Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/335818144?client_source=feed&format=rss
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Wednesday, October 23, 2013
Volkswagen Union Opposed By Tennessee Republican Officials
[unable to retrieve full-text content]At auto plants, the tension is typically between the workers and the management. But not at Volkswagen in Chattanooga, where it's Republican officials who are trying to stand in the way. One of them is the Tennessee governor, who says a unionized plant might discourage other companies from coming to his state.Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/NprProgramsATC/~3/P1ODCzGd3ik/volkswagen-union-opposed-by-tennessee-republican-officials
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Similar Articles: james franco Ed Sheeran Electric Zoo oprah winfrey brandon jennings
Add Your Own Wireless Capability To Your DSLR, And Save On Said DSLR
Camera makers have been extremely stubborn about adding Wifi to their DSLR's, but you add your own wireless capability to your photo rig with the Toshiba Flash Air 8GB SD Memory Card. It's about as elegant as a third-party solution to a first-party problem gets, and it's cheap. I always keep one in my memory card arsenal for when the need arises. $26. [eBay]
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Tuesday, October 22, 2013
Les News, 102213
'Boy Meets World' Reunion, Nokia's Tablet, Shia's Nekkidness
- • Snoop Dogg‘s birthday cake was pretty ridic. [Buzzfeed]
- • A Catholic school teacher was fired 45 minutes after she married her wife. [Queerty]
- • J. Lo covers Cosmo. [PopSugar]
- • The cast of Boy Meets World reunites on Good Morning America. [GossipCop]
- • A high school in San Antonio ditches the king and elects two Homecoming queens. [Towleroad]
- • Gotta love Versace. [Oh La La]
- • Nokia releases its own tablet. [Newser]
- • Snoop Dogg pays a visit to Jimmy Kimmel Live. [Heavy]
- • Katy Perry covers W magazine. [Idolator]
- • Have you met Cash Cash? [arjanwrites]
- • Shia LaBeouf loves showing off his nekkidness. [Starpulse]
- • Everyone hates Pebbles today. [Global Grind]
- • Why the long face, Jake Gyllenhaal? [LaineyGossip]
- • Jonathan Lipnicki (Jerry Maguire) is 23, Zac Hanson of Hanson is 28, Michael Fishman (Roseanne) is 32, Spike Jonze is 44, Shaggy is 45, Jeff Goldblum is 61 and Christopher Lloyd is 75 years old. Click HERE to see who else is celebrating a birthday today.
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Egypt: Attack in Sinai kills soldier, civilian
EL-ARISH, Egypt (AP) — Insurgents ambushed an army convoy in northern Sinai early Tuesday killing a soldier and a civilian, the local government and the military said, the latest in a rising wave of attacks in Egypt's volatile peninsula.
Military spokesman Col. Ahmed Mohammed Ali said the attackers targeted two buses transporting soldiers, detonating three explosive devices and spraying the vehicles with gunfire as they drove down a main road linking the border town of Rafah with el-Arish, the capital of northern Sinai.
In a statement published on his official Facebook page, Ali said forces securing the buses returned fire, forcing the attackers to flee.
He added that one soldier and a civilian driver died in the attack and five soldiers were wounded. The wounded soldiers, some described as being in critical condition, were taken to the military hospital in el-Arish.
A statement soon after the attack from the northern Sinai security department gave different details of the ambush. It said attackers fired three rocket-propelled grenades at an armored military vehicle and a troop carrier, and that seven soldiers were wounded. The military's reports of incidents involving its forces are generally considered more definitive.
Attacks in Sinai have increased since the military toppled President Mohammed Morsi on July 3 following demonstrations by millions calling for him to leave office. Several al-Qaida-inspired militant groups have stepped up attacks on security and military targets in the peninsula. The Egyptian military has responded with intensified operations to eliminate the militants and their sanctuaries in the lawless desert area.
- Military & Defense
- Politics & Government
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Australia firefighters prepare for worst as hot weather returns
By Lincoln Feast
SYDNEY (Reuters) - Australian firefighters worked desperately on Tuesday to contain massive wildfires burning in mountains west of Sydney, but with forecasts of high winds and dangerously hot weather, authorities fear more houses and lives will be lost.
More than 200 homes have been destroyed in New South Wales (NSW) state since Thursday, when fires tore through scattered communities on Sydney's outskirts, razing entire streets. One man died after suffering a heart attack trying to protect his home.
"The forecast and scenario for tomorrow is about as bad as it gets. On days like tomorrow there is a very real potential for more loss of homes and loss of life," said New South Wales Rural Fire Service Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons.
Sixty fires were burning on Tuesday, with the largest and most dangerous in the Blue Mountains around 100 km (6 miles) west of Sydney.
The fires are expected to flare on Wednesday with the return of temperatures in the mid-30 degree Celsius (high-80 degree Fahrenheit) range and winds gusting up to 100 kph (62 mph).
Sydney and its surrounding regions have been given an "extreme fire danger rating" for Wednesday. Fitzsimmons urged everyone who does not need to be in the Blue Mountains to be out of the area by lunchtime.
Authorities ordered schools in the Blue Mountains to be closed on Wednesday and evacuated nursing homes in the area.
"Tomorrow is going to be the worst of the fire weather days. Whatever results from the run of these fires we will seek to deal with and deal with the absolute focus of life preservation and the saving of as much property as we can."
But Fitzsimmons told mountain residents not to expect a fire truck to save their home as they may not be able to reach everyone in time.
The early season fires have burned through more than 120,000 hectares (300,000 acres) and have a perimeter of some 1,600 km (990 miles). Air pollution in parts of Sydney spiked on Tuesday to dangerously high levels as smoke and ash blanketed the city.
The insurance council of Australia said claims of more than A$93 million ($90 million) were expected to grow and the NSW government has declared a state of emergency enabling it to order evacuations.
Thousands of firefighters, including some from New Zealand and from other Australian states, had joined the battle, using hundreds of fire engines and 90 aircraft.
With steep hills carpeted by eucalyptus forests and dotted with small communities, the Blue Mountains are a popular day trip from Sydney, but its rugged and often inaccessible terrain can become a fire nightmare during the long, hot Southern Hemisphere summer.
Police have arrested several children suspected of starting a number of different fires. Other fires were sparked by power lines arcing in strong winds, according to the fire service.
With dry weather and a massive land area, Australia is particularly prone to bushfires. In 2009, the "Black Saturday" wildfires in Victoria state killed 173 people and caused $4.4 billion worth of damage.
Record hot and dry weather across the continent and an early start to the fire season have rekindled arguments on mankind's impact on climate and what can be done to mitigate it.
($1 = A$1.03)
(Editing by Michael Perry)
- Natural Phenomena
- Nature & Environment
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Syrian rebels battle army in Christian town
In this photo, which AP obtained from Syrian official news agency SANA and which has been authenticated based on its contents and other AP reporting, President Bashar Assad gestures as he speaks during an interview with Lebanon’s Al-Mayadeen TV, at the presidential palace in Damascus, Syria, Monday, Oct. 21, 2013. Syria’s president said Monday that the factors that would allow a landmark conference aimed at ending the country’s civil war do not yet exist, throwing further doubt on international efforts to hold peace talks that have already been repeatedly delayed. (AP Photo/SANA)
BEIRUT (AP) — Syrian government forces battled Tuesday with al-Qaida-linked rebels trying to capture an ancient Christian town north of Damascus, activists and the state media said.
The Jabhat al-Nusra, or Nusra Front, appear to have targeted Sadad because of its strategic location near the main highway north of Damascus, rather than because it is Christian. But hard-liners among the rebels are hostile to the minority group, who tend to support the government of President Bashar Assad, and other al-Qaida-linked fighters have damaged and desecrated churches in areas they have seized.
The assault on Sadad, some 95 kilometers (60 miles) north of Damascus, began at dawn Monday, said the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Local police fought back the initial assault and were reinforced by the army.
The rebel attack seemed to target a chief hospital in the town, said the Observatory, which monitors fighting through a network of activists on the ground. He said that there was also fighting in the nearby town of Muhin and that the Nusra Front controlled the main road leading to Damascus.
President Bashar Assad has drawn support from Syria's patchwork of ethnic and religious minorities, including Christians and members of his Alawite sect, a Shiite offshoot, in the country's civil war, now in its third year. The rebels are dominated by Syria's Sunni Muslim majority.
Al-Qaida-linked militant groups such as the Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant are among the most active rebel factions in Syria. They have fought other rebel brigades to seize strategic border areas, and are also battling Kurdish fighters in northern Syria.
Also Tuesday, mortar rounds slammed into a pro-government suburb on the outskirts of Damascus, killing at least two people, said the state SANA news agency and Abdurrahman.
It wasn't immediately clear who was behind the shelling but rebels have previously targeted Jaramana, home to Christians and the Druse religious group. It is close to another suburb, Mleiha, where fighting between rebels and government forces has been raging for days.
Meanwhile, international inspectors tasked by the U.N. to destroy Syria's chemical weapons capability said they had visited 17 sites since they began their work at the beginning of October. In a statement issued late Monday, they said they had destroyed "critical equipment to make the facilities inoperable."
- Politics & Government
- Unrest, Conflicts & War
- Damascus
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Fake Jerseys Work In A Pinch For Bogota Soccer Team
Walk around any city in Colombia and you'll find vendors selling counterfeit soccer jerseys. That came in handy for Bogota's Independiente Santa Fe team. They showed up for an away game in the wrong color, so a team official bought knockoffs from vendors.
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Google Goes After Reporters With New “Google Media Tools” Site
Google has now became the latest tech company to introduce a centralized resource containing tools aimed at courting journalists, with the launch of a new hub called Google Media Tools. The idea is to offer a one-stop shop where reporters can access and learn to use a number of Google services, from Google Search trends to Google Maps as well as get details on how to use Google to enhance their reporting on topics ranging from political elections to humanitarian disasters and more.
The suite of tools was first debuted at the Online News Association ‘13 (ONA) digital journalism conference last week, and was introduced to the broader public today through a post on Google’s official blog.
The Google Media Tools site is more than just a collection of links pointing to other properties under the Google umbrella. Instead, it has subdivided sections where reporters can dive into various topics they’re interested in, to better learn the details of how things like Google’s Transparency Report work, or to learn how to get started using the Google Maps API to build customized maps and better visualize data.
Other information on the new site includes how-to’s for reporters and news organizations aimed at helping them properly promote themselves on Google’s platform – there are instructions on how to get included in the Google News aggregator, for instance, and how to use Google+ Hangouts to reach your audience, though it misses a great opportunity to promote the resource as a way to do interviews (from personal experience, a growing request in terms of doing remote reporting via web chats).
Google’s launch of Media Tools comes at a time when competitors on search, news and social fronts, namely Facebook and Twitter, have already made big pushes of their own to get data from their services into reporters’ hands to aid with their reporting. Facebook this summer opened up the ability for anyone to embed public posts on external websites this summer, after it had already moved into other areas Twitter has been known for like trending topics, hashtags and verified profiles. The social network also recently announced the launch of the Public Feed API and Keyword Insights API, allowing select news organizations like CNN, Today Show, BSkyB and others access to programmatically search through Facebook’s public data for keywords and other trends.
Meanwhile, Twitter has for some time catered to the needs of media, with a dedicated site rich with materials for reporters in newsrooms with how-to guides and best practices and links to Twitter’s various resources for engaging an audience, getting support, understanding Twitter terminology and more.
For these companies, getting their tools and resources into the hands of the press, is not only good PR in a way, but it can help them to boost their bottom lines. Data is their product.
In the case of Twitter, it has also been an effort at getting the service into the hands of those who speak to a mainstream user base, which helped to increase awareness around what Twitter even is and how it’s used. Though Google is much better known, it, too, is still interested in growing its audience, especially as more emerging markets come online thanks to the growing adoption of smartphones and tablet computing.
Explains Daniel Sieberg, Head of Media Outreach at Google, the new site “showcases the power of the Internet overall in reaching new audiences and giving journalists more ways to make an impact.” Sieberg also notes that the site will be filled out better over time with more resources, including case studies, tutorials and expanded content, as well as support for more languages.
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Calling all Android Developers: Schedule your appearance on Android Central Live!
Join us on stage and show off your apps!
If you missed it, earlier today we announced that Android Central is the official community partner of the Samsung Developers Conference. As official community partner, we're going to be streaming a live show from the conference floor Oct. 28-29. Android Central Live will feature our very own Phil Nickinson and Andrew Martonik, plus interviews with Samsung reps, speakers, thought leaders … and YOU.
Android Central is excited to produce this show, not only as a service to our amazing community, but to provide a platform for Android developers looking to show off their apps. If you're going to be at the conference, you should join us on stage because it's going to be a lot of fun!
If you're a developer planning to attend the event, consider this your casting call!
We're busy setting up our interview schedule RIGHT NOW, so if you'd like to appear on Android Central Live, now is the time to act. Email me at james@mobilenations.com ASAP to request an interview slot. Tell me what you'd like to talk about, if you have an app to demo, and basically blow me away with the awesome Android goodness you're going to bring to the stage.
See you in San Francisco!
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Monday, October 21, 2013
Apple rumored to have prototyped Surface-style keyboard covers for iPad
The "lots more to cover" tag line on Apple's October 22 event invitations have lead many to speculate about updated Smart Covers in general, and Logitech/Microsoft Surface style keyboard covers in specific. Apple has tossed out patent applications for such things in the past, of course, and it's one of the more popular third-party and competitive features. So, prototyping an Apple version that would enjoy better and deeper integration is no surprise. Jamie Ryan:
I’ve been speaking to a couple of people at Apple for the last few days and they have told me that a case for the full size iPad that mimics Microsofts touch cover has been prototyped. It’s not clear whether the process is far enough along to make this Tuesdays event but they did say a few different styles had been in testing for a while. [...] It’s not just keyboards either. I’m told other cover like accessories are also being looked at.
There are always last minute rumors before an Apple event, some cool, some flat out crazy. Apple did produce a keyboard stand for the original iPad, which was simply their existing Mac keyboard with a 30-pin Dock connector and base and some customized keys. All iPads are still compatible with the existing Mac Bluetooth keyboard, although it has no customized keys and requires something like the third-party Origami case to provide any physical integration.
Unless Apple cancels the Smart Covers, they'll have to update them for the new iPad 5 form factor anyway. I use the Logitech keyboard cover and like it a bunch, so do many other people I know. An Apple branded, Apple integrated version would be great. It's one of the few things I like about Microsoft's Surface. So, I'd be all over this if it turns out to be real.
If the information above is accurate, the only questions are, has Apple taken it/them out of prototype and put it/them into production, and did they do it in time for the October 22 event?
Source: Jamie Ryan via Gizmodo
iPad (5th gen)
Apple's full-sized tablet gets slimmed down. Rumored features include:
- Touch ID fingerprint sensor
- A7X custom processor
- Improved LTE 4G support
- FaceTime HD camera
- iOS 7 software
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France joins list of allies angry over NSA spying
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry waves to the media as he arrives at the U.S. embassy for a meeting with the Arab League in Paris, Monday, Oct. 21, 2013. Kerry is in Paris for diplomatic talks about a peace process for Israel and Palestinian authorities. (AP Photo/Michel Euler)
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry waves to the media as he arrives at the U.S. embassy for a meeting with the Arab League in Paris, Monday, Oct. 21, 2013. Kerry is in Paris for diplomatic talks about a peace process for Israel and Palestinian authorities. (AP Photo/Michel Euler)
U.S Ambassador to France Charles H. Rivkin, right, leaves the Foreign Ministry in Paris, after he was summoned Monday, Oct. 21, 2013. The French government had summoned the ambassador to explain why the Americans spied on one of their closest allies. Le Monde newspaper said Monday, Oct. 21, 2013 that documents leaked by Edward Snowden show that the U.S. National Security Agency swept up 70.3 million French phone records in a 30-day period. (AP Photo/Claude Paris)
U.S Ambassador to France Charles H. Rivkin, right, leaves the Foreign Ministry in Paris, after he was summoned Monday, Oct. 21, 2013. The French government had summoned the ambassador to explain why the Americans spied on one of their closest allies. Le Monde newspaper said Monday, Oct. 21, 2013 that documents leaked by Edward Snowden show that the U.S. National Security Agency swept up 70.3 million French phone records in a 30-day period. (AP Photo/Thibault Camus)
FILE - In this March 8, 2013 file photo, U.S Ambassador to France Charles H. Rivkin, stands as the US national anthem is played aboard US aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, in Marseille, southern France. Le Monde newspaper says Monday, Oct.21, 2013 that documents leaked by Edward Snowden show that the U.S. National Security Agency swept up 70.3 million French phone records in a 30-day period. The French government has summoned the Rivkin to explain why the Americans spied on one of their closest allies.(AP Photo/Claude Paris, File)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Joining a growing list of angry allies, France on Monday demanded an explanation from Washington of a report that the U.S. swept up 70 million French telephone records and text messages in its global surveillance net, even recording certain private conversations.
The fallout prompted a phone call from President Barack Obama to President Francois Hollande and, the White House said, an acknowledgment by Obama that the episode raises "legitimate questions for our friends and allies" about how U.S. surveillance capabilities are employed. Hollande's office issued a strongly worded statement afterward expressing "profound reprobation" over U.S. actions that it said intruded on the private lives of French citizens.
Spying among friendly countries is classic tradecraft but the sweep and scope of the National Security Agency program have surprised allies and raised indignation among those targeted — Germany, Mexico and Brazil among them.
The report in Le Monde, co-written by Glenn Greenwald, who originally revealed the surveillance program based on leaks from former NSA analyst Edward Snowden, found that when certain phone numbers were used, conversations were automatically recorded. The surveillance operation also gathered text messages based on key words, Le Monde reported.
"This sort of practice between partners that invades privacy is totally unacceptable and we have to make sure, very quickly, that this no longer happens," French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said. "We fully agree that we cooperate to fight terrorism. It is indispensable. But this does not justify that personal data of millions of our compatriots are snooped on."
Seeking to limit damage in relations with one of America's closest allies, Obama called Hollande late Monday and made clear the U.S. government is reviewing its intelligence-gathering "so that we properly balance the legitimate security concerns of our citizens and allies with the privacy concerns that all people share," a White House statement said. The statement said some recent disclosures have "distorted our activities" while others have raised genuine concerns by other countries.
Earlier, the French government summoned U.S. Ambassador Charles Rivkin for answers. A statement issued by the U.S. Embassy in Paris said Rivkin assured Alexandre Ziegler, chief of staff to Fabius, that "our ongoing bilateral consultations on allegations of information-gathering by U.S. government agencies would continue."
The level of the diplomatic consultation at the time — between the U.S. ambassador and only an aide to Fabius — suggested that France was modulating its response. Secretary of State John Kerry landed in Paris early Monday for meetings on Middle East issues and could have been contacted immediately if it appeared relations were in deeper trouble. But the matter was subsequently elevated with Obama's phone call.
Hollande's office said later that the French leader asked Obama to make available all information on NSA spying of French communications.
Kerry would not confirm the newspaper account or discuss intelligence-gathering except to say: "Lots of countries are engaged in the activity of trying to protect their citizens in the world."
Le Monde reported that from Dec. 10, 2012 to Jan. 8 of this year, 70.3 million recordings of French citizens' telephone data were made by the NSA. Intercepts peaked at almost 7 million in Dec. 24 and again on Jan. 7, the paper said. The targets were people with suspected links to terrorism and people chosen because of their roles in business, politics or the French government, the report said.
Former CIA officer Bob Baer, who was stationed in Paris for three years, said the French intelligence service regularly spies on Americans — both on U.S. diplomats and business people. The spying has included rifling through possessions of a diplomat, businessman or spy in Paris hotel rooms and installing listening devices in first-class seats of the now-defunct Concord aircraft to record Americans' conversations, he said.
In another instance, a former French intelligence director stated that the spy agency compiled a detailed secret dossier of the proprietary proposals that U.S. and Soviet companies wrote to compete with a French company for a $1 billion contract to supply fighter jets to India.
But while corporate and spy- vs.-spy espionage may be common, the newspaper report indicated that French citizens were unwittingly drawn into U.S. surveillance, too.
Dennis Blair, a former director of national intelligence, tried to broker a closer intelligence-sharing relationship with France, so the two would simply ask each other to explain political or economic policies directly instead of resorting to snooping.
"The U.S. is overwhelmed by cooperation by France on things like ... terrorism and organized crime," Blair said in an interview Monday. "It dwarfs the amount of time we spend on spying on each other. I'm hoping the day will come when both countries realize they have a lot more to be gained by working with each other, but we're not quite there yet."
The most recent documents cited by Le Monde, dated April 2013, indicated the NSA's interest in communications linked to Wanadoo — once part of France Telecom — and Alcatel-Lucent, the French-American telecom company. One of the documents instructed analysts to draw not only from the electronic surveillance program, but also from another initiative dubbed Upstream, which allowed surveillance on undersea communications cables.
Snowden's leaks exposing details of the U.S. global surveillance apparatus have sparked an international debate over the limits of American spying. The strongest objection has come from Brazil.
Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff canceled a state visit to Washington over a dispute involving Brazil's desire to question Snowden after information he leaked indicated that the U.S. intercepted Rousseff's communications with aides, hacked the state-run oil company's computer network and snagged data on emails and telephone calls flowing through Brazil .
In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel's government canceled a Cold War-era surveillance agreement over reports that NSA snooping swept up communications in Europe.
"I can understand the anger in France," said German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle. "You don't do that among partners. You don't do that among friends."
Mexico has also expressed outrage about an alleged NSA program that the German newspaper Der Spiegel said accessed a domain linked to former Mexican President Felipe Calderon and his Cabinet. Also, a document from June 2012 indicated the NSA had read current Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto's emails before he was elected.
The U.S. is thought to avoid spying on its coalition of "'Five Eye" partners — Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand — but considers other countries fair game.
The U.S. intelligence community has discussed bringing France into the Five Eyes alliance because of its close cooperation with U.S. troops and intelligence against al-Qaida in such as Afghanistan and Mali, according to two current U.S. intelligence officials. But the trust between both countries has never reached the level needed for that, the officials said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the relationship publicly.
___
Associated Press writers Lara Jakes and Lori Hinnant in Paris, Matthew Lee and Adam Goldman in Washington and Raf Casert in Luxembourg contributed to this report.
Associated PressSource: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/3d281c11a96b4ad082fe88aa0db04305/Article_2013-10-21-US-NSA-Surveillance/id-c8a3049dcfe44ac6a7acd3177f575410Category: philadelphia eagles powerball numbers
Walking Dead</em> Recap: The Face-Exploding Flu Meets the Zombie Apocalypse
Photo: AMC
It’s flu season on The Walking Dead! And boy is it a doozy. That’s what killed the nerdy young Patrick last week, a death that immediately sparks a rather gruesome massacre in Cell Block D. This particular strain of flu apparently makes your face explode, and can be fatal within 24 hours even for young and healthy people — which would be dangerous enough on its own even if it didn’t immediately turn their corpses into dangerous killing machines. When you consider that the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic managed to infect a third of the global population and kill an estimated 50 million people, it’s not looking great for our survivors.
And as the extinction of humanity looms even larger than before, it’s no surprise that their primary concern seems to be children — both protecting them and protecting their innocence, goals that ultimately prove to be incompatible.
“Why don’t you wear your hat anymore?” Michonne asks as Carl, shortly before hearing the gunshots. “It’s not a farming hat,” Carl replies, because he and Rick are farming farmers who farm now, in case you missed the many, many mentions of their farming over the last two episodes. Accordingly, they don’t wear cowboy hats anymore, nor do they carry guns, all because of an incident where Carl maaaaybe gunned down a (possibly dangerous) stranger in cold blood. Concerned that his son might be taking a one-way trip to Psychotown, Rick is now obsessed with trying to give Carl back his childhood, which in Rick’s mind means 1) farming (obviously) 2) refusing to let Carl take part in any zombie-related duties and 3) insisting he read comic books and go to storytime with the little kids.
Which isn’t entirely fair, and you can see how badly playing the role chafes for Carl. Like many of the survivors, he had to become a very different person in order to stay alive, and he hasn’t really been a child for a long time. But he’s trying with all his heart to act like one anyway because Rick wants him to, because he can tell that his father needs it far more than he does. Rick doesn’t want Carl to carry a gun because he wants to believe that Carl doesn’t need to carry a gun. And of course, that’s not true.
Rick’s stance on Carl having access to a firearm is kind of the like conservative stance on teens having access to contraception; you can refuse to give them the means to protect themselves, but it’s not going to change the reality of the situation — it’s just going to make it more dangerous for them. The difference being that instead of getting an STD, it is far more likely that Carl will die and then turn into a monster and kill everyone around him, so the stakes for parental delusion here are just a little bit higher. Wishing that the world were a safer place doesn’t make it so, and leaving Carl unarmed doesn’t make him safer either; it makes him more vulnerable.
The lone voice of responsible post-apocalyptic parenting here is Carol, who has turned her regular storytime session become a junior clinic in survivalism, switching between reading novels to children and teaching them how to kill with knives. When Carl finds out what’s really going on in between chapters of Tom Sawyer, Carol asks him to keep it a secret from both Rick and the other parents. They might understand why their children need to learn how to use weapons, she says, but they also might not, and she can’t take that risk. Insisting that children remain innocent might sound protective, but by the end of the episode, it’s obvious how irresponsible it is.
Relatedly, Carol promises a dying man (whose name I also do not know, because this season is full of red shirts who live only to die) that she will take care of his children, two girls named Lizzie and Micah. You may remember Lizzie as the total idiot from last week who thought that walkers were people too, a notion so fatally stupid that it’s hard to believe it exists. After her dad dies — and she has a weird tantrum about her favorite Backstreet Boy zombie, Nick, getting killed — it falls to new surrogate mom Carol to deliver some tough love: “It’s time someone told you the truth: honey, you’re weak.”
As Daryl buries the possibly infected bodies with what I’m sure is the most sterile of bandanas wrapped around his face, he thanks Rick for his help during the massacre – and suggests that with the epidemic looming, it might be time for Rick to step up and take a leadership role again. Rick, who desperately wants the post-apocalyptic equivalent of a desk job, declines. “I screwed up too many times,” he says, before trailing off about how hard it is to be the man making the calls. In monomythical terms, this is known as the “refusal of the call” – the reluctance of the story’s hero to embrace his true destiny. (It may also be worth referencing Joseph Campbell’s description of what happens to the hero during this part of the journey: “Whatever house he builds, it will be a house of death: a labyrinth of cyclopean walls to hide from him his minotaur.”)
Danai Gurira as Michonne. Image: AMC/Gene Page
While everyone else who was exposed to the flu quarantines themselves and hopes that their faces will not also explode, Beth watches over baby Judith, singing her the thematically-appropriate Tom Waits song, “I Don’t Want to Grow Up” as a lullaby:
How do you move in a world of fog
That’s always changing things?
Makes me wish I could be a dog
When I see the price you pay
I don’t wanna grow up.
Beth asks Michonne – whose trip to Macon has been sadly postponed by a twisted ankle – if any children died in the massacre, musing that while we have words like “orphan” and “widow,” there’s no word for someone who has lost a child. “You’d think someone would have given that a name.” This particular form of loss seems to strike a chord for Michonne, who reacts poorly to Judith’s crying, and even worse to Beth’s suggestion that she hold Judith for a moment. When she finally does pick up the baby, Michonne unexpectedly breaks down sobbing in a way that suggests that if that particular word did exist, it would probably apply to her.
Meanwhile, things seem to be going well for Tyreese his lady friend, but since experiencing any form of joy on this show seems to be a form of hubris that calls down the wrath of the gods, you know that doesn’t bode well. (Nor does the fact that I still don’t know her name.) She wants to take things a little slower before they move into the same cell, and though he’s obviously crazy about her, Tyreese seems happy to wait. Of course, she soon starts coughing — a symptom of the fast-moving flu — and when he comes to bring her flowers, he finds her gasoline-soaked body burning in a courtyard, presumably killed as a preemptive measure because of the risk she posed to the community. It’s pretty emotionally crushing, but that is also the entire point of the show, as far as I can tell.
The group faces a second crisis when all the gunshots attract so many walkers to the fence that it threatens to buckle under their weight. Finally, Rick finally decides to cut the projected Peter Pan crap and get his shit together. After a wistful look back at his pig sty, he realizes how he can save them all: by dropping a trail of bloodied pigs like really tragic breadcrumbs to lead the zombies away from the prison, a plan that succeeds.
In the aftermath, Carl finally tells Rick about Carol’s little weaponry tutorial, including the fact that she hasn’t told the children’s parents — and that Carl doesn’t think he should try to stop her. Neither does Rick, anymore. “I won’t stop her. I won’t say anything,” he says, right before he throws the match to burn down his pig sty – and likely, the bucolic life he wanted so badly to believe he and Carl could have. Then he not only gives Carl a gun again, but finally puts his own weapon back in its holster. Time to grow up.
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