The war on science is in full swing as evidenced by a clueless crackpot clown who managed to get his insecurity promoted by Netflix.

Unavoidable problems in his script were easily picked apart by experts, who also posed the question how someone so obviously wrong could be spread by Netflix.

Most glaring to scholars investigating the history of Hancock’s pseudoarchaeology is that while claiming to “overthrow the paradigm of history,” he doesn’t acknowledge that his overarching theory is not new.

Scholars and journalists have pointed out that Hancock’s ideas recycle the long since discredited conclusions drawn by U.S. Congressman Ignatius Donnelly in his book Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, published in 1882.

That’s a pretty damning blow, which should crush the bogus anti-science mysticism…again.

The problem however is that the mysticism is propaganda meant to be a gateway to violent hate crimes.

Like many forms of pseudoarchaeology, these claims act to reinforce white supremacist ideas, stripping Indigenous people of their rich heritage and instead giving credit to aliens or White people. […] This sort of “race science” is outdated and has long since been debunked, especially given the strong links between Atlantis and Aryans proposed by several Nazi “archaeologists.”

Factually debunking weaponized white grievance propaganda pushed by Netflix is unlikely to be enough to stop expansion of dangerous terrorist cells now who already cared not a whit about truth — trying to feed them science could backfire.

Netflix should have known better than to fertilize Nazis with this, as the damage and cleanup will be very expensive.

I’ve written before here (back in 2008!) that people consuming poisonous conspiracy may become more devout and extreme if a scientist dares to directly challenge such beliefs.

The easiest option now may be for Netflix to retract the show, explicitly condemn it, air a science-based refutation without promoting directly or as a response (send it to people who didn’t watch the hate propaganda yet)… and then donate all related proceeds to anti-hate organizations that help track the consequences of this hateful propagandist being aired.

Perhaps that doesn’t sound easy, but the alternative is much harder as the Hearst network realized watching Kristallnacht in 1938 after they had been promoting Hitler in the years prior.

Con artists like this attacking institutions are extremely dangerous when left unchallenged, especially ones like Elon Musk who attack institutions from within.

A million years ago (when I was at NASA working on security for people like physicists designing robotics for Mars) we talked about all the obstacles to swarms being successful.

Lately it seems like the script has been flipped and journalists are breathlessly warning that nothing can stop swarms.

In a decade or so we went from “can’t get swarms to flow” to “swarms can’t be stopped”. Both are exaggerating the truth.

The reality is somewhere in between, yet I fail to see anyone these days taking about the simple obstacle side of things.

In a 2014 lecture I was invited to give by the soon-to-be ill-fated head of Facebook security, for example, I gave specific examples of swarm countermeasures including illustrations.

More to the point, I had been asked to keynote a week of security training inside a huge silicon valley brand. My pitch was a move from synthesis to analysis; security teams must prepare immediately for an onslaught of inexpensive integrity attacks (realities of securing big data — my latest book).

I got a lot of nodding heads, right before I watched the newly minted head of Facebook security do the exact opposite. The integrity breaches he allowed, despite many direct warnings, are still known as the worst in history (facilitating atrocity crimes).

In later presentations I showed how swarm platforms like Waze were being countered and their agents redirected.

So here we are. The world is carping about horrible integrity attacks, just as I warned, and saying they will get worse. That’s progress. However, the preparation steps of a decade ago or more seem to be overlooked.

I guess it’s the ancient problem that stark fear sells far more than nuance of risk management.

“Sugar filling mouths can’t be stopped” gets more eyeballs than “brush your teeth twice a day” let alone “change your diet based on science”.

The kind of stuff the old NASA physicists would probably say is painfully obvious: Throw up strategic obstacles and a swarm may be frozen if not suicidal.

Very inexpensive, very effective. What’s not to like?

We need to talk far more about integrity, the stuff that makes quality, because most or even all swarms right now don’t have it.

The over emphasis on confidentially and availability counter-measures has been missing an obvious weak point in security’s three legged stool.

In fact we’re long past the point where people blandly demanding end-to-end encryption should be asked what exactly they’re doing about dangerous integrity breaches (to avoid repeating Facebook mistakes).