ISIS Leader al-Baghdadi dead, Washington Post eulogizes him

This headline actually ran at the WashPo website this morning. This is akin to a death notice to the effect of "Jeffrey Dahmer, noted connoisseur of banned dishes, dies at 34."

It was taken down after a storm of Twitter scorn, but... Why would a one-time pillar of American journalism do this? Are they just trying to troll President Trump, who took a victory lap this morning in an address to the country? They can't seriously consider one of the Muslim world's worst mass murderers to be a solemn student of theology, can they?

Here's the Commander in Chief:

President Trump, announcing the death of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, described him as dying "in a vicious and violent way, as a coward, running and crying.”

“He died like a dog, he died like a coward,” Trump said in a speech to the nation Sunday morning. ...

Trump said al-Baghdadi died while being chased down by U.S. forces in a tunnel, and that the ISIS leader was “whimpering and crying and screaming all the way.” 

Normal Americans are gladdened by this news. The Islamic State (ISIS) grew to fill the vaccum left when President Obama abruptly pulled U.S. combat troops from Iraq in August 2010. If you read the WashPo "obituary," you'd think that al-Baghdadi was just a reluctant, yet patriotic prophet-warrior:

When Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi took the reins of the Islamic State of Iraq in 2010, few had heard of the organization or its new leader, an austere religious scholar with wire-frame glasses and no known aptitude for fighting and killing. ...

The man who would become the founding leader of the world’s most brutal terrorist group spent his early adult years as an obscure academic, aiming for a quiet life as a professor of Islamic law. But the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 upended his plans and launched him on a course toward insurgency, prison and violent jihad.

He was born Ibrahim Awwad Ibrahim al-Badri in the central Iraqi city of Samarra on July 28, 1971. He grew up in a devout Sunni Muslim family that included several clerics and claimed to descend from the prophet Muhammad. That assertion later proved vital to Mr. Baghdadi’s efforts to anoint himself as “caliph,” or leader of the Islamic caliphate.

From his teens, he was fascinated with Islamic history and the intricacies of Islamic law. Acquaintances would remember him as a shy, nearsighted youth who liked soccer but preferred to spend his free time at the local mosque. ...

This is not just a background piece, designed by editors to give context to the man at the top of a brutal terrorist organization. It's an actual obituary. It's found in the Obits section, where you will also learn about the passing of a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, a famous artist known for using a broom to sweep paint across canvas and a scientist who studied the geology of the moon.

I'm starting to believe that this episode is just a poorly conceived troll job. Why?

It's certainly true that President Trump deeply offended al-Baghdadi's legacy and his (remaining) adherents. To say that he died in a cowardly fashion, being chased by dogs and crying at the end is a grave insult. Trump's words were carefully chosen to humiliate al-Baghdadi in death.

Local TV station falls for long debunked vaping myth UPDATE: Based on a spoof video?

Update: Here's a link to a spoof video that was published almost three years ago. Here's NBC 15's report on the subject. USA's "pulmonary expert" appears to have been taken in by an admitedly convincing parody of A&E's "Intervention" reality TV series.

Read this quote from Dr. Karen Fagan, a pulmonary expert at USA. Then check out the video.

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"It boils down to science.

" 'It was originally described in a single patient, who described that he loves the smell of buttery popcorn, so he would pop it and inhale it multiple times a day,' Fagan explained."

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Original post follows.

Bless their hearts. In the grips of hysteria over recent health problems caused by idiots doing what idiots do, NBC 15's Cassie Fambro has rushed to press with a fearful warning about a myth that was thoroughly debunked years ago. It's the dreaded 'Popcorn Lung Disease!'

I can't bring myself to link to the story--I have a policy against publishing or promoting known falsehoods. What I will do is set the record straight with a little help from a real pulmonary expert. The text below is excerpted from a piece that ran in the Daily Caller four years ago.

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"[A]ccording to Dr. Michael Siegel, professor in the Department of Community Health Sciences at Boston University School of Public Health, the Harvard study has several “glaring omissions,” and the level of diacetyl exposure from vaping compared with smoking differs by “orders of magnitude.”

Siegel, who has spent 25 years in the field of tobacco control, points out the study published in the journal “Environmental Health Perspectives” didn’t even mention that regular cigarettes contain diacetyl, and in far greater amounts than any e-liquids.

Looking at the numbers, Siegel found “daily exposure to diacetyl from smoking is therefore 750 times higher, on average than exposure to diacetyl from vaping.” Vapers are, on average, exposed to a daily dose of nine micrograms of diacetyl, compared with 6,718 micrograms for smokers.

But the evidence gets worse for sensationalist headline writers and anti-vaping activists. “The ‘worst’ e-cigarette tested produces diacetyl exposure that is 85 times lower than that of the ‘worst’ cigarette tested,” says Siegel. The e-cigarette liquid with the highest level of diacetyl in the Harvard study exposed vapers to just 239 micrograms against 20,340 micrograms for heavy smokers.

Bronchiolitis obliterans is known as “popcorn lung” because it was identified in workers who inhaled the artificial butter flavor used to make microwavable popcorn. Some cases of popcorn lung have been so damaging that patients have required a lung transplant.

But vapers have little reason to worry about the relatively trivial levels of diacetyl in e-cigarettes compared to tobacco cigarettes.

Not only is the risk of diacetyl exposure far lower for vapers than for smokers, but according to Critical Reviews in Toxicology, “smoking has not been shown to be a risk factor for bronchiolitis (popcorn lung).”
...

“There’s a lot of effort out there to demonize electronic cigarettes and a lot of research attempting to identify the risk, which is fine, we need to know what the risks are, but the reporting of the research I think has been very biased.
“What this really does is undermine the public’s appreciation of how severe the risks of smoking is. What it’s basically telling ex-smokers who’ve quit, using e-cigarettes, is you might as well go back to smoking.”

...

“I think the media is reporting what is being presented to them. What we’re seeing is not the media going wild, what we’re seeing is the anti-smoking movement misrepresenting the data to the media.

“The [study’s] authors and the groups that are putting out this information are responsible for the way the results are portrayed to the public and the way that the results are interpreted. We’ve seen multiple examples of perfectly valid data that are just completely distorted.”

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This is a fairly common problem. Members of the media know next to nothing about vaping so they reach out to purported 'experts,' who usually turn out to be sycophants for groups who demand nothing short of complete nicotine abstinence.

The British Government is years ahead of its U.S. counterpart.

The popcorn lung myth comes up a lot. So often, that there is a satirical twitter account named for it The American Popcorn Lung Association.

Perhaps the biggest problem is that media types rarely reach out to vapers, many of whom have stories to tell about how vaping allowed them to finally stop smoking tobacco. Like your beloved blogger, who is now more than two years tobacco free.

Sports journalism is in the toilet

Maybe it’s time to flush.

Quick… name the hottest three stories covered by major sports media outlets since the BCS Championship Game on January 7, 2013? How about these: Manti Te’o’s undead fake girlfriend, AJ McCarron’s hot girlfriend and her budding fame and a bunch of horse puckey about two snake oil salesmen peddling deer antler spray, holographic chips and “Beam Ray” bulbs.

It’s probably just a coincidence that all three of these ridiculous topics somehow involve players from the two teams that met in Miami last month, right?

When once respected media outlets like Sports Illustrated and ESPN are chasing down leads on stories that would be spiked by the National Enquirer, what does it say about the quality of today’s sports media?

When gossip websites like Deadspin and TMZ have better sourced and better researched articles than credentialed journalists purporting to provide objective news and analysis, one has to wonder if the latter hasn’t replaced the former as legitimate and trustworthy outlets.

Do sportswriters really want to do pieces like the Sports Illustrated story on SWATS? Do their editors really enjoy signing off on reports about the sexual orientation of the admitted Te’o hoaxer and his victim?

Seriously?

What should have been the biggest story in the month of January was Lance Armstrong and his confession to having used performance enhancing drugs during his multiple Tour de France wins. That got some press, but it has been dwarfed by the SWATS garbage. Here’s a blockbuster about a disgraced former champion who admits to using performance enhancing drugs and it’s being ignored in favor of a story about two guys peddling alleged performance enhancing drugs, despite the fact that respected scientists and researchers adamantly dismiss their products as so much snake oil.

Stir in the hoopla created by the revelation that the heartwarming story of Manti Te’o’s star crossed love affair that wasn’t and the Armstrong story is buried in the signal-to-noise ratio.

There is a reason you haven’t seen much bandwidth wasted on Te’o’s holographic girlfriend, SWATS’ holographic frequency chips and the very real and very lovely Ms. Webb’s meteoric rise in popularity.

It’s not news. They’re all non-stories. These are punch lines to potty room jokes but they’re being pushed as major news topics.

What about Mark Emmert’s recent revelation that the NCAA violated its own rules when conducting the Miami enforcement investigation?

Yawn.

Wait? What? Manti Te’o’s hoaxer may be gay and was deeply in love with his victim? Rush to print and get Katie Couric on line one, please.

Disgusting.

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TCU’s Del Conte chooses words poorly, hysteria ensues

The conference realignment feeding frenzy has gotten to the point where someone is gonna get hurt. peaking at an event in Lubbock, TX, TCU Athletic Director Chris Del Conte was heard saying that the Big 12 was so vibrant that it has “schools like Florida State, Clemson and Miami trying to get in." 

There have been rumors for weeks that the new ACC media deal left some of the conference’s premier football members feeling shortchanged enough to start looking elsewhere. That was further fueled by 247Sports’ Florida State crew announcing that FSU and Clemson had informed the ACC that they were exploring options. That story remains unconfirmed. Today’s Morning Six Pack noted a story in which a CBS Sports reporter attempted to conflate a discussion between the Big 12 and Notre Dame on Olympic Sports with a full fledged courting of the storied football power.

People are stretching for stories and sooner or later, the credibility axe is going to fall on an overextended neck. So, when Del Conte issued his [ahem] “confirmation” that three of the biggest football powers in the ACC were scaling the walls of the Big 12, the innerwebs went BOOM.

“Not so fast” says Stefan Stevenson, the TCU beat writer for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Del Conte says he was referring to how the Big 12 had grown in stature since last year—when the 2011 realignment craze looked like it was about to gut the league—and was using the rumors of interest from ACC schools as an illustration of how things changed.

Whether you believe he’s simply walking back comments that accidentally provided the story-starved media with red meat or you believe he’s clarifying marks that were misunderstood doesn’t matter. What does matter is that in this hyper-reactive environment, doesn’t it make sense to wait until the suits call a presser before you rearrange the pieces on the board?

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