Lake for hours, trading gunfire with San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputies. Repeated calls over a loudspeaker for him to surrender went ignored. Attempts to flush him out with tear gas led nowhere.

Wanting to end the standoff before nightfall, members of the sheriff’s SWAT unit enacted a plan they had devised for a final assault on the cabin, according to law enforcement sources. An officer drove a demolition vehicle up to the building and methodically tore down most of its walls, the sources said.

With the cabin’s interior exposed, the officer got on the radio to others awaiting his order. “We’re going to go forward with the plan, with the burner,” the unidentified officer said, according to a recording of police radio transmissions reviewed by The Times.

“The burner” was shorthand for a grenade-like canister containing a more powerful type of tear gas than had been used earlier. Police use the nickname because of the intense heat the device gives off, which often causes a fire.

“Seven burners deployed,” another officer responded several seconds later, according to the transmission which has circulated widely among law enforcement officials. “And we have a fire.”

Within minutes the cabin was fully engulfed in flames, ending a dramatic manhunt that captivated the nation.

The SWAT radio transmission, in addition to the comments of at least one officer who earlier in the gun battle could be heard by a TV reporter calling for the cabin to be burned down, have raised questions as to whether authorities intended to end the standoff by setting the structure on fire. San Bernardino County Sheriff John McMahon at a Wednesday press conference adamantly denied that was the intent. But the department on Thursday declined to answer further questions about the standoff.

Facebook Says It Was a Target of Sophisticated Hacking Attack:

(Reuters) - Facebook Inc said on Friday it had been the target of an unidentified hacker group, but it found no evidence that user data was compromised.

“Last month, Facebook security discovered that our systems had been targeted in a sophisticated attack,” the company said in a blog post posted on Friday afternoon, just before the three-day Presidents Day weekend. “The attack occurred when a handful of employees visited a mobile developer website that was compromised.”

The social network, which says it has more than one billion active users worldwide, also said: “Facebook was not alone in this attack. It is clear that others were attacked and infiltrated recently as well.”

Facebook declined to comment on the motive or origin of the attack.
A security expert at another company with knowledge of the matter said he was told the Facebook attack appeared to have originated in China.

From the terrifically awesome album: The Sound Of The Life Of The Mind.

It can’t have been easy to find a right winger dense and jingoistic enough to fill the big clown shoes of the recently disenfranchised Sarah Palin, but Fox News has risen to the occasion and found someone sure to delight their wingnut audience: Herman Cain Joins Fox News as Contributor.

Fox News Channel has hired former Republican presidential candidate and Godfather’s Pizza CEO Herman Cain as a contributor. Cain will provide political and business analysis and commentary across FNC’s daytime and primetime programming, as well as on Fox Business Network.

“Cain’s impressive resume makes him a valuable addition to the FOX News and FOX Business lineup,” said EVP Bill Shine. “As a political expert with business savvy, he brings an important voice to the nation’s debates.” …

Cain added, “I’m excited about joining the FOX family as a contributor because it is an opportunity to be one more voice for intelligent thinking in America.”

As opposed to “dumb thinking.”

Fox News announces that Herman Cain will be their exclusive correspondent in Oo-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan.

— Charles Johnson (@Green_Footballs) February 15, 2013

More: Today’s Deals in Electronics

Today, Amazon has a wide selection of electronics on sale as part of their President’s Day Sale. Shop for cameras, MP3 Players, headphones, audio/video accessories and more.

(Note: if you click through from our links to Amazon, we get a small commission on anything you buy, at no cost to you. It’s a great way to help support LGF!)

After cruising through space for who knows how many millennia, a chunk of rock about 15 meters across plunged into Earth’s atmosphere above the Russian region of Chelyabinsk today and exploded with a force rivaling a nuclear blast, injuring at least 700 people with its shockwave: Russian Meteor Largest in a Century.

A meteor that exploded over Russia this morning was the largest recorded object to strike the Earth in more than a century, scientists say. Infrasound data collected by a network designed to watch for nuclear weapons testing suggests that today’s blast released hundreds of kilotonnes of energy. That would make it far more powerful than the nuclear weapon tested by North Korea just days ago and the largest rock crashing on the planet since a meteor broke up over Siberia’s Tunguska river in 1908.

“It was a very, very powerful event,” says Margaret Campbell-Brown, an astronomer at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, who has studied data from two infrasound stations near the impact site. Her calculations show that the meteoroid was approximately 15 metres across when it entered the atmosphere, and put its mass at around 40 tonnes. “That would make it the biggest object recorded to hit the Earth since Tunguska,” she says.

The meteor appeared at around 09:25 a.m. local time over the region of Chelyabinsk, near the southern Ural Mountains. The fireball blinded drivers and a subsequent explosion blew out windows and damaged hundreds of buildings. So far, more than 700 people are reported to have been injured, mainly from broken glass, according to a statement from the Russian Emergency Ministry.

The unsettling part of the story is that nobody saw it coming — and we probably won’t see the next one either.

Despite its massive size, the object went undetected until it hit the atmosphere. “I’m not aware of anyone who saw this coming,” says Heiner Klinkrad, head of the European Space Agency’s space debris office at the European Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt, Germany. Although a network of telescopes watches for asteroids that might strike Earth, it is geared towards spotting larger objects — between 100 metres and a kilometre in size.

“Objects like that are nearly impossible to see until a day or two before impact,” says Timothy Spahr, Director of the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which tracks asteroids and small bodies. So far as he knows, he says, his centre also failed to spot the approaching rock.