Welcome to the year end wrap-up for the Bogosity Podcast for the year 2025, the year of Artificial Stupidity.
This is your host, Shane Killian. We made it through 2025, and we are still alive! What a year!
So before 2026 has a chance to do much to us,
let's look at the good, the bad, and the ugly from the previous year..
A big part of our coverage was Elon Musk and all things adjacent,
starting with the Biden Administration obstructing his plans
for a $100 million network of electric big rig charging stations.
Around the same time, DailyKos posted a fake news headline saying that a Tesla battery storage facility caught fire.
In reality, the battery storage facility was owned by Vistra Energy and had nothing to do with Tesla.
Instead of properly posting a retraction, DailyKos just 403'd the story.
Then, when Elon Musk gave a crowd of people the "my heart goes out to you" gesture,
the news media and the social media propaganda network spent weeks insisting it was a Hitler salute,
even though it didn't even remotely resemble one even with their cherry-picked video frame.
All of that and more makes it really hard not to blame the news and social media
backchannel propaganda mongers for the violence against Tesla and Tesla owners.
Elon himself had numerous death threats made against him, and Teslas all over the country were vandalized,
spray painted with insults, epithets, and Nazi symbols, and even having windows busted out and panels dented.
Your reminder that Teslas have cameras and Sentry Mode will pick up every single thing you do to them.
Superchargers were also attacked, some even set on fire,
which also hurt owners of other EVs since this is all a charging standard now
and Tesla's superchargers are by far the most prevalent.
Showrooms were also targeted, and there were arrests of people caught on video throwing Molotov cocktails at them,
as well as the firebombing of a Tesla showroom in Colorado.
One, who got Idiot Extraordinaire, tried lobbing Molotovs at Teslas and end up accidentally setting himself on fire.
There ended up being a rash of swatting targeting Tesla owners and employees.
And then there was Candace Owens, who got Idiot Extraordinaire for railing against Musk and Tesla,
and going from there to say that all of AI is literally demonic.
Yes, every time you type a prompt into an AI, you're summoning a demon!
And, I guess with FSD, you're being driven around by Beelzebub? Or maybe one of the lesser demons?
Hey, seems to work better than Jesus being your copilot!
But overall, Tesla was having a great year. The Model Y is still the best selling car of any kind,
and although sales dropped 8%, that's actually pretty good compared to a 41% drop in sales of EVs overall!
Then there was the immensely successful Robotaxi launch in Austin,
where a bunch of Model Ys driverlessly chauffer people around an area that's expanded several times since then.
There are still some regulatory hurdles like the requirement of a human monitor in the passenger seat,
but Tesla expects to be able to go fully driverless around mid-2026.
All in cars that are identical to ones people can buy at showrooms.
Tesla says the plan is to allow Tesla owners to make money by adding their own cars to the fleet.
Elon himself got better news as Tesla shareholders enthusiastically gave him a compensation package
similar to the one that a Delaware judge denied despite two stockholder votes approving it.
But now that Tesla has moved completely from Delaware to Texas, stockholders can give him a completely new package.
They set out incredibly ambitious goals for the company, and if they're not met, Elon gets nothing,
but if he does, Elon will become the world's first trillionaire.
Meanwhile, the Delaware Supreme Court overturned the Chancery Court's ruling and reinstated his older package.
Still, that doesn't seem to be stemming the tide of companies leaving Delaware,
including Meta and Cloudflare, both moving to Texas,
and other companies including Pershing Square, Trade Desk, and TransPerfect,
either have moved or are considering a move from Delaware to Nevada, the biggest one being Dropbox.
They all cite Delaware's legal environment as the reason for the move.
Of course, the news media continued their anti-Elon antics.
The Wall Street Journal got Biggest Bogon Emitter when they claimed that Tesla
was so fed up with Elon that they were going to replace him as CEO.
There wasn't the slightest bit of truth to that.
After Tesla commented and said that the story was absolutely false,
the Wall Street Journal lied and said that Tesla had declined to comment.
I don't know if someone at the Journal was shorting Tesla stock or what.
Of course, a lot of the misinformation about Elon surrounded DOGE,
with the news media once again getting everything wrong: Musk was a White House advisor, not the head of DOGE.
By the way, DOGE is very much continuing without Musk and as of October 4th has found $214 billion in savings,
which amounts to over $1300 per taxpayer.
There are now 271,000 fewer federal civilian employees since Trump took office.
In fact, the last time there was any significant reduction in federal employment was during the Clinton years,
but even compared to that, this is a historic outlier in scale, speed, and execution.
Clinton achieved a similar total over eight years with bipartisan support.
Trump's approach is more disruptive,
leveraging executive power and DOGE to enact rapid, controversial changes.
We saw that on the 9th of February when Nayib Bukele, President of El Salvador,
tried to claim that they were using money to fund communist movements in his country.
Many others, such as Politico, tried to deny the funding they got from USAID,
even though it wasn't sufficiently laundered and it was paid straight to them!
Wikileaks showed that USAID was funding over 6,200 journalists across 707 media outlets and 279 media NGOs,
including 90% of the media outlets in Ukraine.
The so-called 'Institute of Peace' deleted one terabyte of data to coverup their crimes,
but DOGE found it because, again, deleting a file doesn't actually get rid of it!
The left is oddly vocal about defending an agency that oversaw the forced
sterilization of 300,000 indigenous women in Latin America in the 1990s.
That saw the rise of a new internet term: hostage puppy.
You take a bunch of money, do a bunch of horrible things with it,
but use a tiny amount of it to take care of a cute puppy.
Then when someone complains, you wheel out the puppy with its adorable pathetic eyes and say,
"Why do you want the puppy to die?"
The solution, of course, is to take the puppy away from the person doing that!
We also how FBI agents were told to game a DoJ questionnaire
asking for any involvement they might have had in the US Capitol riots on January 6, 2021.
All that accumulated in June with the tragic breakup of Musk and Trump over the One Big Beautiful Bill,
which is everything Trump had promised not to do:
pass a massive omnibus bill that House members weren't even given time to read before the vote,
which increases the debt ceiling by $5 trillion, among many other boondoggles.
Another big case, slowly ongoing and still mired in discovery, is X Corp v. Media Matters,
where X is trying to prove that Media Matters is basically a backchannel propaganda outlet,
probably with government ties including CISA and DHS,
and Media Matters is doing everything they can to avoid and even violate discovery.
Media Matters are the ones who successfully got a lot of advertisers to leave X
by showing them fraudulent data suggesting that their ads were placed next to neo-Nazi and other extremist content.
The big news in that case this year was Media Matters trying to change venue
from the Northern District of Texas to the Northern District of California.
US District Judge Reed O'Connor denied it in a scathing ruling.
Both the judge and X have been jerked around ever since this began,
and Media Matters have been consistently stonewalling discovery and acting in bad faith.
It just remains to be seen how much more Judge O'Connor will tolerate.
I'll keep you updated on it. They've been stonewalling so much
the trial date had to be pushed from February of 2026 to the 26th of October.
Oh, right: and, the advertisers came crawling back to X, so it didn't even work for all that long.
But X did get us a big win for freedom of speech, made more impressive that it was in the corrupt DC Circuit Court.
They got the court to lift an unconstitutional gag order on them prohibiting them from telling
their users when government demanded their private information under the Stored Communications Act.
The DC District Court ordered that gag order ex parte, with X Corp not even being present or even knowing it was going on!
Hopefully, this is a start of a trend that'll see the Act
declared to be the unconstitutional monstrosity that it is!
Artificial Intelligence also plowed its way through the year,
exceeding expectations especially of the neo-Luddites.
Beginning when Chinese AI startup DeepSeek made a model to rival ChatGPT with far fewer resources,
working smarter, not harder.
We had the amazing fair use victories in Kadrey v. Meta, the OG AI case,
and Bartz v. Anthropic,, which then moved towards a settlement
that Judge William Alsup was extremely skeptical about.
Judge Alsup is now retired, so we'll have to see if the new judge is just as skeptical or not.
And we saw the AI song "Walk my walk" go viral and reach #1 on Billboard's Country Digital Song Sales chart.
It wasn't all good, though. Google screwed up Gemini again
when they completely broke their AI products for people who need them the most,
such as victims of assault and others suffering PTSD.
All this bogus censorship that's supposed to make AI safe really makes it more dangerous.
And if you thought that couldn't get any more horrific,
a court actually allowed the use of an AI to hallucinate the dead victim of a road rage incident
where it was pretty evident the defendant was acting in self-defense against him.
Nonetheless, he was found guilty of manslaughter,
and then had to deal with this sob story imagined by the victim's family in his name and voice,
saying things he never said in a way he never said them.
It wasn't even a well-done AI! It was one step up from a Clutch Cargo cartoon!
But it made the verklempt judge sentence the defendant to a year more than the prosecutor was asking for!
An appeal is set for February. Hopefully, the appeals court will see sense.
Fortunately, most courts seem to be pushing against AI hallucinations, as we saw in stories in the US,
the UK, and even Israel, when the AIs hallucinated nonexistent cases
and the lawyers didn't even bother to fact-check them, despite having software that will do so automatically!
Another big tactic of the neo-Luddites and ambulance-chasers is,
crazy people do crazy things with AI.
There is absolutely nothing an AI can do to make someone psychotic when they're not,
but they can be a trigger for the psychosis. But then, so can anything.
OpenAI did a good thing, though, when they hired psychiatrists to help them navigate this complex issue.
The problem is, the very same traits that make AIs work for most users can end up
being problematic when used by someone with a more fragile grasp on reality.
The other problem is,
doing this didn't seem to stem the tide of neo-Luddites complaining that ChatGPT drives people to psychosis.
Don't try to win with these people. You can't. Because they're not making honest criticisms.
They're looking for any excuse to take down this technology.
That includes Josh Hawley, who got Idiot Extraordinaire for his all-out attack on free speech and fair use,
all to protect us from the "threat" of AI.
In the process, he lied about AI cases such as Kadrey v. Meta and Bartz v. Anthropic.
The Authors Guild also got Idiot Extraordinaire for their ridiculous case against OpenAI.
After something like two years of discovery,
the total amount they had to back up their claims was...nothing.
They claimed they could make ChatGPT output infringing material,
but the only thing they could demonstrate was an outline of a book that doesn't even exist!
They're the lead in a pile-on of cases in the hideously corrupt SDNY,
which includes things like the Ziff Davis case
where they claimed that ignoring a robots.txt file was a DMCA violation!
Another one of those cases is New York Times v. OpenAI,
also called News Plaintiffs since there are actually dozens of them,
where the news companies want the private chats of you and me that we made to ChatGPT,
believing that the privacy policy protected us.
They initially wanted our deleted chats, too, but fortunately, that was a road too far, even for the SDNY.
But still, they want OpenAI to turn over 20 million of your private thoughts,
questions, ponderings, creative writings, and other prompts to the news—
who have shown no compunction in the past
about using court-obtained documents against people who aren't parties to the case.
Imagine those muckraking yellow journalists getting all of the personal information you've put in,
even private thoughts you put in for therapeutic reasons or even just for fun, so they can troll through it.
By the way, OpenAI found proof that the Times was using ChatGPT for journalism and accounting purposes,
but oh, that's just prying too much into their private business, says the magistrate!
Show you were we stand, doesn't it?
Reddit also sued Perplexity for scraping its data, when their ToS makes it clear:
they don't own that data! It belongs to the users who post it!
They weren't even complaining 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, who actually did the scraping, isn't a party to the lawsuit, and Reddit is making no claim against them.
Scraping is, of course, a vital part of the Internet and something else the anti-AI movement is seeking to destroy.
Wikipedia got Biggest Bogon Emitter for being on the wrong side of it.
Gone is the Wikipedia that protested SOPA/PIPA, now warriors against the open Internet.
They made a blog post saying that AI developers should pay them to scrape their data—
even though Wikipedia is a non-profit and their data is in the public domain!
Another Idiot Extraordinaire went to Universal Pictures for
attempting to put a disclaimer in the credits of at least two movies, "Jurassic World: Rebirth" and "M3GAN 2.0",
that you're not allowed to use the movie for AI training.
But a disclaimer can't take away your right to fair use!
It was also fun watching Hollywood lose their shit over AI actress Tilly Norwood.
Of course, AI does have its bad uses, such as the Flock Safety camera systems
that are an end run around the Fourth Amendment, allowing police to track anyone,
anywhere, without a warrant—and has already been abused by,
for example, police thugs using them to stalk ex-girlfriends!
They also don't work well, and have resulted in numerous people being
falsely arrested for stolen vehicles and other crimes, many wrestled to the ground and beaten!
In fact, several cities have shut off the cameras and ordered that they be taken down.
We also saw problems with AI facial recognition,
with the UK Home Office whining that common law makes it difficult for them to spy on innocent people.
We've also seen the failure of AI gun recognition in schools,
including a student being arrested and having guns pointed at him when the AI flagged an empty bag of Doritos.
All while completely failing to detect actual guns and knives.
AI is never good nor bad. It's how it's used.
So if you have a camera that uses AI to enhance the pictures you take, that's cool. But what if you want to turn it off?
The Pixel 10a camera has an AI that apparently is always on,
which was a problem for a mom who was taking a picture of her kid's rash to send to the doctor.
The AI kept enhancing the picture to remove it!
By default, maybe a lot of us would like that, but the thing is, she couldn't turn it off!
And it also happened on both an Android phone and an iOS tablet made in the last three years.
AI can be used to find security vulnerabilities,
but what happens when that's abused to harass a small but important open source project?
FFmpeg was inundated by Google's AI sending them bugs so obscure it's unclear if any of them even could be exploited,
let alone would. But it didn't send them any patches!
So a few group of volunteers, already stretched thin,
were having what they termed "CVE slop" piled on them by a trillion-dollar company
who apparently can't put any of their massive engineering talent towards submitting a few fixes.
Despite Google being a heavy FFmpeg user themselves!
The curl project found that,
while AI in the hands of ham-fisted amateurs can result in the aforementioned CVS-slop,
in the hands of a real coder, it can make wonderful contributions to vulnerability testing.
And then we saw conservative Matt Walsh become a Richard Wolff-esque socialist
when complaining about AI destroying jobs! A Yale study found that it doesn't.
Around August, we also started seeing the incredibly silly claims that AI was bad for the environment,
starting with the UK who got Idiot Extraordinaire for telling people to save water by deleting emails!
Because datacenters use water, emails are stored in datacenters... I dunno.
But we saw fearmongering from people who apparently think that once water is evaporated, it's gone forever!
In reality, the water they use to cool the computers is in a closed loop with very little loss,
and the open loop can even be used for district heating and water purification!
At any rate, when you look at the total amount of water used by datacenters around the world,
trying to reduce our water usage by shutting them down would be like bailing out the Titanic with a thimble.
Same thing with other fearmongering, such as the carbon usage.
It's also ignoring the fact that datacenters help humanity reduce our water usage and carbon emissions
by making our computer usage more efficient, instead of having to do everything on our machines or on local servers.
As for the power usage, OpenAI sent a good explanation to the White House
letting them know basically how dumb we were for shutting off nuclear reactors
and how much catching up we have to do with China.
And things are getting better on that front.
The NRC has approved the restart of the Palisades Nuclear Plant in Michigan,
set to go critical sometime in 2026, probably around March.
In fact, we got a surprising bit of news of how safe nuclear power is
when a man fell into the water of the reactor cavity at Palisades and nothing bad happened.
A US judge overturned stupid New York Governor Kathy Hochul and even stupider AG Letitia James
ignoring NRC regulations and putting the Indian Point reactor shutdown in an impossible Catch-22.
We need to get on this. A report we covered shows that estimates for coal generation increased 11%
and stay elevated through 2027.
Power companies all over the country are reporting having to burn more coal to meet increased demand.
Amazon is working with Terrapower to build their Natrium reactor as cheap, safe, clean energy for an AWS datacenter,
and Microsoft is working with Constellation Energy Generation to restart the TMI-2 reactor in two years.
But this one-restart-a-year crap isn't gonna cut it, especially since elsewhere in the world
there will be 15 new or restarted plants going critical in 2026, most of them in China!
I want to remind you again that if political idiots had never put the brakes on it,
if the NRC had never existed, or at least had been anything but a bunch of panicky obstructionists,
we would be absolutely swimming in clean power!
No one would care about climate change, electric cars would be uninhibited,
and people of all socioeconomic classes would be immeasurably better off than they are now!
And, give it up for innovative people:
ProEnergy has innovated the use of repurposed jet engines to act as a supplemental power source for datacenters.
They can provide the power datacenters need during construction and for some five years thereafter,
by which point the local power grid should hopefully have caught up.
Afterward, the turbines are still useful as backup power, or can be used to supplement the grid.
But all of this is because solar and wind just ain't gonna cut it.
You can't use intermittent forms of power to meet the constant and continuous demands of datacenters.
People are learning that.
Over 10,000 people marched to protest the closure of Spain's Almaraz Nuclear Power Plant,
part of Spain's plan to phase out nuclear by 2035.
All total, Spain had seven reactors producing 20% of the country's electricity; that went down to about 8%.
Sadly, no new reactors have been built since the socialist government passed a moratorium in 1984.
The rest of the 37 planned reactors had to be scrapped.
Two months later, something happened that should have taught them a lesson.
Spain experienced a blackout of pretty much the entire Iberian peninsula,
which includes Portugal and part of France.
It started with just a two-second blip, the kind that happens. The major problem happened when it came back on.
See, if most of your power is nuclear or hydro or even coal or oil, you use turbines.
Think "big spinny thing spinning fast."
In Spain, where AC power is 50Hz, that means 3000rpm for regular generators and 1500rpm for nuclear generators.
When they come back online, those generators,
having still been spinning the whole time, are still in phase with the grid.
Solar and wind don't work that way. They use inverters, which don't have any such inertia.
Ordinarily, they would detect the phase of the grid and automatically sync themselves to that.
But what happens if most of your grid is solar and wind?
What do they sync themselves to? Nothing—and down goes the grid.
It's exactly what Redeia, the parent company of Spain's grid operator REE,
warned about two months before it happened.
We've covered the problems with Spain.
We've covered the problems with Germany. We've covered the problems with Sweden.
All because they shut down nuclear plants.
France didn't. Their nuclear fleet is still going strong, and they haven't had any of these issues.
In fact, their nuclear is hitting highs while solar and wind drop to disturbingly low levels.
One thing about solar and wind they don't like to advertise:
how much oil and gas they need to back them up, even when operating properly!
France's fleet of reactors put out more than 55GW of electricity,
at a time when wind slumped to less than a gigawatt.
Meanwhile, Germany's oil generation surged to levels not seen since 2017.
Their electricity prices rose to €360/MWh.
Nuclear means cheap, safe, and reliable. There's just no way to deny it!
And now, with more and more datacenters being built, and AI actually being less than half the reason why,
add one more adjective: necessary!
Okay, moving to the Supreme Court,
which started off the year idiotically refusing to step in on the Donald Trump trial,
which was not only lawfare but should have been immune from the start.
They voted 5-4 to just not get involved.
And then you have the insane separation of powers claims from the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition
who was set to get some money from USAID when DOGE happened.
This is one of those funky cases where a district court judge went way beyond
his jurisdictional authority and ordered the Trump Administration to pay them $2 billion.
By making it a TRO, they could do it ex parte, with the other side not even being heard.
In reality, this was a summary judgement disguised as a TRO,
another important factor being that TROs can't be appealed.
And the Supreme Court just decided 5-4,
hey, who cares about that whole separation of powers thing and Marbury v. Madison, anyway?
They actually figured that this was a one time thing and didn't at all predict what everyone else did:
a veritable deluge of swutty little district court judges who now felt they
had the go-ahead to be un-elected dictators of the entire country.
So, back to SCOTUS, and this time it was 6-3 the other way.
So a bit late, but at least they put a stop to it.
But they wimped out in the VanDerStok case,
about the ATF's idiotic misinterpretation of the "frame or receiver" rule,
now so broad that any hunk of iron dug out of the ground could be considered a gun.
Seven members of the court, including Gorsuch,
were such cowards that the only thing they could say is that it wasn't "facially invalid."
So basically, a plaintiff who challenges a rule cannot ever win
unless he can show that there is no set of circumstances in which the regulation would be consistent with the statute.
There's now no way anyone could possibly successfully make a prima facie challenge.
Then they had to decide the case of a charter school in Oklahoma that wanted board approval,
and was denied because they were Catholic.
That should be a blatant First Amendment violation, but with Barrett recusing herself, SCOTUS split 4-4.
They prohibited the school charter without setting a precedent. Wimps.
We did have a good result in the Kim Davis case,
the magistrate judge who refused to do her job and denied marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
She lost at the Sixth Circuit, and appealed to the Supreme Court.
If she'd been a preacher, we would have been on her side, and likely so would SCOTUS.
Instead, they denied certiorari and let the Circuit court ruling stand.
What she was really trying to do is overturn Obergefell v. Hodges,
the 2015 case that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. Wasn't gonna happen.
They unanimously shot down a case where Mexicans sued gun manufacturers for, quote:
"massive trafficking of their guns into Mexico." SCOTUS wasn't having it.
Then in Ames v. Ohio Dept. of Youth Services, another unanimous ruling, written by Jackson no less,
said, yeah, it can be discrimination if you demote someone for being straight, go back and do the case again.
Another ruling favored a Catholic charity in Catholic Charities Bureau v.
Wisconsin Labor and Industry Review Commission, a good ruling for the First Amendment.
And now, let's review this year's coverage of the biggest
and probably most important Supreme Court case we've bene following.
The Fourth Circuit ruled that Cox Communications as an ISP is liable for its users who infringe on copyrights.
In other words, they can be made to pay a billion dollar judgement because they
didn't kick these people off the Internet solely on the say-so of a big record label.
Cue Cox's appeal, and the ensuing deluge of amicus briefs to the Supreme Court.
They also denied the petition from Sony and the other music labels.
Losing this case would mean nothing less than the
loss of what little of our privacy rights are left with communications.
So after five years, Cox finally got to be heard at the Supreme Court.
The justices seemed very receptive to the argument that this would mean cutting off entire households,
entire businesses, entire regions because some corporation claims that one person is pirating.
They were also receptive to the argument that Cox was ordered to pay $1 billion for not doing anything.
They heard from Cox, they heard from the federal government, who also thought the whole thing was ridiculous,
and they heard from the incredibly silly record labels, who made one Orwellian argument after another
that would threaten to undo basically all of the Bill of Rights.
Well, maybe not all. It wouldn't let them quarter troops in our homes.
I don't think.
The Internet has become a vital utility for everyday communication,
banking, commerce, speech and expression, even health care.
Cut off an entire hospital just because a patient used their Wi-Fi to pirate? That's what the RIAA argued!
Imagine if they said this about a power company:
people are using your energy to power the computers they use to infringe, so cut them off!
Just as silly, and just as dangerous if not more so.
And even worse: the labels argued, quote: "there has to be room for treating somebody that says 'F— the DMCA!'
differently from somebody that tries their level best to comply, and doesn't." A direct attack on freedom of speech!
That is absolute content-based censorship.
So we'll find out, probably around June, what the result of all of this finally is.
That'll be six years of a court case and 27 years of harassment and uncertainty of Internet users everywhere.
It looks like the court might be leaning the right way on this one.
There's just been so much to talk about this year,
and the insane opioid scare caused by the psychotic War on Drugs has, if anything, escalated!
Just when overdoses were starting to go down due to Naloxone,
Trump might be reversing that due to his crackdown on fentanyl coming in from China and Mexico.
Why? Because people will just switch to home-grown fentanyl,
which is weaker, so they make it more potent by cutting it with xylazine—which negates the effect of Naloxone.
Or, they just add carfentanil, which Naloxone isn't strong enough to touch!
In fact, carfentanil overdose deaths have increased sevenfold!
We've also seen a disturbing rise in hospitals and emergency rooms
treating patients with ineffective Tylenol and then telling them their pain is "all in your head."
In fact, a study that looked at 3400 patients who were told that
found that they were pushing their patients into depression and anxiety!
Here's another good thing DOGE did: terminate money to hospitals who were using federal funds,
not to treat patients, but to "fight the opioid epidemic."
They were taking money to not give patients painkillers!
And if it hadn't been for DOGE cutting off the funding, they would have expanded it!
More damage was done when Walgreens was forced to pay a $300 million settlement to the DoJ
because they actually had the audacity to fill opioid prescriptions.
They now have to watch out for "invalid prescriptions" and "red flags,"
all of which seem to mean "whatever we say they are at the time."
Given the gleeful way in which the Trump Administration picked up and made hay with this Biden-era lawsuit,
you can expect it to get worse—and it did.
Meloxicam is a very strong NSAID with all sorts of long-term adverse effects.
The FDA approved IV-Meloxicam for patients instead of painkillers.
Unlike opioids, Meloxicam has common, very detrimental side effects—that come on with no warning at all.
And, that's better than a 0.6% chance of addiction???
A highly dangerous NSAID is being pushed over safe and effective opioids.
It would be one thing if prominent hospitals were pushing back against it.
Sadly, they aren't. In fact, the Mayo Clinic deliberately spread pseudoscience,
and blatantly violated the Hippocratic Oath, to frighten doctors into not prescribing opioids!
Their article was not in any way medicine. It was hate.
Of course, it would be nice if the CDC gave us proper statistics on this, but as we covered, they don't.
In fact, they deliberately refuse to collect them, at first to cover their own asses,
and later because they got in bed with the ambulance-chasers at PROP.
But we did manage to get some from Australia. Out of 27 million people,
the total number of drug-induced deaths involving pharmaceutical opioids as the sole drug type
was just 33 people a year. Basically, a rounding error.
Whereas 50 Australians die every year from Tylenol.
You're more likely to be killed by your own bed than by an opioid!
All right, now let's go over the more notable recipients of Biggest Bogon Emitter and Idiot Extraordinaire over 2025.
Biggest Bogon Emitter Juan Merchan was the judge over Trump's sexual doo-dah case,
and although he wasn't as insane as Judge Engoron, he was every bit as corrupt.
Another judge, James Boasberg, got Biggest Bogon Emitter when he tried
to insert himself into deportation proceedings outside his district,
and then went on to make things worse. SCOTUS put a stop to it in July.
Elizabeth Warren got one for running a scam claiming that people can donate to LA wildfire victims through ActBlue,
when most of the money was being laundered among middlemen.
Fulton County, Georgia DA Fani Willis racked 'em up,
beginning when a judge ordered her to pay thousands of dollars in fees
and costs in the open records lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch.
Willis had falsely denied having any responsive records regarding their
communication with Jack Smith's office and the Jan6 Committee.
She also claimed that a whistleblower to her office posed a violent threat.
She violated a slew of whistleblower protection laws when she demoted her and made her a file clerk.
Her false claims of violent threats were quickly debunked by audio recordings of the calls in question.
There are also a ton of questions about how her office has been spending public funds.
Hey, remember when she was kicked off the Trump RICO case because she was sleeping with the special prosecutor,
whom she arranged to have paid over $700,000 and then went on cruises with him?
She appealed all the way to the Georgia Supreme Court—and lost bigly.
The prosecutors who inherited the case decided the whole thing was bogus and dropped it.
Turns out, it's not illegal to question election results!
Turns out, it's also not illegal in Michigan,
where a district court judge threw out the state's conspiracy prosecution against the Republican electors.
Then there's New York AG Letitia James; we talked about her earlier with the Indian Point nuclear plant.
Her corruption involved the American Irish Historical Society,
her attack on the free speech of New York City firefighters, and the state eviction moratorium.
And then there was the mortgage scandal where she falsified records
in exactly the same way she falsely accused Trump of doing!
She falsified records to get more favorable loan terms,
including saying her primary residence wasn't in New York (as it's required to be),
said her husband was her father, and that she wasn't renting out property she was renting out.
The appeals court threw out her Trump case, by the way, with one judge seriously dressing her down.
Anyway, when the indictment came down for James,
it was a lot worse than we thought! She got various riders she shouldn't have,
got them through a Fannie Mae-backed lender, and then reported it on her taxes as rentals!
So she was so dumb she officially filed that she wasn't renting the property,
then filed her taxes claiming rental income on the property!
And then, of course, there were all the states, along with Australia,
who were passing various versions of the Child Online Safety or whatever they were calling it.
Basically, they want websites to have all of your identifying information.
It started out being just porn sites, which was bogus enough,
and SCOTUS gets another brickbat for not shooting that down when they could,
but has since expanded to all sorts of social media sites as well.
And it didn't take long for the worse to happen: A Discord breach resulted in 70,000 IDs being stolen!
And this is as bad as it gets, because identity theft is almost impossible to come back from!
We also had a few more cases where payment processors decided to play censor
and shut off payments for adult games and visual novels.
The Biden Administration got his share, of course, with Biden and Kamala Harris getting a joint one
for trying to claim that the Equal Rights Amendment had been ratified when it clearly hadn't.
Biden had said, quote: "The 28th Amendment is the law of the land,
guaranteeing all Americans equal rights and protections under the law regardless of their sex."
Kamala also tweeted: "The Equal Rights Amendment is the 28th Amendment, and it is the law of the land."
Of course, you can't get an amendment into the Constitution by bullying.
Biden got another for the bogus documents case in Florida.
They just had to try and smear Trump one more time by releasing two volumes of the Special Counsel's Report,
even though Jack Smith wasn't a special counsel at all,
and releasing these smears is not only improper on the face of it,
it would also prejudice the case against Nauta and De Oliveira as well.
They were shot down, and the judge let them have it.
Karine Jean-Pierre took Idiot Extraordinaire for being even more of an incredible dumbass on her book tour.
Chuck Todd got Idiot Extraordinaire for trying to resurrect the long-dead RussiaGate hoax.
Seriously, how freakin' desperate do you have to be to still be sticking by it?
Gavin Newsom got three, one where he tried to backpedal after the major Democratic loss in November,
to the point where even a CNN chyron asked, quote: "What in God's name is going on?"
His second was in July, where he appeared on the Shawn Ryan Show and still wouldn't answer basic questions
about the ridiculous and harmful COVID mandates.
Then there was all the redistricting crap,
which as a North Carolinian I am never going to listen to a Democrat opine about gerrymandering!
Especially since his redistricting was a blatant violation of Article XXI of the California Constitution.
Of course, the news media had their fair share as usual,
beginning with the ridiculous attacks on Elon Musk that we covered,
but there were a number on immigration as well.
Especially the news media making doe-eyes at the wife-beater and child trafficker Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
Seriously, that's the guy you're gonna hitch your wagon to?
National Review got one for doing a hit piece on Tulsi Gabbard,
saying she was unfit because she didn't like the government spying on US citizens.
The Register got one for a majorly low-IQ take on nuclear SMRs.
The New York Times got a few, starting in February with their hit piece on DOGE,
running interference and denying corruption that even the GAO under Biden warned about!
Then there was their AI hit piece in June.
Teachers don't like that students were using AI to cheat, so they tried to flip it around,
claiming that professors were using ChatGPT to make slides for their presentations!
Not even to grade papers or anything important.
They made the whole thing a hit piece against ChatGPT—
which, remember, they're lead plaintiffs in a lawsuit against!
And they made one more attempt at necromancy to resurrect the Russia hoax,
prompted by the NSA firing its top lawyer April Doss,
who had publicly advocated for Trump to be banned from public platforms.
All the Russia and misinformation and insurrection garbage again.
CBS got one in June because of their deceptive editing of their Kamala interview back before the election.
CBS settled the lawsuit for something like $30 million,
and now, whenever they or any other Paramount Global property interviews a presidential candidate,
they're required to make the unedited transcript available.
We've got the Economic Times in August for the whole AI-makes-water-disappear-forever claim.
The Guardian for using crime statistics that had been previously proven
to have been illegally altered by the DC police commander.
Jen Psaki for trying to push the conspiracy theory that Trump had died over Labor Day.
And then there was Elie Mystal's epic meltdown on MSNBC about how Trump is allowed to murder you.
The entire news media as well as Democrats got it for gaslighting everyone about the economy for four years,
to the point where even Politico said, quote: "Voters Were Right About the Economy. The Data Was Wrong."
No, Politico, not the data. You were wrong!
They were also taken to task twice over gaslighting about Biden's cognitive decline.
The ambulance-chasers at Perkins Coie got it
for suing Trump because Trump decided not to do business with them. Gee, I wonder why.
John Bolton got it for mishandling classified documents
and wrongly storing them in his office, because the universe loves irony.
Of course Donald Trump got his share,
twice for acting to primary Thomas Massie because he didn't support the One Big Beautiful Bill,
again for supporting Lindsey Graham because Trump never learns a thing,
and again for a trade policy to get drug prices down that'll just make them more expensive.
He also got it twice for the tariffs, of course.
Most of them were illegal, the reciprocal tariffs weren't reciprocal at all,
and every bit of data says countries with high tariffs are poorer.
After promising to stop inflation, he decided to push for more inflation by urging the Fed to lower interest rates—
at a time when inflation was at a multi-month high.
His administration, particularly Marco Rubio,
got one for their disastrously failed attempt to get Russia and Ukraine talking peace.
And uniquely, there was a joint one for Biden and Trump
because they both passed policies that made electric vehicles more expensive.
I'm not even talking about removing the tax credits.
We also gave one to Mike Johnson for being yet another mouthpiece for the Uniparty,
and one to James Clapper who, as it turns out, was also on the team that manufactured the false intel about Iraq WMDs.
One big incestuous family. Do you see that yet?
We also had two Silver Cluon Award winners.
We started right off with Mark Zuckerberg supporting the right to free speech,
right on the heels of getting one the previous November for showing
open sourcing Llama models will save money.
The other one went to driverless car company Waymo,
who, unexpectedly, went to bat for you and me saying that they'll reject all requests from law
enforcement for data from its autonomous vehicles that aren't backed by a warrant or court order.
Are you listening, Ring Doorbell people??? ===
After all that, it's time to name 2025's Idiot of the Year.
And conspicuous by his absence throughout the rest of this review, you can expect it to be RFK Jr.
It started when he wanted to collect everyone's medical records
and cull through them to go against whatever it is he's wanting to go against next.
Like what they were trying to accuse Elon Musk and DOGE of doing,
except this is very, very real, and from the horse's mouth.
He talked about numerous autoimmune and neurological disorders
and other chronic conditions that he doesn't know anything about.
We went over the reality of each and every one of those things to show how stupid he was.
Later that year, we went over a study involving 233 genes strongly linked with autism
(yes, Bobby, autism is genetic),
and why they were actually necessary for the evolution of our intelligence.
Autism is not due to vaccines or Tylenol or whatever. It's not a glitch; it's fundamental to who we are as a species.
And speaking of vaccines, we also saw how measles is not a "harmless childhood illness"
with the story of an otherwise-healthy 11-month-old infant
who is now going to become a quadriplegic because of measles.
All because the baby wasn't vaccinated.
So now, RFK is using the CDC website to try and shift the burden of proof,
saying that studies "have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism."
Even though they totally have. As we've covered, autism is a genetic disorder.
Vaccines are post-natal. There's not even an opportunity for overlap!
And one more, which exposes all of MAHA for what it is:
Remember how Bobby bullied people into not using seed oils?
MAHA Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced a $12 billion bailout of farmers who grow corn,
sunflower, canola, rapeseed, and safflower—in other words, the ones most commonly used for seed oils.
Encouraging production and oppressing consumption.
All while misinforming people and taking their money,
pretending to be on their side while maintaining the government's crony relationship with big factory farms.
After all of that, no one other than RFK Jr. could possibly have been 2025's Idiot of the Year!
Well, that wraps up the Bogosity Podcast for 2025.
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I hope you had great holidays and a great new year, and we'll see you next week for the start of our 2026 coverage!
Thank you for listening. Until next time, here's a quote from Margaret Chase Smith:
"Moral cowardice that keeps us from speaking our minds is as dangerous to this country as irresponsible talk."
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