What Is the Speed of Dark?

If everyone talks about the speed of light, how come no one really talks about the speed of dark? Stored somewhere in my high school brain, I happen to know that the speed of light is approximately 186,000 miles per second. Which is pretty fast. But the speed of light is the stuff of space age advancement. Or science fiction...hyperdrive, warp speed, ludicrous or plaid speed....You know what I mean. 

But what about the speed of dark? How long does it take a devastatingly bad action to travel from idea to horrifying reality? I thought a brief timeline dive into early Nazi Germany might be useful:

1928: The Nazis got less than 3% of the national vote in the parliamentary election

1930: The Nazis won 18% of the national vote. They promised to

• fix the economy and put people back to work;
• return Germany to the status of a great European and world power
• regain territory Germany had lost in World War I
• create a strong authoritarian German government

1933: 

• January 30th, German President Paul von Hindenburg appoints Hitler Chancellor of Germany.
• March 22nd: Dachau opened to contain Nazi regime opponents
• April 1:  Nazis initiate nationwide boycott of Jewish-owned businesses and  professionals,
• April 7th: Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service is used to bar Jews and other political opponents from government employment, universities, and state positions.

That's just 66 days between the elevation of Hitler to Chancellor and the first laws to be put in place. 

It took a took another 859 days until September 15, 1933, the date The Nuremburg Laws stripping German citizenship from all Jews was enacted. 

Another 2,276 days days passed before Chełmno, one of the five camps designated for the Final Solution, began exterminating Jew on December 8th, 1941. Just so you know, on September 2, 1942, the Nazi called for the children under ten, the elderly, and the ill to be surrendered for "relocation." They were all summarily executed at Chełmno

That's a grand total of 3,234 days between the elevation of Hitler to Chancellor to the operation of the first Final Solution camp. 

8 years.

 10 months. 

8 days.  

Just a little more than 2 consecutive presidential terms. 

But that was then, this is now, you say. 

Since January 20th, 2025, Feckless Felon has signed over 277 executive orders. You can read about the scope on Ballotpedia's Donald Trump's executive orders and actions, 2025-2026. I just read through a bunch of them and, quite frankly, many of them do not serve the health and welfare of this nation...they bolster his personal wealth, his friends' personal wealth, and target the least able to afford basics like health care.  

Just to cite an example, my absolute favorite has to be Executive Order 14183 of January 27, 2025 Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness. This is a life-destroying, anti-military order predicated on his personal fear of homosexuality and transgender recognition. It is possibly the most heinous, neanderthal vivisection, most bullshit attack on our own fighting forces:

Recently, however, the Armed Forces have been afflicted with radical gender ideology to appease activists unconcerned with the requirements of military service like physical and mental health, selflessness, and unit cohesion. Longstanding Department of Defense (DoD) policy (DoD Instruction (DoDI) 6130.03) provides that it is the policy of the DoD to ensure that service members are “[f]ree of medical conditions or physical defects that may reasonably be expected to require excessive time lost from duty for necessary treatment or hospitalization.” As a result, many mental and physical health conditions are incompatible with active duty, from conditions that require substantial medication or medical treatment to bipolar and related disorders, eating disorders, suicidality, and prior psychiatric hospitalization.

Using this categorically lie-laden excuse, he has terminated ultra-qualifies officers, leaving gaping holes in our nation's preparedness. This is nothing more than a Nuremberg law dressed in 21st century clothing. What's next for the non-hetero population? Repealing marriage laws? Oh, wait, there are people already trying to do that. SCOTUS has, amazingly enough, declined to hear the Kim Davis Appeal. The former Kentucky county clerk asked the Supreme Court to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, but the justices declined to hear the case in November 2025, leaving marriage equality as the law of the land. But we all know it ain't gonna stop there. In at least 9 states, legislators have filed bills and resolutions trying to get state law to overturn same-sex marriage. 

But that's not enough damage for him  because it doesn't directly fill his own pockets. Nope. To do that, he has to create EOs that apply directly to him and his cronies.

 

Executive Order 14233 on March 6, 2025 Establishment of the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and United States Digital Asset Stockpile is one that defies any pretense at logic. Serious legal and ethical issues are raised by this executive order since it allows Feckless Felon and his family to profit massively. But did that stop him? Nope. The House Judiciary Committee issued a report, Trump, Crypto, and a New Age of Corruption, excoriating this EO. They raise the following concerns:

• President Trump and his family have earned hundreds of millions of dollars and added billions to their net worth through a network of cryptocurrency ventures launched during and after the 2024 campaign, including World Liberty Financial and the $TRUMP memecoin.
   
• The Trump family’s crypto ventures have attracted substantial investments from foreign nationals and state-linked entities seeking to curry favor with the Administration—raising severe constitutional, ethical, and national security concerns.
   
• The Trump Administration has intervened to halt or terminate federal investigations and enforcement actions involving multiple cryptocurrency firms that have donated to the President or invested in his companies, including Coinbase, Gemini, Robinhood, Ripple, Crypto.com, Uniswap, Yuga Labs, and Kraken.
   
• Trump has issued pardons and rolled back sanctions for known bad actors that have provided financial support to his ventures.
   
• The Administration has systematically dismantled anti-corruption and financial integrity safeguards, including dissolving the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team (NCET), and repealing investor protection rules adopted during the Biden Administration—moves that have directly advanced the President’s personal financial interests. 

And it's also worth noting, President Felon has revoked over 100 Executive Orders from previous administrations, mostly dealing with civil rights and equal opportunity actions, rollbacks of multilingual services, mandate rollbacks for medical services including COVID and other vaccinations. The list keeps rolling along, killing shorelines, wildlife habitat, sacred lands, whatever stands in the way of the almighty buck.

Look, no empire has survived into the modern age. The most recent examples...the British, the Ottoman, the Austro-Hungarian, or even the Chinese all crumbled in the face of growing technology. Power to the people wasn't about physical prowess; power was the intellectual and scientific capabilities that plowed under the old regimes. Just look at Russia struggling to regain its former expansionist existence. It can't do it. 

Feckless seems to think annexing Greenland or renaming the Gulf of Mexico or Lake Ontario, or even Canada will give him power, will make him look like a conquering hero. Not even Viagra will help him look like anything but a doddering old fool with delusions of grandeur.

But that still doesn't answer my original question. What is the speed of dark? 

The speed of dark happens when the social safety nets collapse around the population and the population must seek survival elsewhere. That can happen fast...or it can be a prolonged experience made infinitely worse by the refusal of those in power to recognize this is a real problem. Like Social Security running outta money by 2033. We, the People, pay for Social Security by investing our own money in the program. Occam's razor could apply here... that the simplest fix is probably the right one: adjust the wage cap to have more people on the higher end paying in. It's not like they cannot afford to keep paying in like the rest of us working stiffs.  But that would significantly impact the longevity of the program for those who need it and rely on it most. The speed of dark will happen when that social safety net breaks and millions die as a result of a new, unnecessary form of poverty. 

Maybe, the speed of dark is the time it takes for a government to stop caring about its citizens enough to protect them. Living spaces...be they empires, countries, city states, towns, or villages  collapse when the residents can no longer afford to live there. When living in a particular place becomes so much of a hardship that safety is completely and totally compromised, people leave. Fast. They don't hang around for the afterparty UNLESS they are prevented from leaving altogether. But that's a different story.

In my most humble opinion, I do think the speed of dark in any society is predicated on its inability to respond to the basic needs of its population. That apparently is a lesson no one is willing to learn.

The Wifely Person's Tip o'the Week

Friday night begins Rosh HaShanah, our Jewish New Year.

Out goes 5787 and in comes 5788.

May you all be inscribed in the Book of Life

for a happy, healthy, and sweet New Year.

Can Social Security Be Fixed? Ja, Sure, You Betcha.

Charles Ponzi

Today, we're gonna learn about Ponzi schemes, a term bandied about by lots of people, few of whom actually knows that that is. Most people ascribe it to Bernie Madoff who made off like a bandit using a Ponzi scheme, but that's a different history lesson.  This one is about Social Security.

By definition, a Ponzi scheme, named for Charles Ponzi, is:

a form of fraud in which belief in the success of a nonexistent enterprise is fostered by the payment of quick returns to the first investors from money invested by later investors. (from Oxford Languages )

According to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Ponzi schemes share a set of red flags:

1. High investment returns with little or no risk
2. Overly consistent returns.
3. Unregistered investments.
4. Unlicensed sellers.
5. Secretive or complex strategies.
6. Issues with paperwork.
7. Difficulty receiving payments

The typical Ponzi scheme requires an initial investment, usually a significant amount, then promises above average earnings. The purveyors of the scheme are cloudy in their information about the investments and its structure. Often, terms like secret strategy or off-shore investments are used to keep the inexperienced investor from asking more questions, thereby playing to their naïveté. 

In the Presidential Debate held on September 7th, 2011, then Texas Governor Rick Perry stated:

“It [Social Security] is a Ponzi scheme to tell our kids that are 25 or 30 years old today, you're paying into a program that's going to be there. Anybody that's for the status quo with Social Security today is involved with a monstrous lie to our kids, and it's not right.”  

Howard Gleckman of The Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center immediately took issue with that. The next day, he published Rick Perry's Social Security Myth through TPC, writing:

Here is the real story of Social Security in one sentence: It is underfunded and badly needs to be modernized but even if Washington does nothing, young people will receive three-quarters of their promised benefits. And last I looked, three-quarters of promised benefits falls somewhat short of a “monstrous lie.” Don’t believe me? Just ask the bipartisan Social Security Trustees—even those who served during George W. Bush’s administration. Here is a link to the trustees report from 2007. This year's isn't much different.

Granted, a fair amount of time has passed since then, but what Gleckman says remains a pretty accurate assessment of Social Security.

Borrowing from Social Security began under George W Bush, but whenever it has happened, it has been a pretty transparent action. From the Social Security Agency history page:

Inter-Fund Borrowing Among the Trust Funds 

In the early 1980s the Social Security Trust Funds had developed short-term cash flow problems, as a result of the adverse performance of the economy during the "stagflation" of the 1970s. As a stop-gap measure, Congress passed legislation in 1981 to permit inter-fund borrowing among the three Trust Funds (the Old-Age and Survivors Trust Fund; the Disability Trust Fund; and the Medicare Trust Fund). This authority was to lapse at the end of 1982. However, the 1983 Amendments extended the inter-fund borrowing authority to the end of 1987. Under the law as amended, all loans would have to be repaid by the end of 1989. 

The inter-fund loans were required to be repaid with an amount of interest equal to that which the loaning fund would have earned had it had use of the money during this time. In other words, the borrowing fund was required to make the loaning fund whole at the end of the process.

This authority was used twice, once in November 1982 and once in December 1982. The total amount borrowed was $17.5 billion. The Old-Age and Survivors Trust Fund borrowed the money-$5.1 billion from the Disability Trust Fund and $12.4 billion from the Medicare Trust Fund. Repayment began in 1985 and the debt to the Medicare Trust Fund was paid off by January 1986 and the debt to the Disability Trust Fund was liquidated in April 1986.                  

                                        Larry DeWitt / SSA Historian's Office/12/17/98

Again, an older source, but the process has remained stable and pretty much unchanged. 

I also went looking for reliable fact-checking sites. League of Women Voters of Copper County, Michigan has a really good analysis with a pretty comprehensive guide to those websites providing fact-checking services. They're located in Houghton, a town near and dear to our hearts, I will be using PolitiFact and FactCheck.org for today's episode. Both of are highly rated by International Fact Checking Network (IFCN) and are considered dead center for bias. 

Okay...back to Social Security.

Harkening back to the original allegations made during 2011, FactCheck actually delved directly into the question when Ted Cruz called Social Security a Ponzi scheme:

FactCheck.org, Sept. 8, 2011: The [Social Security] system doesn’t meet the common definition of a “Ponzi,” which is a criminal fraud, relying on deception. The Securities and Exchange Commission, for example, says a Ponzi is “an investment fraud that involves the payment of purported returns to existing investors from funds contributed by new investors.” Ponzi schemes draw their name from Charles Ponzi, who in the 1920s promised his victims that he could provide a 50 percent return in 90 days by putting their money into a speculation scheme involving postage stamps. In reality, Ponzi simply paid early “investors” big returns with the money eagerly offered by others who came later — pocketing millions for himself — until the bubble inevitably collapsed. Bernard Madoff’s more recent fraud — while much larger — was another example of a Ponzi scheme. Madoff and Ponzi lied to their victims about where their money was going, while Social Security’s finances — while troubled — are an open book.

In an interview on February 28th, 2025, Elon Musk told Joe Rogan:

 Social Security is the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.

POLITIFACT patiently explains why not:

The Social Security benefits program has crucial differences from a Ponzi scheme, which is an illegal money-making fraud. A Ponzi scheme is based on signing up more and more investors to pay off earlier members, until that becomes impossible. 

Unlike a Ponzi scheme, Social Security is transparent, has multiple layers of oversight and doesn’t promise unrealistic returns. And if there isn’t enough money to pay benefits, mechanisms exist to make it financially sustainable.

 sources: 

• Social Security Fact Sheet view 3/19/25
• Social Security Trust Fund -2024

Duh.

Is Social Security still underfunded? Yes,but that does not make it a Ponzi scheme. Are there ways to fix it? Yes. Removing the annual earnings cap would be a huge step forward. Right now, the cap is set at $176,100 which is ridiculously low. The cap should be removed altogether or set at a more reasonable number....like  $5,000,000. That would do a great deal to offset the reckless borrowing from Social Security. The pundits predict Social Security will be depleted by 2035. What this actually means is that SSA would be able to pay a percentage of the expected benefit. 

Besides, if Social Security really was a Ponzi scheme, you wouldn't know about it because being a BIG secret is sorta a main thing if you wanna have a Ponzi scheme. It's stupid, I know. 

To be sure, Social Security needs a lot of things, but shutting down offices, removing online access, cutting the number of workers answering phones is NOT the answer. Implementing insane changes like the new ID business is nothing more than a waste of taxpayer money at a time when we can least afford it. The horror stories from rural areas are beginning to come in, even for simple death benefit adjustment questions that cannot be answered by those picking up the phone. This is not re-organization; this is wholesale demolition.

Since  it began, people have depended on Social Security to provide for retirement. We pay in, we get it back. Damn near every civilized society has some form of national pension. Are these all Ponzi schemes, too?

Meanwhile, back in the olden days.....

Miss Pease, my 7th grade Cit-Ed (citizenship education for those of you who did not grow up in the rarified land of The Board of Regents) told us that the purpose of government was to provide for the good, welfare, and safety of its citizens. Whether it was a clan, a tribe, a village, or a city, the powers that ran it had a civic responsibility for its residents/citizens. Otherwise, what would be the point? Any anthropologist/sociologist will tell you the same thing. The bigger the banding together, the greater the need for a social contract. That's how society is formed. It's not always fair, or equitable, but a leader cannot remain a leader if he/she is not protecting the people and their way of life. Simple, basic, social contracts. 

What Elon Muskrat and his little elves are doing is shredding that basic social contract with the blessings of President Felon. 

As the other departments and programs are cut and suspended, other sectors of the population are beginning to understand the magnitude of the impact. On the news last night, a potato farmer whose main markets are Mexico and Canada is watching those markets being yanked out from under his farm even through he voted for the felon.. His voice was so full of pain and disbelief when he said: 

I knew people were gonna get screwed, but I didn't think he was gonna screw us. We all voted for him.

Long before election day, I wondered how people could go into the voting booth and vote against their own self-interest. I still don't understand that. I guess they figured even though he screwed every employee he ever had, they were gonna be different, that he wouldn't screw them. But he did. And  between him and the Muskrat, they've given kleptocracy a bad name.

Clearly these guys are too busy lining their pockets to understand guys like them usually end up at the end of a rope. By making the U.S. more vulnerable to outside forces, they are not endearing themselves to others. They have not learned the lessons of war and governance. Perhaps a class on French history would remind them of what happens to despots, benevolent or otherwise. 

I just don't know if we can afford to wait around for their collapse. It will happen. It has happened to every other self-aggrandizing leader since Julius Caesar. The list is endless...and they will just be two more names at the end. It won't end well for either of them.

*********************

Before I sign off, I want to take a moment to write about my friend Elissa. She left us last week. I actually knew her mom before I knew her. See, she was a Teener...a member of the family that had the only decent theatrical costume company in town. I met her when our kids were little and we were day school parents and volunteering for every organization in town. She had impeccable style. She always looked outrageously terrific. Elissa was one of the kindest people I ever knew. We laughed a lot. We would email each other late into the night...because talking might wake sleeping husbands. And when I could not stand up on my own, she told me, "Lean on me. We can be upright together." She did not want a funeral, she wanted a celebration of life. She asked us to wear colorful things and to wear bright red lipstick. I did. 

Her memory is forever a blessing for all of us lucky enough to have known her.  I will miss her forever. 

The Wifely Person's Tip o'the Week

Choose  to be happy.