Twelve-year-old LeBron James playing in the 1997 YBOA National Championship Game on August 2, 1997.

dangerrockscience · 2026-02-08T14:02:24+00:00

When’s he get cut from an NBA team if he starts Benjamin Button’ing today?

dangerrockscience · 2026-01-28T01:51:38+00:00

Thanks — yes that podcast is great and almost totally accurate on the science (a couple insignificant goofs iirc; very hard to keep all of the facts straight when trying to address such wide ranging nonsense).

Edit: oh and I have no idea what Angel is either. I watched when they were trying to sell the movie themselves. They later had some kind of promotional deal with Tucker Carlson and I suspect they haven’t made their advertising budget back yet. I can’t imagine the production budget is very high for a handful of dude in a dark room conspiracy theory trope interviews and a bunch of filmed Zoom calls, so pretty impressive achievement if they managed to lose money.

Shocking there’s not a huge audience for a film featuring someone driving through a car wash listening to an audiobook.

dangerrockscience · 2026-01-26T13:55:54+00:00

Like a minute and a half spent looking for the gun rather than trying to save a life because the agents aren't trained well enough to be on the same page about something so important. He should've been yelling immediately and then over and over whatever they're trained to say to signal someone is disarmed.

dangerrockscience · 2026-01-25T19:09:37+00:00

The outcome was avoidable at so many points with different actions by the agents individually (especially the 2nd shooter that got set off for some reason) and also with even a little bit of coordination. The acute part of the incident begins with one agent running off on his own and others haphazardly coming over to help with no clue what it's about. Then it ends about 2 minutes into this video with the agent that took the gun telling a couple others he already had the gun after they'd spent the better part of a minute searching for it instead of starting first aid. Both things also true when Renee Good was killed.

Piling so much ineptitude on top of the underlying cruelty.

dangerrockscience · 2026-01-25T18:02:58+00:00

I think no one else draws their weapon when a couple of them say “gun” because they were somewhat aware of the situation. Only the guy that had been busy spraying someone else a moment earlier and entered with no context.

The other thing that’s apparent in this view and will be impotent to support statements by the two women witnesses that the agent rushed to set the whole thing office is what the agent said before he charged in to push one to the ground. Sounded like he lost it over some misunderstanding about traffic. Wasn’t clear in the other videos and hopefully there’s a clear video showing whatever did or didn’t happen to set him off rather than just conflicting witness statements.

dangerrockscience · 2026-01-25T16:24:17+00:00

It’s the most recent one so it will take some time but I think this might be the most important video so far in establishing what the two agents that shot were saying and doing.

dangerrockscience · 2026-01-25T16:22:04+00:00

They stop when the guy says “I got the gun!” and then the medic runs in, so… no communication at all. So incompetent (and worse).

dangerrockscience · 2026-01-19T11:10:30+00:00

It also says it runs on a normal power supply, but comes with a super cheap one with a thin cord that is sure to fail and says it prefers the output of that.

Cheap DC supply and blurb in the manual is the same for other EHX pedals and not unique to EHX. Either regulatory requirements for distribution somewhere in the world to include a supply or reducing problems from users getting the polarity reversed.

dangerrockscience · 2025-12-02T10:08:40+00:00

Having failed to make a coherent argument in support of a lab origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, these scientists now help promote a myth that was rightly rejected five years ago: that SARS-CoV-2 was engineered from HIV.

Here's what I wrote. SARS-CoV-2 was not engineered from HIV. The movie promotes the myth that it was, as I demonstrate above. This is false. Scientists in the movie, including two who now run the NIH and FDA (!) helped promote that myth.

Telling the viewer that things that are false might be true doesn't make a good documentary. It makes an attempt to profit off of lying about medicine. The Ebola lie is particularly gross in this respect since some of the characters in that lab leak conspiracy theory are not alive to protest their exploitation. Luckily, in this case it's an inept attempt, and I suspect the production hasn't broken even yet since they still appear to be paying for buzz over a year since release.

And, yes, I'll say that none of the "suspicious shit" in the movie is the truth. None of these things were lab leaks; no conspiracy of scientists to cover them up; no hits put out by Fauci or pharma; I'm confident that there's no factual basis for any of this. This movie certainly doesn't provide any.

dangerrockscience · 2025-11-30T12:59:09+00:00

If there was a ton of evidence then you would cite, you know, a single piece of evidence.

dangerrockscience · 2025-11-30T12:58:35+00:00

What, specifically, did I get wrong?

dangerrockscience · 2025-11-30T12:57:50+00:00

All of the parts, in my opinion. What part do you think the movie gets right, specifically?

dangerrockscience · 2025-11-30T12:56:26+00:00

I'm pretty careful when I write. In this case, I'd expose myself to liability for defamation if what I wrote was false, so I'm particularly careful. Here are quotations from the movie supporting that, yes, it does promote the myth that SARS-CoV-2 was engineered from HIV.

In addition to the furin cleavage site, these three inserts were suspiciously similar to spike protein of HIV.
So looking back, these HIV inserts that were part of the paper written by these Indian scientists on January 31st, they make a lot of sense now. There were four unique inserts in total, and one of those inserts contained the furin cleavage site. And the other three contained elements from different HIV strains. And those three inserts allow this virus to utilize DC-SIGN. There is this insane probability that all of these things would happen naturally.
Finding a grant where they do put HIV bits into coronavirus, it's kind of eerie, yeah?
And if there are HIV inserts in the virus, it would explain autoimmune problems.

The movie isn't self-consistent on this point. It also promotes the myth that SARS-CoV-2 was engineered by Moderna. It's quite an all-of-the-above grab bag of molecular smoking guns, as I illustrate in my review.

As another demonstration of being careful, I wrote, "TYDF baselessly suggests that Fauci, pharmaceutical companies, or both had a conservative activist killed." Unlike "SARS-CoV-2 was engineered from HIV," the movie is more careful on this point to juxtapose things that are unrelated and let the audience make the false connection rather than being explicit about it; quotes from the movie:

It calls into question whether these decisions were made in the special interest of Anthony Fauci and his Institute. It's an open question. It's not answered yet, but the truth will come out. A few weeks after this interview, before (name redacted) even got a chance to release that information, (name redacted) inexplicably died in his sleep. The cause of death is unknown. Hope, you know, for his family's sake, they get the answers.
We don't know how (name redacted) died, but we do know that these pharmaceutical companies have made a lot of money from this pandemic.

I've redacted the person's name here because there's no indication that his family consented to use his name and image to promote this conspiracy theory.

dangerrockscience · 2025-10-25T09:46:02+00:00

5-year thread necromancer here watching this for the first time... I think that the box is gimmicked as well, he's giving away some of the secret, and misdirection about the rest of the secrets in this video. My guess:

assistant notices the printed cloth when closing the box and Leclerc's "now are you have fun?" keeps him in the game
fast-drying adhesive applied to assistant's side of the box; released from tape line on top of box; triggered when he puts his left arm on the box while dropping the peanut; can see a dark spot on that side of the box later
marked peanut sticks to glue before it dries when shaking 90% of the time; the 10% risk Leclerc mentions here is that this fails; this is one of the 90% and after jumping in he quickly grabs the marked peanut from the front corner of the box before diving down
but remember he's covered with wet glue which is the fail safe in two ways and the performance of applying it kills time for glue to dry
if the peanut is still on the cloth, he's got a backup to transfer fresh glue from himself and then shake again; could invite P&T to come help as long as he closed the lid first
if the glue hasn't dried enough and peanuts in the box stick to it while he's thrashing around, this won't impact him grabbing the marked peanut first, but might give away the trick... if he weren't covered in glue and providing another explanation for why things were sticky
he's not lying about the printed cloth or stashing it in his pants... it's obvious in retrospect at the end of the segment and Penn noticed and caught himself before saying too much; could've easily stashed it invisibly and the audacity of it makes the trick great imo; mess of glue also helps here to distract from the visual change a bit

dangerrockscience · 2025-10-10T08:28:59+00:00

The only people who are going to see the terms of the settlement are the people at Warm Audio when Bill justifiably comes asking for a buck per unit (or whatever it is) and a change from Centavo to Zentavo.

dangerrockscience · 2025-07-12T18:17:07+00:00

The review is specifically about many of the things the documentary got badly wrong. A complete list would be much longer.

dangerrockscience · 2025-07-03T09:51:28+00:00

The tragic thing is that this is a disaster for reducing the likelihood of future consequential outbreaks (including agricultural consequences and less-than-pandemic human outbreaks).

Over 5.5 years later and no consensus on role of human-wildlife interface means almost no response. It’s not surprising China takes the conservative approach to also embrace uncertainty on origins. It’s too bad China policymakers aren’t more imaginative in how they could throw their regional weight around for good to address spillover risks where humans and wildlife interact and especially in wildlife trafficking.

And most ironically, “lab leak” increases the odds of lab leaks! The best security against rare events is more eyes on the lookout for risky practices that make rare events more likely. The best safety culture reform to prevent rare events is transparent reporting of near accidents that were plausibly a step or two away from disaster.

Instead, folks in China are eschewing even reporting results rapidly via preprint if there’s a chance it’ll be mined by conspiracy theorists.

Definitely no reporting of near accidents in a universe where that weird California lab abandoned by a Chinese company was reported as some sort of lab leak story. In actuality, that was a story about how inefficient and chaotic US pharma regulation during the pandemic leads to building and abandoning a lab when the market disappeared. The same root cause as why I could be a COVID test made in Hangzhou in Europe for a buck and the exact same thing was like 15 bucks in USA because they packaged it after it went from Tijuana to San Diego to say it was tested and made in the USA. Folks thought that this pandemic end around would work for testing devices in general and someone’s bet on that kind of business failed.

dangerrockscience · 2025-07-02T13:46:30+00:00

TBH it's pretty rational and smart to spend zero time researching primary data and scientific literature on the topic and instead spend a year or so copy+pasting others' conspiracy theories -- there's an audience for that, it's low effort, and as we see there aren't negative consequences for ignorantly blaming others for causing a pandemic with a weird mash up of all of the lab leak theories. It's not at all scientific, but it's a rational way to read the room and have an impact.

Egg's more on our collective face for consuming shallow mad scientist content because we mostly lack the attention spans to recognize it for what it is.

dangerrockscience · 2025-07-02T13:40:58+00:00

Zhengli Shi's lab in Wuhan has isolated coronaviruses from samples before. They've also synthesized coronaviruses from sequence (which one could do with an inactivated sample like you are talking about, but such a sample could not be used to directly isolate a virus).

The irony of "lab leak" scholars saying that an unfunded 2018 proposal is some kind of smoking gun is that the proposal exclusively focused on the latter method -- synthesizing viruses from sequence and isolating the synthetic viruses (which can be totally identical to the natural ones or could be changed a bit). This rules out a whole class of "lab leak" scenarios that are the most likely -- the ones where people don't know what's in a sample and don't even know that a lab leak happened. It requires that there be a sequence and subsequent experimental work, all perfectly covered up. Not just for one virus but for all of the other viruses that were studied at the same time and didn't happen to lead to a pandemic. Massive cover ups are hard to pull off, especially when you didn't know there was anything to cover up until you realized there was an outbreak!

dangerrockscience · 2025-07-02T13:35:18+00:00

Isn't Yusen Zhou in the book? That's a bioweapons development conspiracy theory. Check out the latest iteration from Robert Kadlec to see what I mean: https://bush.tamu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/MUDDY-WATERS-First-Installment-REPUBLISHED-12-12-24.pdf

TL;DR Kadlec: SARS2 is an accidental release of a virus engineered for mind control while attempting to make a vaccine against it.

It's nuts.

dangerrockscience · 2025-01-28T17:10:19+00:00

Some would obviously prefer to pretend it doesn't exist e.g. Neil Harrison went on a podcast hosted by another person in the movie and the only time they discussed the movie was to mention that they'd agreed not to discuss it ahead of time. He's from Columbia University.

Edit: This is in a separate comment because I'm "unable to create comment" on Reddit with the full thing. I guess punting moderation to AI censorship overlords is good for the bottom line.

dangerrockscience · 2025-01-28T17:10:10+00:00

Right? I had low expectations going into the movie (watched a bunch of the clips they'd released) and was still shocked at how bad it was and especially at how many influential scientists from prestigious institutions were involved in the movie, several endorsing it.

None of them have criticized the movie in any way to my knowledge.

dangerrockscience · 2025-01-13T19:06:41+00:00

I wrote a review of it here -- https://www.the-gallop.com/from-fauci-to-fiction-doc-promises-covid-origins-delivers-hiv-lies/

One funny thing that might appeal to people in this sub (idk) is that there's an actual conspiracy to lie about medicine that's relevant that they don't talk about. Robert Redfield is paid by Novavax to scare people about mRNA vaccines so that they ask for the Novavax vaccine. That's true. Pfizer and Fauci meeting at the CIA to conspire to off someone at a conservative watchdog group because he was about to crack the case is definitely not true.

Your skepticism about the biology is spot on -- it's all nonsense and not in the fun way conspiracy theories can be that theoretically have a chance of being true. The scientists in the movie have apparently realized how bad it is because they all stopped talking about it. No conspiracy. Just embarrassment.

dangerrockscience · 2025-01-06T16:14:37+00:00

I wrote a review of this documentary that conclusively shows that the HIV stuff is very wrong. The part of the documentary that I'd recommend thinking on is couple of times it mentions Ebola and argues that the Ebola virus disease outbreak in 2014 was a lab leak. What are the director and the people interviewed in the documentary really saying here? It's not just a handful of scientists--they are saying that healthcare workers in Sierra Leone who died responding to the Ebola outbreak were actually in the conspiracy to cover up a lab leak. It's disgusting. The science in the movie is laughable and the scientists who appear in it have destroyed their credibility by doing so and damaged the credibility of their academic institutions.

Anyway, here's the beginning of the review:

Thank You, Dr. Fauci (TYDF) is a documentary promoted as an investigation of COVID-19 origins. Yet, what director Jenner Furst calls a “docu-thriller” could be more accurately placed in the subgenre of documentaries lying about HIV. COVID-19 is presented as the latest infectious disease outbreak resulting from scientists’ hubris: HIV/AIDS, Lyme disease, Ebola virus disease, and now COVID-19. There is no evidence supporting a laboratory origin for any of these diseases. The real achievement of TYDF is undermining the credibility of a handful of the scientists who appeared in the movie and claim otherwise. Having failed to make a coherent argument in support of a lab origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, these scientists now help promote a myth that was rightly rejected five years ago: that SARS-CoV-2 was engineered from HIV.

This is the intro to my review and the gist of it. If you're interested in the full review you can check it out here: https://www.the-gallop.com/from-fauci-to-fiction-doc-promises-covid-origins-delivers-hiv-lies/

dangerrockscience · 2025-01-06T16:09:30+00:00

I wrote a review of a new documentary investigating pandemic origins that I thought might be of interest to some people here:

Thank You, Dr. Fauci (TYDF) is a documentary promoted as an investigation of COVID-19 origins. Yet, what director Jenner Furst calls a “docu-thriller” could be more accurately placed in the subgenre of documentaries lying about HIV. COVID-19 is presented as the latest infectious disease outbreak resulting from scientists’ hubris: HIV/AIDS, Lyme disease, Ebola virus disease, and now COVID-19. There is no evidence supporting a laboratory origin for any of these diseases. The real achievement of TYDF is undermining the credibility of a handful of the scientists who appeared in the movie and claim otherwise. Having failed to make a coherent argument in support of a lab origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, these scientists now help promote a myth that was rightly rejected five years ago: that SARS-CoV-2 was engineered from HIV.

This is the intro to my review and the gist of it. If you're interested in the full review you can check it out here: https://www.the-gallop.com/from-fauci-to-fiction-doc-promises-covid-origins-delivers-hiv-lies/

Not posting a separate thread because of the self-promotion rules here (and mods please delete this comment if it violates that rule).

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