Category: that’s too bad”
Report on man killed by Glacier National Park grizzly contains disturbing new details
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FILE: A grizzly bear in Glacier National Park, Mont
A surprise night time encounter with a grizzly bear led to the death of Anthony Pollio in Glacier National Park this spring, according to a new report containing previously undisclosed details of the attack
Compiled by the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee, the board of review report describes how evidence at the scene helped investigators reconstruct what led to the incident on May 3. “The attack was likely brief and intense and not prolonged,” * the report reads.
*(No shit !)
With Lake McDonald 4,300 feet below, trees burned by the 2017 Sprague Fire stand along the steep Mount Brown Lookout Trail in Glacier National Park, Mont., on Sept. 17, 2019.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Members of the review board included bear experts from state and federal wildlife agencies, as well as Glacier National Park’s carnivore biologist and chief ranger.* A report is required after any human fatality caused by a grizzly bear.
*(You do have to know that this “report” had to cost us Taxpayers a shit load of money!!)
Pollio, a 33-year-old man from Florida, was hiking the Mount Brown Lookout trail, one of the steepest in the park, alone. According to messages with friends and family sent before the attack, he planned to hike to the lookout and watch the sunset.
(Insert Florida man joke here!)
Investigators believe he was descending the trail, known for its jigsaw of standing and dead trees, in the dark around 9:30 p.m. “Darkness and dead fall on the trail would have prevented the bear and Mr. Pollio from seeing each other until they were very close,” the report reads.
A view of the attack site in Glacier National Park, Mont., from below the trail looking upslope.
Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee
It’s unknown if Pollio was making noise* or if he was using his cellphone as a flashlight when the bear, a male grizzly thought to be at least 15 years old, charged.
*(Yeah, I guess that his screaming does not count!)
The report confirmed that Pollio was able to deploy a full can of bear spray.* However, it’s unknown if the spray made contact with the bear. The bear killed Pollio via injuries to his head after a short pursuit. Search and rescue teams found the bear spray in the bushes just off the trail before finding Pollio’s remains.
(I am convinced that some bears like the spray just like my son Willie loves extreme hot sauces on his chow!)
DNA from bear hair and bear scat* collected at the scene matched a grizzly bear with no previous history of human conflict, aggression or capture, described as a “life-long resident of the park.” Investigators found no evidence of predation or caching at the scene, and no bears were found in the area during the search or investigation process.
(A word known as shit or what was left of Poor Pollio’s recycled remains by the rest of us!)
Glacier National Park did not immediately respond to questions regarding whether any management action * was taken, or will be taken, against the bear.
*(Shooting the bear!)
FILE: A road sign warning of dangerous grizzly bears alongside the highway near Glacier National Park, Mont.
Buddy Mays/Getty Images
Bear experts made numerous recommendations for future hikers to avoid similar surprise encounters with bears. That includes making noise by talking, clapping or singing, which is “critical when visibility and hearing are limited.” Traveling in a group is always recommended*, as “groups of people are usually noisier and less likely to surprise bears.”
*(That way more large caliber guns can then be carried!)
Experts also suggest not traveling when bears are most active at night, dawn or dusk.
(No scat Kemosabe ! Now I don’t know if a gun would of helped. But I do know that wandering around alone in the woods is just asking for it! Grumpy)
Now I am sorry if this upsets the family or friends of the dead. But being a weak person, I just could not pass up the poor writing of this incident ! Or the frankly really dumb actions of poor old Pollio in the field! Mea Culpa, Grumpy
It’s likely tough living with a legit genius. I have known a few truly gifted wordsmiths in my day. They were honestly all just a little bit nuts.
I’m a professional writer. I have the CV to prove it. However, I’m a mechanic, not an artist. I just like to tell stories. It’s not like I am in any real danger of earning a Pulitzer for my collected GunCrank columns.
That’s likely a good thing. I enjoy the best of both worlds. I get paid to write about stuff I like to do, but I’m not all weird and freaky about it. Ernest Hemingway, by contrast — amazing literary luminary that he was — came with a fair amount of emotional baggage. That was a package deal.
Greg Hemingway had an undeniably hard life. Public domain.
The Man
Papa Hemingway has been universally extolled as a paragon of American manliness. He served as an ambulance driver during World War I and was badly wounded in 1918. These sordid experiences formed the basis for “A Farewell to Arms.” In 1937, he got neck-deep in the Spanish Civil War. That led to “For Whom the Bell Tolls.”
During World War II, Hemingway conned his way into both the D-Day invasion and the liberation of Paris … as a civilian. He was in two airplane crashes and was a legendary hunter and fisherman.
In all, he published 28 books. But in addition to all of that great stuff, he was also a hard-drinking wild man who was legendarily tough to live with. The blowback from that extended throughout his family.
Greg Hemingway and his famous wordsmith dad Ernest had a strained relationship. Public domain.
Daddy Issues
Ernest Hemingway was married four times. His second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, was the mother of his two youngest sons, Patrick and Greg. Patrick attended Harvard and worked as a professional big game hunter, operating his own safari business in Tanzania for over a decade. He died in Bozeman, Montana, in 2025 at age 97. Greg, however, had a somewhat rougher time of it.
Greg struggled with gender issues from a very young age. If you think I am going to dive too deeply into that thorny space here, you have lost your mind. However, as regards pronouns, cut me some slack. Greg Hemingway never quite figured that bit out, either.
Greg went by “Gig” or “Gigi” as a child. He was an exceptional athlete and an accomplished marksman. However, starting about age 12, Greg began wearing his stepmother’s clothes.
When Ernest discovered this, he was rendered apoplectic. After one particularly fulminant exchange on the subject, the esteemed novelist calmed down and told his son, “Gigi, we come from a strange tribe, you and I.” However, his confrontation with Greg’s mother, Pauline, did not end quite so well.
In 1951, at age 19, Greg was arrested attempting to enter a woman’s restroom in a Los Angeles movie theater while wearing female clothing. Ernest and Pauline were divorced at the time, but this revelation resulted in a most extraordinary dustup over the phone.
Over the course of an hour, he vigorously berated Pauline, accusing her of being somehow responsible for Greg’s behavior. These accusations stung. The poor, unfortunate woman fell over dead the following day at age 56. Though she was later found to have had an undiagnosed adrenal tumor that might have played a role, her demise was attributed to an acute state of shock stemming from that livid telephonic trouncing.
Ernest Hemingway and his second wife Paula had their moments. Ernest screamed at her enough on the phone to literally kill the poor woman. Public domain.
Details
Greg served briefly in the military and later attended the University of Miami School of Medicine. He eventually underwent gender reassignment surgery in 1994 and took the name Gloria. However, he/she never found peace.
Greg Hemingway was married to four different women and fathered eight children. He carried a formal diagnosis of bipolar disorder and voluntarily underwent electroshock therapy in an effort to treat it.
When things were at their rockiest with his father, Greg retreated to Africa to shoot elephants. Of this time, he said, “I went back to Africa to do more killing. Somehow it was therapeutic.”
As Gloria, she penned a brutal letter to her father accusing him of having killed Pauline, something Ernest had accused her of doing as well. The following year, the esteemed novelist took his own life in Ketchum, Idaho. He was 61 years old.
Dysfunction On Display
There was clearly a genetic component to this sordid stuff. Five of Ernest’s immediate relatives committed suicide, including his father, brother, and two sisters. His granddaughter Margaux was a successful actress in her own right until she killed herself in 1996. This ignoble mess has been cumulatively referred to as the “Hemingway Curse.”
Gloria vacillated between gender roles while sinking ever deeper into drug abuse and alcoholism. She tried to obtain a license as a professional hunter in Africa but was denied due to her chemical dependency. She wrote a bestseller about her relationship with her father titled “Papa: A Personal Memoir.”
Gloria eventually died in 2001 at the age of 69 of cardiovascular disease while in the Miami-Dade Women’s Detention Center. She was incarcerated for indecent exposure and resisting arrest at the time. Buried next to Ernest in Ketchum, Idaho, the gravestone reads, “Dr. Gregory Hancock Hemingway 1931–2001.” It was a tragic end for a family of exceptional wordsmiths.
Artificial intelligence (AI) isn’t good at rendering firearms, and that’s probably not a bad thing, for reasons that will soon be explored. It should also be noted that while AI rendered guns isn’t good yet, it is likely to improve. That might not be a good thing either.
First, we need some background on what exactly AI is, or more accurately, what is generative AI. It has been in development for decades, but it was only in 2022 that generative AI entered the public consciousness with consumer-friendly programs.
Suffice it to say that generative AI, which includes OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google Gemini, among many others, is the evolution of technology that emerged in the 1960s and is something that is now used every day, again both for good and bad.
That’s not just in how it renders firearms.
AI can create visual artwork, compose music, write papers and stories, and produce other content. Students are using it as a shortcut with homework, and anyone who has been on social media has likely seen images and videos of varying quality. With a few prompts, which are written instructions, AI can generate content that just a few years ago would have taken design teams days, even weeks to produce.
However, there is a lot of “AI slop,” as in low-quality, mass-produced digital content that shows a lack of human effort. Such content is seemingly created — if created is really the right term — by those seeking to flood the Internet to exploit algorithms and to generate quick ad revenue on some platforms.
How AI Works
It is important to understand how AI images are generated. How “intelligent” AI actually is remains a matter of debate.
Generative AI is based on “Large Language Models” (LLMs), which are trained on massive datasets of text and code to recognize patterns. Although they can be effective at parsing data, solving logic puzzles and even summarizing lengthy documents, LLMs can also produce factually incorrect, nonsensical, or made-up information that may seem plausible.
AI generates images by “learning” patterns from billions of existing pictures and their accompanying text descriptions. This process is called diffusion. AI is very good at generating images of well-known objects, where the attributes, including dimensions, color, and other properties, are clearly described.
It would seem that AI, therefore, should be good at rendering firearms, but a search of social media tells a very different story. AI-generated images of firearms depict weapons that would be impossible to produce in the real world, much like the fantastical settings created by the late Dutch artist M.C. Escher.
In the case of firearms, LLMs and AI have no shortage of information to draw from, yet generative AI platforms still struggle because they lack a true 3D understanding of the underlying mechanics, resulting in nonsensical attachments, bent barrels, missing triggers, and incorrect magazine placement. AI is still treating firearms as abstract collections of shapes rather than focusing on the functional mechanisms. That has resulted in impossible geometry.
There are now Facebook Groups and Reddit subs devoted to sharing AI-generated firearm images that defy reality. Even when it gets the basics right, AI still misses some key details. Several factors are at play, but the most basic is that generate AI is based on algorithms, and many are far less “intelligent” than it might seem.
Guns And Media — It’s Never Been Accurate
It is further worth taking a step back and remembering that mainstream depictions of firearms have long been questionable. Consider firearms in comic books and video games as just two examples.
Writers of the former and developers of the latter would routinely ignore basic mechanics, notably magazine capacities and recoil, opting instead to treat firearms as versatile plot devices that are only as accurate or deadly as the story demands at any given moment.
Likewise, the World War II-based comic books of the 1960s didn’t bother to feature realistic depictions of the enemy. The Germans were often presented with big red swastikas on their helmets, carrying weapons that were not an accurate drawing of the MP-40. It was a version that fit the narrative, even if it was far from accurate.
Video games have, in recent years, gone to great lengths to get many details of modern firearms right, including the look and sound, yet other attributes are often still very wrong, notably the weight and recoil. The guns may look correct, but they way they are employed and operate is anything but accurate.
Lack of Instruction?
AI continues to struggle with firearms for some very simple reasons. There is an old saying among computer programmers: “Garbage in, garbage out,” which is the principle that the quality of a system’s output is directly linked to the quality of input. Flawed or low-quality data will produce equally flawed or useless results.
In the case of AI, the “garbage in” is the lack of clear instructions.
“One of the reasons that guns are not properly rendered in AI is in the details,” explained Roger Entner, founder and principal analyst at Recon Analytics. “AI is only as good as the instructions you give it.”
AI often needs more information and details than it is given. It can get the basic shapes right, but it still doesn’t understand the mechanics.
“Guns are such intricate tools, with minuscule differences that are huge,” Entner told The Armory Life. “Gun owners may know these things so intricately, but AI does not.”
That is a key point to consider. There is already massive confusion in the mainstream consciousness about the differences between a commercial AR-15 and the military M16, so how can we expect AI to know better?
AI doesn’t just fall short with firearms, but all sorts of things.
“AI isn’t good at depicting a Cadillac XTS from a Chevrolet Malibu,” said Entner.
There is also the issue of bias, and it is firearm enthusiasts who are likely to notice the rendering problems of AI when it comes to guns.
“AI really does render firearms poorly. Many details range from implausible to outright wrong. But in perspective, AI renders many objects poorly,” noted Dr. Jim Purtilo, associate professor of computer science at the University of Maryland.
“If someone in the firearm community notices it with guns more than with other objects, then this could well be another example of a selective attention bias, which is where people with a decided interest in a given object will be much more inclined to notice when details are wrong. Show a young man the photo of a pretty young girl, and he will never notice what is in the background. ‘What monster?’”
Such a selective attention bias has cropped up in cinema for years.
“Show an old war movie and the gun enthusiast will complain, ‘that’s not a rifle they used,’ the history aficionado will say, ‘that’s not how it happened,’ and the linguists will lament that characters used words that didn’t become common until the modern era. This illustrates our biases,” Purtilo told The Armory Life.
Still, the implausible images result from how AI generates them today. There is ample data on firearm attributes, but few descriptions of how everything connects. AI’s LLMs make a best guess, often with comedic results.
“Pictures are tougher for AI than we understand,” added Entner. “Generic descriptions of something to AI will generate a generic description. It is like asking a five-year-old to draw a Single Action Colt.”
AI is thus like a child, and it may not provide all the details unless pressed. Even then, it may not fully appreciate how things go together without further explanation.
“Said simply, the program is averaging all the details of its training images when deciding which features to include,” said Purtilo. “It might know that a firearm has sights, a shoulder stock, and attachments, but it doesn’t know how these details might depend on one another.
The average sight across all the images it analyzed might have been a scope, the average stock might have a pistol grip, and the average attachment might be a laser pointer — and that is how it gives you a Revolutionary War musket with pistol grip, high power optic, and laser pointer.”
The Barriers of AI
The current technical barriers are just one of the main reasons that AI is bad at rendering firearms. The other is policy. AI developers are already cautious about how AI can be used.
“On the technical side, guns are complex objects with very specific features. Because they are so specific and have many parts that can be rendered incorrectly, it’s easy for a human to identify them as incorrect, as AI is not good at replicating specific weapons,” said Dr. Cliff Lampe, professor of information and associate dean for academic affairs in the School of Information at the University of Michigan.
Lampe, who focuses on the study of misinformation in media, told The Armory Life that the policy reason is that many models specifically list firearms as a type of object to render poorly.
“You can imagine, for instance, that you don’t want to be able to have GenAI [generative artificial intelligence] create specific schematics for firearms. Different models may have different thresholds here as a matter of policy, but all of them will have some safety restrictions built in,” Lampe noted.
Microsoft’s Copilot and ChatGPT are now among the generative AI platforms that won’t even render a firearm if requested. Copilot won’t even render soldiers holding firearms. However, because of the rise in “AI slop,” it may be a good thing that AI can’t generate extremely accurate firearms in videos. No manufacturer would be happy to see their product — a car, gun, or something else — used irresponsibly in an AI-generated video.
For now, we may need to accept that AI doesn’t do guns well, just as comic writers and video game developers missed the mark in the past.
“I don’t know whether AI is more likely to generate silliness with firearms than other objects. But if so, then this may well reflect a selection bias in training materials,” Purtilo continued. “AI models are trained by ingesting a huge volume of raw content. The companies scrape pages from websites, books, social media, and more for this purpose.”
As Lampe noted, there is also the issue of policies that restrict many sites from including firearm images, which could impact how AI learns.
“This limits what material AI has for training,” said Purtilo. “If you can’t depict safe and responsible firearm use on the web, then no AI will be able to render images with safe and responsible use of firearms. Whatever it generates will be inherently gibberish.”
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by Lee Williams
United States Congressman Rob Bresnahan is a young newly elected Republican serving Pennsylvania’s Eighth Congressional District, which is located in the northeast portion of the state and includes Patrick Tate Adamiak’s home where his father lives.
Bresnahan is the CEO of a construction company with 150 employees. According to his bio, the Congressman lives with his wife Chelsea and a cat named Blue.
Last week, Congressman Bresnahan’s staffers refused to allow him to be interviewed about Patrick Tate Adamiak, the weeks of “Diesel Therapy” he was recently saved from, or the 50-plus stories we’ve written about his wrongful prosecution, conviction and imprisonment.
Just minutes after killing the interview, Bresnahan’s staffers immediately called Adamiak’s father and questioned him once again about his son’s plight. The Congressman’s staffers have been talking to him for months but have done nothing substantive.
“We have been trying to get them on board for a long time. I first spoke to one staffer who blew me off. Basically, they said they don’t want to get involved with legal cases,” Dave Adamiak said Monday. “I was shocked and a little aggravated being a constituent that they can’t help in any way. A few weeks later, I was in touch with a different staffer. He was a little more responsive and said he’d get back to us. He never did. When you posted the tweet that’s when I got another call. He claimed it had nothing to do with the tweet.”
Late Monday afternoon, Congressman Bresnahan’s communications director, Hannah Pope, called and said, “We are looking into this issue.”
She still would not allow her boss to be interviewed, saying “We’re still looking into this. Try checking back in a few weeks.”
Congressman Bresnahan did not respond to interview requests.
Here’s the tweet Dave Adamiak referred to:
As of Monday, when the U.S. Supreme Court denied certiorari to Adamiak’s case, the role any federal or state lawmaker can take to help the 38-year-old former active-duty sailor became even more important.
Pennsylvania State Senator Lisa Baker is running for re-election to represent District 20. Another Republican, her current term ends in November.
Baker, who served as deputy chief of staff for two former Republican governors, did not respond to calls or emails seeking her comments about Adamiak’s plight, but her opponent did.
Tyler Meyers describes himself as Christian, a conservative Republican and a U.S. Army veteran, who was born and raised in northeastern Pennsylvania.
Both he and his daughter appreciate guns and are strongly opposed to what happened to Adamiak.
“Tate was arrested for selling gun parts, but the ATF couldn’t actually pin any type of crime on him, so they manufactured charges against him, got him convicted and then sentenced to 20 years in prison,” Meyers said Monday. “Even though the current ATF Director seems opposed to it, it’s ridiculous Tate’s still in prison. There are groups trying to get him out, but they were told he’d be home by Christmas. My opponent, Lisa Baker, is supposedly a ‘Second Amendment champion,’ but she’s been silent on this issue. I heard the story about Tate a long time ago. It’s insane this has been allowed to get this far.”
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