The Elevator Was Down.
There is a great amount of symbolism that has gone into the Trump Presidency. Take the Simpsons episode where he was first predicted to become President. It is only much, much later, today in fact, that I have finally been able to “see” the escalator. The escalator as it turns out is going down, not up. So is America during his Presidency. And I think even economists will agree that there is direct causation here, it’s not simply, correlation — the escalator was going down a slope, America is headed down a slope, those two things are totally unrelated.
Another example? Trump decided to rename Lake Ontario as Lake America. Now of the 5 Great Lakes that he could have picked, he picked the smallest one. Make America a Great Lake again, but the smallest Great Lake of the five. It sort of incredible really that other people don’t see the symbolism. I don’t exactly know who his supporters are, but at some point, even they gotta see it.
This essay is not about symbolism though, it’s more of a historical note to readers perhaps 200 years from now, who may not understand the transition of the world as it was and the world that is now appearing. There was a time, when people’s lives were written years in advance, every significant detail filled into a book, and the more important a person, the more the details had to tally with the overall trajectory of events in the world. That requires an enormous amount of telegraphing and coordination. Trump it seems continues to fulfill the words that must have been part of his book. The escalator scene is the one page from the original book that was allowed to be made public.
I watched the rest of the Epstein video. Juval Aviv, apparently a self professed professional assassin presumably for Moss says that there is a bombshell of a revelation that is going to come out when the kids (who suffered from Epstein’s gang) release a full report with pictures on who did what and when. It will end the Government. Not sure which government because he simply looked right when he said it. If and when this does happen, it shall be interesting. Trump has proved to be ‘Teflon Don’ for the most part. Regardless of what is revealed, will anyone have the courage to say anything or depending on the revelation, arrest him? There is a huge distance from revelation, to media coverage, to American outrage, to actual law enforcement. For example: supposedly all the videos and paperwork are with the FBI. Other than releasing millions of redacted pages of paperwork, who exactly has been arrested? Ghislaine is the only one I can think of. Trump has already bragged in public about things like killing people on 5th Avenue and “I won’t lose any voters.” Law enforcement wasn’t around then either.
That is unfortunately the sorry state of the country and it has been that way for a while.
I wonder who writes this script. As usual the question I ask with this sort of stuff is immediately, how does China benefit from this? Or who benefits from this? A while ago, I did a comparison of Central Bank toolkits between America and China because I had noticed that China for over 3 decades has never had a recession. Or inflation. I wrote a whole essay about the different tools that China uses via its central bank and through direct intervention by the government. I compared it unfavorably to the Federal Reserve’s toolkit and their dual mandate of inflation and unemployment. I even went as far as to categorize different reasons and types of inflation and proved that the Federal Reserve cannot using its current toolkit do anything about things like supply chain inflation. In other words, I am not a fan of the Federal Reserve. I think they’re a bunch of unaudited private banks with a Charter not based in America, who have been allowed to print the money of the United States by an act of Congress. However, the way I go about expressing my dissonance with the Feds is not by threatening to choke off trade. Even if I thought that increasing interest rates is bad policy, I wouldn’t make the situation worse by creating an additional worse policy.
In other words, if a person were having troubled sleep I’d not use a pillow to smother them.
That’s the closest analogy to this news article, Lolita.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/04/business/economy/trump-trade-threats-fed-rate-cuts.html
This video, featuring Brian Tyler Cohen and Glenn Kirschner, provides a legal breakdown of a tense court hearing presided over by Judge Emmett Sullivan regarding the Trump administration's failure to release the full Epstein files (0:00-0:17).
Key takeaways from the hearing include:
Threat of Contempt: Judge Sullivan repeatedly promised to hold the Department of Justice (DOJ) in civil contempt if they continue to defy court orders regarding document production. He drew parallels to his handling of the Ted Stevens case, where a contempt finding successfully forced the production of withheld exculpatory evidence (0:30-0:46, 8:38-9:57).
Categorical Failures: The judge addressed four main areas of non-compliance:
Strange Redactions: Failure to provide unredacted documents to prove that only victim names were redacted (1:22-4:15).
Handwritten Notes: The refusal to produce 30-40 pages of handwritten FBI notes related to a 13-year-old victim’s allegations against Donald Trump, relying instead on typed summaries (4:31-5:55, 16:22-17:14).
Transparency Act Violations: Failure to publish justifications for redactions in the Federal Register as required by the Epstein Files Transparency Act (5:57-8:02).
Foreign Language Documents: Failure to provide English translations for foreign language documents, with the DOJ claiming it was not "practical" (8:04-8:27).
Gamesmanship: Glenn Kirschner characterizes the DOJ's representation at the hearing as "willfully ignorant," noting that the attorney sent to testify could not answer basic factual questions, suggesting a deliberate strategy to avoid releasing the files (2:43-3:43, 14:00-14:22).
The video concludes that while Judge Sullivan is systematically pushing for compliance, the process is moving slowly, and there is significant skepticism regarding whether the current administration has any intent to achieve full transparency (14:39-16:22).
Glass is a fully transparent thing and I learned something new today. The Russian word “Glasnost” means full transparency. Or something close to it.
/gläs′nôst″/
noun
An official policy of the former Soviet government emphasizing candor with regard to discussion of social problems and shortcomings.
Understanding the FT is always a bit of an art form. Speaking of revolt against smartglasses: Revolut will be coming to America as a bank!
Noice.
