0:50 video

Outside:

Todd Orr did everything right. When he left his Bozeman, Montana, home to scout for elk in nearby Madison Valley last weekend, he went armed with two cans of bear spray, as well as the powerful handgun he uses for hunting. Entering the woods, he hollered, “Hey bear!” at half-minute intervals, to avoid surprising one. And when a female grizzly charged him, he fired the bear spray to create a fog-like barrier between him and the animal, keeping his finger on the can’s trigger until she was on him. As the bear broke his arms with her jaws and slashed his scalp with her claws, he curled into the fetal position, and kept his hands locked behind his neck, protecting his vulnerable spine and organs.

So Orr lived.

I thought Outside’s cocksure analysis and advise was total crap. I’ll give Todd Orr credit: he has guts. But myself, I would definitely have shot that bear.

Period: Meiji Taisho

3-3/8″ high x 2-3/4″ x 2-5/8″

David Wong does a good job of explaining exactly why rural America is desperate enough to opt for the “burn it all down” option this election year.

If you don’t live in one of these small towns, you can’t understand the hopelessness. The vast majority of possible careers involve moving to the city, and around every city is now a hundred-foot wall called “Cost of Living.” Let’s say you’re a smart kid making $8 an hour at Walgreen’s and aspire to greater things. Fine, get ready to move yourself and your new baby into a 700-square-foot apartment for $1,200 a month, and to then pay double what you’re paying now for utilities, groceries, and babysitters. Unless, of course, you’re planning to move to one of “those” neighborhoods (hope you like being set on fire!).

That is, if they don’t replace the only room you can afford with a $3,300-per-month high-rise.

In a city, you can plausibly aspire to start a band, or become an actor, or get a medical degree. You can actually have dreams. In a small town, there may be no venues for performing arts aside from country music bars and churches. There may only be two doctors in town — aspiring to that job means waiting for one of them to retire or die. You open the classifieds and all of the job listings will be for fast food or convenience stores. The “downtown” is just the corpses of mom and pop stores left shattered in Walmart’s blast crater, the “suburbs” are trailer parks. There are parts of these towns that look post-apocalyptic.

I’m telling you, the hopelessness eats you alive.

And if you dare complain, some liberal elite will pull out [his] iPad and type up a rant about your racist white privilege.

Read the whole thing.

Trump supporters are not wrong about the coastal urban elites. They just are betting on fake solution which will never work.

Weird Al Yankovic parodies Bob Dylan’s “Gnomic Balderdash” rock poetry. Give Weird Al the Nobel Prize, too!

Hat tip to “Gnomic Balderdash” John Brewer.

NBC Chicago:

A leaked email from Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign Chairman John Podesta referenced a 2015 BuzzFeed article in which Sen. Mark Kirk predicted nuclear war in the Middle East in the wake of the Iran nuclear deal.

Podesta’s email, which was released Friday by WikiLeaks along with a cache of documents from the Clinton campaign chair, was in response to a message from John Anzalone of Anzalone Liszt Grove Research that bore the subject line, “you call it.” In his email, Anzalone included a link to the BuzzFeed article and a quote from Kirk.

“This agreement condemns the next generation to cleaning up a nuclear war in the Persian Gulf,” Kirk told BuzzFeed at the time. “This is the greatest appeasement since Chamberlain gave Czechoslovakia to Hitler.”

“Yup,” Podesta said in response to the email.

Quite an admission.

Edvard Munch, Lust, 1895

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