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Welcome to the Bogosity Podcast for the week of November 2nd 2025,
the podcast that made Gilligan dress as a girl.
This is your host, Shane Killian. Let's denotate the News of the Bogus.
If you're on any social media at all,
you can't have escaped the controversy of SNAP benefits ceasing due to the government shutdown.
Of course, Congressman and Senators are still getting full pay and benefits...
Yeah, it's one of the ways they have of deliberately making the so-called "shutdown"
felt by the greatest number of people
without actually having to shut down anything they feel is actually important,
all so people will blame the other party.
SNAP is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program,
the food stamps used by 42 million Americans who, on average, get about $187 a month.
It goes on a card that can only be spent on food that hasn't been heated.
SNAP's website now reads:
"Senate Democrats have now voted 12 times to not fund the food stamp program.
Bottom line, the well has run dry.
At this time, there will be no benefits issued November 1.
We are approaching an inflection point for Senate Democrats.
They can continue to hold out for healthcare for illegal aliens and gender mutilation procedures
or reopen the government so mothers, babies, and the most vulnerable among us
can receive critical nutrition assistance."
Although Republicans have a majority in both the House and the Senate,
under Senate rules a minority can block passage of a bill unless the majority gets 60 votes to override it.
Republicans have 53 seats to the Democrats' 47, and each time the vote has been split along party lines.
Democrats are accusing the Trump Administration of not releasing contingency funds to keep SNAP going,
but the US Department of Agriculture, who runs the SNAP program, released a memo that said, quote:
"SNAP contingency funds are only available to supplement regular monthly benefits
when amounts have been appropriated for, but are insufficient to cover, benefits."
"Instead, the contingency fund is a source of funds for contingencies, such as the Disaster SNAP program,
which provides food purchasing benefits for individuals in disaster areas,
including natural disasters like hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods, that can come on quickly and without notice.
For example, Hurricane Melissa is currently swirling in the Caribbean and could reach Florida.
Having funds readily available allows the USDA to mobilize quickly in the days and weeks following a disaster."
They explained that using the funds to cover SNAP would transfer money away from child nutrition programs,
which provide funds for school lunches and infant formula.
They put the blame on Democrats for not passing the Continuing Resolution
that would have provided funding to the program. Quote:
"Due to Congressional Democrats' refusal to pass a clean continuing resolution,
approximately 42 million individuals will not receive their SNAP benefits come November 1st.
This jeopardizes all SNAP recipients in November,
including those that have applied for benefits in the last half of October,
and furloughed Federal employees who will not receive their combined October/November benefits."
That didn't stop two federal district judges from again overstepping their authority
to order the Administration to use the contingency funds for SNAP.
So what do they expect the USDA to do if there's a much bigger problem coming through,
that the contingency funds are supposed to be used for?
We just had the Category 5 Melissa blow through!
What about the next hurricane or typhoon or earthquake or whatever?
Contingency funds are for contingencies.
That's probably too high a concept for the mental capacity of federal judges.
The problem is, federal district judges have no authority whatsoever over federal spending.
Contingency and discretionary spending is 100% under the control of the Executive,
and judges can only operate in the Judicial branch.
Of course, one of these is the same judge who tried to block Congress from defunding Planned Parenthood.
Seriously, the Supreme Court just needs to grow a pair and smack them down!
The main problem is completely visible on the socials.
Theoretically, SNAP is supposed to be a safety net, a temporary measure to keep families fed during hard times.
But what we see on TikTok and other video media sites
are complaints from people who openly say they are using SNAP as a lifestyle,
a regular household budget item they're entitled to.
Many of them go even further and claim they're going to just steal food from stores,
and are encouraging others to do so as well.
Here, we see the fallacy of the welfare state laid bare—and this is by design.
Instead of being a safety net, it's become a program of entitlement and dependency,
locking in millions of Americans to poverty that,
unlike any period in American history before, became generational.
Which is exactly why Thomas Sowell called it, "The biggest and most deadly tax rate on the poor."
Presenting: the greatest game this side of Yuggoth!
You are H.P. Lovecraft's cat, and your name is Ni***
...Right. We can't say that on a podcast. Anyway, that's the point: Your name is a joke to him.
So now, you are out for revenge!
Using the Necronomicon, you come to the present day to buy a gun
to go vanquish him once and for all.
But the Necronomicon is devious, and it summoned Lovecraft's monsters as well.
Now, in a crumbling world, you must fight for the revenge you seek.
Fight monsters. Gain allies. Buy guns and armor for yourself and your team.
Defeat the bosses of each level.
Then get your revenge against Lovecraft himself.
Play Lovecraft's Cat! The link is at cat.bogosity.tv.
Yeah, we're doing cat.bogosity.tv, not...that other one.
What, you want me to get kicked off the Internet or something?
One of the disturbing trends we've been seeing recently in lawsuits
is the threat to freedom and fair use that come from anti-scraping actions.
For decades, courts have recognized that scraping of public data on the Internet is legal,
but in particular with the AI lawsuits,
it seems the big content cartels are making another go at stopping web crawlers,
search engines, archives, and other public data repositories.
Now, Reddit has sued Perplexity AI for scraping its public data,
yet another in a series of cases where companies have been trying to wall off the open Internet.
What's unique—and disturbing—about this is its novel twisting of copyright law
that could completely break how the web operates.
The complaint isn't that they're scraping Reddit, it's that they're scraping Google's scraping of Reddit,
and in so doing, violating the anti-circumvention clause of the DMCA.
Google isn't a party to the lawsuit, and Reddit is making no claim against them.
Reddit said in their complaint:
"These tools are aimed at bypassing two levels of security:
First, evading Reddit's own anti-scraping measures,
and second, circumventing Google's controls
and scraping Reddit content directly from Google's search engine results.
In a very real sense, these Defendants are similar to would-be bank robbers,
who, knowing they cannot get into the bank vault, break into the armored truck carrying the cash instead."
Yes, that's every bit as batshit crazy as it sounds!
And, of course, they filed it in the Southern District of New York.
The start of it is that Reddit signed a $60 million scraping deal with Google.
That's sketchy enough to begin with, since Reddit doesn't own the copyright on forum posts; the users who posted it do.
Add to that, the deal includes a guarantee that Reddit
will get at least a certain amount of traffic from Google search results.
They've been using that agreement to ask money from other AI providers,
while at the same time insisting on more money and traffic from Google.
The next issue is: Perplexity didn't scrape anything for AI!
It's an AI that operates as an intelligent search engine,
but its LLMs are based on open source LLMs including Llama and Mistral.
It was actually the first to combine a traditional search engine with an LLM
to provide both answers to queries and links to the sources,
something most other search engines now have as well.
The only scraping they've ever done is the traditional old-fashioned way search engines have always done.
So basically, when an answer to a user query comes from and links to a Reddit post, Reddit wants to be paid for it.
And although this is exactly how the open Internet has always worked and is supposed to work,
Reddit is turning that into something nefarious. Quote:
"They do so by masking their identities, hiding their locations,
and disguising their web scrapers as regular people (among other techniques)
to circumvent or bypass the security restrictions meant to stop them.
For example, during a two-week span in July 2025, Defendants SerpApi, Oxylabs, and AWMProxy
circumvented Google's technological control measures and automatedly accessed, without authorization,
almost three billion search engine results pages containing Reddit text, URLs, images, and videos."
That isn't in any way circumvention!
Yes, this is their old favorite, Section 1201 of the DMCA,
which they try to make everything fit because there's no fair use defense for it.
And advocates of the open Internet have been talking for decades about how it's commonly abused,
how it threatens innovation, and how it should be completely and utterly abolished.
They want Section 1201 to say that anything you do to access a copyrighted work
is automatically a copyright infringement even if the use of the copyrighted content isn't infringing at all.
All they have to do is show that it violates a "technological control measure" of some kind,
which, as I recently covered regarding the RIAA cases against Suno and Udio,
could be something as simple as hitting the F12 key and manually copying a link!
In the past, Section 1201 has been used to stop Linux DVD players,
cheaper inkjet cartridges, even cheaper garage door openers.
In this case, they want it to mean getting scraped data from a search engine instead of from the site directly.
And they're doing it by claiming that it's Google's TCM that they're bypassing, even though Google isn't even a party!
Add to that the fact that they're making this claim over content that they hold no copyright over whatsoever,
and you have what is quite possibly the most insane DMCA case since its inception!
And in an unbelievable act of chutzpah, they even brag in the filing itself that they're champions of the open Internet!
Quote: "Because Reddit has always believed in the open internet,
it takes its role as a steward of its users' communities, discussions, and authentic human discourse seriously.
Through this action, Reddit seeks to end Defendants' circumvention
of security measures protecting Reddit data,
blatant misuse of Reddit content, and disrespect for its users' rights,
all of which harm Reddit and its hundreds of thousands of authentic human communities."
They also filed: "Reddit believes in an open internet,
but it does not believe that third parties have a right to misuse public content just because it's public."
Well, then, you don't believe in the open Internet, do ya???
No, this is extortion, plain and simple. And if it succeeds, no website anywhere will be safe.
If you're on the Wi-Fi in a coffee shop or hotel,
anyone on that network can get access to your traffic.
Do you really trust all of those strangers?
For that matter, do you really trust your ISP?
A VPN can protect you from prying eyes, disguise your location, and even foil government censors.
It's essential in this day and age, so go to vpn.bogosity.tv and you'll be taken to BoxPN.
Starting at just $2.99/month,
you can get unlimited high-speed connections to VPN servers all over the world,
and they don't log connections so your privacy is assured.
Travelling abroad, just VPN home and don't worry about what those other governments are doing.
Back at home, stop your ISP from traffic-shaping
and messing with the quality internet access you're paying good money for.
You can connect from multiple machines at once, including your smartphone or tablet,
and it supports all the secure standards including OpenVPN and SSTP.
Bypass censors and surveillance with your own secure VPN connection. Go to vpn.bogosity.tv.
It's pretty much an unspoken but agreed-upon rule: if you want a civilization, you need energy.
And the more efficient energy you have, the better.
Unfortunately, as we've covered in the past on this podcast,
the lobbying behind renewables and the anti-nuclear propaganda have really held us back.
We're just not making anywhere near the clean, safe, affordable power we could be making.
Fortunately, in recent years that seems to be changing,
with a nuclear revival throughout much of the world
and in particular in the second Trump Administration thanks to a series of executive orders.
OpenAI just sent a submission to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy
letting them know just how much catching up we have to do,
especially if we want to outcompete China as a world technological superpower.
They pointed out that, in 2024, the US added 51GW of capacity while China added 429,
building energy capacity over eight times faster.
While the US is leading the world in AI technology, the Chinese might pull ahead in AI infrastructure,
since datacenters in the US are exposing just how much deficiencies in the grid limit how quickly we can grow.
They told the White House:
"Limits on how much electricity the US can generate to power AI development
threaten both our ability to seize this once-in-a-century opportunity,
and our advantage on the most consequential technology since electricity itself.
For the US, unlocking electrons will unlock our greatest national economic opportunity
since electricity drove the latter half of the Industrial Age.
Electricity is a strategic asset—it underpins the US AI advantage
and in turn, our economic competitiveness, technological leadership, and national security."
In the last seven months, OpenAI's weekly user base has doubled from 400 million to 800 million users,
and that doesn't count people using other AI technologies.
So they're calling on the Trump Administration to work with the private sector
to increase our electricity growth to 100GW a year.
That pretty much needs to be nuclear, but that'll take a few years to get underway,
even assuming you can get the NRC to release its stranglehold on the industry.
They even make it difficult to simply restart existing nuclear plants,
like the Duane Arnold Energy Center in Iowa, the state's one and only nuclear plant.
That's expected to go critical in 2029, four years from now. But we do know how to build them faster.
Onagawa units 2 and 3 were built in just 3 years 7 months and 3 years 3 months, respectively, each proving 825MWe.
And if you're wondering how safe they are: they both went undamaged in the 2011 Tōhoku event
despite being closer to the earthquake epicenter and being hit with a larger tsunami than Fukushima.
We know how to do this, people! Only idiot government regulators stand in the way.
The advantage, though, is that this will be real energy generation.
Most of that 429GW that China has built is solar and wind,
and due to the way they measure capacity, you're not actually getting that much.
Solar and wind only output about 17% of nameplate capacity,
so that 429GW is actually about 73GW.
And the thing is, we've covered stories in the past about how
the increased power demands of datacenters are way overblown.
If you wanted to solve our energy issues by stopping AI, then you're trying to bail out the Titanic with a thimble.
Datacenters aren't causing the issues with our energy infrastructure; they're just exposing it.
And even absent AI, with Americans facing rising energy costs, this needs to happen.
I want to tell you about the eyeglasses I've been wearing for years.
As people can see on my videos, I have a very strong prescription,
which makes glasses more expensive, especially when I need computer glasses,
reading glasses, prescription sunglasses,
and most expensively, progressive lenses for general everyday wear.
To save money while still getting quality glasses, I get them from Firmoo.
In fact, I just got a pair of progressives with high index aspherical lenses
in a nice pair of frames my wife loves, for just over $100.
It would have been $500 to get them through my eye doctor.
Not only do they look good, the glasses are durable.
I've worn many pairs for several years without problems.
All orders come with a 30-day return policy,
a 3-month warranty, and one-on-one customer service.
Go to firmoo.bogosity.tv any time you need quality glasses at a low price.
Once again, that's firmoo.bogosity.tv.
And now it's time to preactivate this week's Biggest Bogon Emitter.
The DMCA was absolutely the best law ever passed for copyright trolls.
And if you think that's an accident, I got news for you, sunshine: it's the idea.
The more the big content cartels can make life difficult for startups and competitors, the happier they are.
AI has merely provided fantastic new opportunities for it.
Case in point: Meta being sued by rightsholders Strike 3 Holdings and Counterlife Media, two porn giants.
They've filed tens of thousands of lawsuits against alleged BitTorrent pirates,
and now they're aiming higher. Gotta sue them deep pockets!
In Kadrey v. Meta, the only surviving part of that case
is the allegation that Meta engaged in copyright infringement merely by using BitTorrent,
regardless of whether their ultimate use was fair, which the judge already found that it was.
So based on that, Strike 3 and Counterlife looked through their archive of BitTorrent data
for any Meta-adjacent IP addresses.
They found 47 of them, and immediately filed a lawsuit against Meta accusing them of piracy,
even though courts have said in the past that a mere IP address isn't sufficient cause for that.
In particular, the Ninth Circuit, under which the Northern District of California has its authority,
found that IP addresses are not linked to individual identities.
Not only are IP addresses reused by ISPs all over the place,
even at a moment in time an IP address may be used by many different people in a household,
a hotel, a coffee shop, or anywhere else that's behind a NAT router.
And as Meta pointed out in their filing, quote:
"Plaintiffs are familiar with this case law, as courts have repeatedly admonished them to abide by it,
but they nevertheless fail to do so here."
The timing of it doesn't even work out, quote:
"Plaintiffs do not explain how sporadic torrenting activity that purportedly commenced in 2018—
years before Meta allegedly began researching Multimodal Models and Generative Video in 2022—
could have been intended for purposes of acquiring content to train such models."
Another set of copyright trolls accusing someone of being a time-traveler!
Moreover, there's no reason to believe that this was anything corporate at all, quote:
"Further, the small number of downloads—roughly 22 per year on average
across dozens of Meta IP addresses—is plainly indicative of private personal use,
not a concerted effort to collect the massive datasets
Plaintiffs allege are necessary for effective AI training."
In other words, you just have a handful of randos downloading porn. And you don't even know who they are!
Even if you could prove the IP addresses were used by Meta at the time,
this infringement could have been done by anyone on their campus, including employees or even visitors.
Quote: "And there is yet another conundrum Plaintiffs fail to address:
why would Meta seek to conceal certain alleged downloads of Plaintiffs' and third-party content,
but use easily traceable Meta corporate IP addresses? The obvious answer is that it would not do so;
Plaintiffs' entire AI training theory is nonsensical and unsupported."
It's not enough to show that those IP addresses were used by Meta.
It's not even enough to show that Meta's network was used to download the videos.
They need to show that Meta intended it, knew about it, facilitated it, and had a financial interest in it.
They can't even show one of those, let alone all four!
Quote: "The Complaint fails to state facts sufficient to state a claim against Meta for direct,
vicarious, or contributory copyright liability.
And these claims fail not only for lack of supporting facts,
but also because Plaintiffs' theory of liability makes no sense
and cannot be reconciled with the facts they do plead.
The entire complaint against Meta should be dismissed with prejudice."
It isn't that there's a case like this here and there.
It's that you can have one copyright troll after another after another pile onto it
and make life difficult for individuals and businesses.
Even a lawsuit that gets dismissed can cost a defendant thousands of dollars.
Seriously, there should be something similar to an anti-SLAPP law, only for copybullies.
So all of that makes those copyright trolls this week's Biggest Bogon Emitter.
Do you have children? Or nieces or nephews?
Are you homeschooling, or just want to counter
some of the socialist indoctrination most children get in school?
If so, go to bogosity.tv/tuttletwins, and you'll be taken to a website
where you can get some great books for elementary-aged children.
The Tuttle Twins books are books about liberty and free market economics
that include children's versions of Bastiat's The Law, Leonard Read's I, Pencil,
and Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, as well as books about the Federal Reserve
and how regulations protect business cronies.
They'll learn about the harm caused by eminent domain,
or regulations passed in the name of safety, and fundamental concepts of liberty.
And as you can see from the sample pages on the website,
they're all easy to read and nicely illustrated.
They're just $9.99 apiece, or get a special discount
as well as free bonuses when you purchase all five.
You can even buy in bulk to donate to schools and local libraries.
So get the Tuttle Twins books at bogosity.tv/tuttletwins.
And now let's hallucinatorizationalify this week's Idiot Extraordinaire.
You would think that the Biden Adminstration no longer being a thing
would mean that Karine Jean-Pierre wouldn't be getting this.
You'd be thinking wrong.
Amazingly, she proved to be even more of an incredible dumbass on her book tour
than she did as Biden's press secretary—to the point where even her former colleagues are cringing.
A lot of them are kind of disgusted by the fact that she can't seem to go
thirty seconds without mentioning she's a "black queer woman."
Others are just dumbfounded at the fact that she can't seem to coherently answer questions about her own book.
The memoir is titled: Independent: A Look Inside a Broken White House.
Weirdly, she tried to retcon the title to The New Yorker by claiming she was really referring to the Trump White House.
One Democratic communications strategist said, quote: "A car crash is fascinating to watch.
She was the top communicator for the president of the United States and she can't get through basic interviews"
and said it was like, quote: "watching Mike Tyson fight a baby."
Another former colleague said, quote: "It's like watching a toddler jump into the deep end of the pool."
None of them seem to understand the premise of her book,
why she didn't seek feedback from any of them, or even call on them to help promote it.
Most of the focus is on the summer of 2024 when the party realized they'd pushed an unelectable dunderhead
into the nomination without even a single primary, and then scrambled to figure out what to do.
Another Biden White House official said, quote:
"It's a sad commentary on where things are.
The premise of the book doesn't really make any sense, it's sort of illogical.
Being back out there and regurgitating those three weeks:
it's just unhelpful right now and
we need to be focusing on the things Democrats need to be doing to fight back against Trump."
In a disastrous interview with Isaac Chotiner, she said:
"There's a period of time that I questioned what was happening and how do we treat our own,
how do we treat people who are decent people?
And then you also have to think about how I'm thinking about this
as a Black woman who is part of the LGBTQ+ community,
and living in this time where I also don't think Democrats right now, Democrats' leadership,
is protecting vulnerable people in the way that it should."
The official said, quote: "The interviews use a vernacular,
which we now acknowledge doesn't work—very identity focused.
It's bringing us back in time and we need to be going forward
and focused on communications that we know will work in this era."
Another said: "Every time she falls back on identity politics instead of actually answering questions,
she reinforces the worst stereotype about Democrats."
In a PBS interview, she said: "Joe Biden objectively had a successful presidential.
Joe Biden objectively was a good human who cared about the American people.
That's what people would say. And yet he was treated as if he was the worst thing ever."
Uh, no, he was treated as someone who had no hope of winning against Trump!
And it wasn't some kind of secret conspiracy or scandal.
It was because his disastrous debate performance meant that they could no longer hide his mental decline.
Every time she was questioned on that, she failed to come up with a coherent answer.
When Chotiner asked her about that, she fell back on the whole denial tactic, saying, quote:
"I did not see anything that would cause me concern. I had never seen him like that before.
I'm not the only person who feels this. I'm just the one speaking very loudly."
Folks, we're just seeing how dumb she is.
The only reason she wasn't this embarrassed back when she was press secretary
was that she could cut off a question and go to someone else whenever she wanted.
Once she's not in control, she's as pathetic as Kamala Harris.
So all of that makes Karine Jean-Pierre this week's Idiot Extraordinaire.
Well, that wraps up this "the candidate passes" edition of the Bogosity Podcast.
I hope you enjoyed it; if you did, please go to donate.bogosity.tv for several ways to support,
and discord.bogosity.tv to join the discussion.
Subscribe at the Discord, Patreon, or SubscribeStar and you can listen early and ad-free.
Thank you for listening. Until next time, here's a quote from Oscar Wilde:
"Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth."
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