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Lori Arnold is a major portion of the book Methland, which I recommend highly.

Edit - after reading the article, I recommend Methland over the first-person.

The mother of our next door neighbour in Tallinn drowned in this disaster.

I've sailed many times on this classic route.

Plenty of conspiracy theories about how it happened. A few people survived by swimming hours to land.

The author of this article, William Langewiesche, is great. I thoroughly recommend his book Fly By Wire: The Geese, The Glide, The 'Miracle' on the Hudson

I shuddered my way all the way through that to get to the end and realised I have the exact book referenced sitting on the shelf next to me. I tried to read a biography of Freeman several years ago, but the only time I had to read was right before bed. NOPE.

As far as preventing, this is the roadmap. It's telling that the media never covers this kind of information -- https://www.amazon.com/Rampage-Social-Roots-School-Shootings/dp/0465051049

I remember reading a gifted copy of Lance Armstrong's autobiography before the scandal broke (It's not about the Bike). I remember it being one of the most sanctimonious books I had ever read. One especially overwrought speech I still remember came from then-girlfriend Sheryl Crow after his cancer diagnosis but before his Tour de France winning streak. It went something like, "You're Lance Armstrong damnit, you're not the kind of person who just gives up. You get on that bike and fuckin' do it!" Turns out she had seen him doping a couple years before that speech.

It seems like the most status-quo worshiping have been disproportionately ensnared in scandal lately. Cosby, Rose, Halperin were among the most sanctimonious of their peers. Weinstein also used artistic prestige and political connections to fuel his complicity machine.

I skimmed over the Deadspin article a few days ago, but it's hard to have much sympathy for Armstrong. He really comes across as a sociopath who used first yellow jerseys and then charity as a bludgeon to shame and silence his critics.

> The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis

https://smile.amazon.com/Fifth-Risk-Michael-Lewis/dp/1324002646/

There was a really interesting Radio War Nerd episode on Lyme Disease recently, with a guest with Lyme disease who spent years researching it and wrote a book about the subject.

The book has generated enough awareness that last month there was a bipartisan amendment in the house to get the DoD to admit if it tested ticks as a potential biological weapon in the 50s through the 70s.

> For most of the 20th century, national news media had felt obliged to pursue and present some rough approximation of the truth rather than to promote a truth, let alone fictions. With the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine, a new American laissez-faire had been officially declared.

The story of Walter Duranty and the NYT is especially alarming because of suppression of other voices. George Orwell fought in the Spanish Civil War on the Republican side, but couldn't get his criticisms of the Stalinist a fair hearing in the UK. Malcolm Muggeridge managed to get uncensored reports of famine back to the UK in the diplomatic bag, where they languished.

> Before the web, it really wasn’t easy to stumble across false or crazy information convincingly passing itself off as true.

My mother used to believe her woman's magazines. I tried to explain that they are run on the cheap. The editor needs an article, perhaps ten ways to eliminate wrinkles, and a busy journalist makes shit up. Ta da! But she never got it. Written, printed, it was all true.

Actually it was much worse than that. The demonisation of dietary fat was based on slim, cherry picked evidence, but it was official - it was sometimes hard to discover an alternative to false or crazy information convincingly passing itself off as true.

I studied American History for O-level in 1976. What caused the Great Depression? As a school boy I had no access to alternatives to the "crisis of capitalism" narrative. Yet A Monetary History of the United States had been published 13 years earlier. The experts in government had screwed up, but in the 1970's the Zeitgeist favoured government experts, so the truth was slow to spread and weird shit such as "WWII revved up the economy and ended the Great Depression" was widely believed despite being bat-shit insane.

> But over the past few decades, a lot of the rabble they roused came to believe all the untruths. “The problem is that Republicans have purposefully torn down the validating institutions,” the political journalist Josh Barro, a Republican until 2016, wrote last year. “They have convinced voters that the media cannot be trusted; they have gotten them used to ignoring inconvenient facts about policy; and they have abolished standards of discourse.”

Having done some post-graduate research in statistics I'm aware of the replication crisis in psychology and medicine. The p-hacking scandal is part of it. The scientific journals are important validating institutions, but What has happened down here is the winds have changed When Susan T. Fiske doubled down on questionable research practices by condemning their critics as "methodological terrorists" she burned the credibility of the Association for Psychological Science to the ground. Republicans didn't do this. Academics did it to themselves.

"How America Went Haywire" is an interesting article because it fills in historical background going back to the 1960's. But much is missing. one example The Murray-GellMann amnesia effect. Another is the seminal work of Philip E. Tetlock.

Notice how the effects amplify each other. The mainstream media credulously report the mainstream experts. When the experts turns out to be wrong, ordinary folk know because, well, it gets a little subtle. The media report the news. Five years down the line the media are reporting more news, but they don't hold experts to account. The media don't say that old predictions are wrong, they print new predictions. Indeed they seduce the experts into making bold predictions; you need to be bold, to get published, and you can afford to be bold because you will not be held to account for you predictions.

Eventually ordinary people notice that things don't turn out the way they are supposed to and the credibility of both experts and media is lost. I'm not seeing Republican fingerprints on this.