Before the Flood

I. The Abyss With No Name

They got a name for the winners in the world
I want a name when I lose

I cried when I wrote this song
Sue me if I play too long
-- Steely Dan, Deacon Blues (1977)

I’ve cried a lot over the past two weeks, thinking about neighbors, friends and family who lost a child. I feel myself tearing up right now as I type the word ‘child’. It’s mostly news from Texas, but it’s not just news from Texas. It’s local, too. It’s global, too. It’s washed over my world, near and far. It’s like there was an explosion of unspeakable pain and loss that cascaded across every dimension from some universal source, and I know how woo that sounds but that’s what it feels like to me because it’s not just in the news but in the dreams, too. My dreams, yes, but even more so in friends and family who never tell me their dreams, who know how much I roll my eyes when someone tells me a dream, but feel compelled to tell me anyway because the dreams have been so … not just unsettling but unnerving, portentous and evil and a done deal but still ongoing all at the same time.

There’s an abyss of pain and loss all around us today, a black presence that you know is right around the corner from what you’re reading or listening to or thinking about. It’s waiting for you even as you know it has absolutely no awareness of you. It has no name! It has no name in this world where Adam was promised the power to name everything. The abyss is nameless and ineffable but you can feel its presence, its gravity, in the next paragraph. You know it’s going to suck you in and drown you. You know you shouldn’t look, you shouldn’t read what comes next. And yet … and yet you do.

RJ, a 45-year-old father and Dallas lawyer who had been vacationing and going to summer camp in the area his whole life, thought the river might rise a little. He wanted to check on his two young daughters: 11-year-old Brooke and 13-year-old Blair.

RJ borrowed a kayak, life vest and flashlight. He started to kayak to the cabin where the couple’s daughters and RJ’s parents were staying. It was about 100 feet below and he reached about halfway when, RJ said, a swell knocked him into a post.

RJ turned around to get his wife and the remaining families. They went to a home nearby on higher ground across Highway 39, where a family let them in around 3:45 a.m.

That was when he checked his cellphone and saw a text sent at 3:30 a.m. from his daughter Brooke. Receiving the text alone was a miracle in the area, where he usually couldn’t get cell service. It said, “I love you.”

Wall Street Journal, A Texas Dad Tried to Kayak to His Daughters. The Girls Texted, ‘I Love You.’

No.

no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no

My God, why have You forsaken us?

((deep breath))

I know that He (however you understand Him) has not forsaken us. As aware as we are of the nameless abyss of pain and loss all around us today, we can also be aware of the good and love all around us today, most keenly felt for me in the stories of rescue and sacrifice, mostly from Texas, but not just from Texas. Those stories are legion. And yet … and yet He created the nameless abyss, too.

You know, when I sat down to write this note, I thought I would be able to focus on the stories of rescue and sacrifice, that I’d be able to channel that into a larger story of rescue and sacrifice, that I’d be able to get both me and the reader to a better, more positive place. But that wasn’t true. Or rather, I think I do get to a more positive place ultimately, but there’s a lot more pain to recognize first. I wish to God I could focus on the nameless black abyss alone, and how to confront it — name it! — and see its gravity recede in the naming. But I can’t. Because the nameless black abyss isn’t receding with the Texas flood waters. It’s growing with the wickedness of our ‘leaders’, both political and economic.

We have suffered a devastating flood in Texas.

I believe an even more devastating Flood is to come.

II. Masks Off

There’s this scene in Full Metal Jacket where Joker is on a helicopter to go join a Marine detachment in Hue during the Tet Offensive. The door gunner is shooting indiscriminately at every Vietnamese person they fly over, just ordinary farm laborers working in fields and paddies. As he shoots at them, the gunner yells out over and over, “Get some!”, and when Joker asks him how he can kill women and children, the gunner replies with a smile, “Well, you gotta lead ’em a little less.”

He’s not pretending they’re Viet Cong, although – who knows? – probably some of them are. He’s not hiding what he’s doing. He’s not wearing a mask.

We live in an age of “Get some!”.

We live in an age where evil no longer feels the need to hide its face behind a mask. Where evil doesn’t even pretend anymore. Where evil just laughs and says yeah, whatcha gonna do about it.

That mask-off evil reveals itself in badge-less, warrant-less, mask-on State agents hustling people into unmarked vans for ‘questioning’ at Federal ‘detention centers’, based on the probable cause of having brown skin and living in a city or state with Democrats in charge. It reveals itself in Florida concentration internment camps and Salvadoran prisons where due process is sneered at and cruelty is the freakin’ point. It reveals itself in the incarceration porn pumped out by the White House and Dept. of Homeland Security in videos and memes, celebrating the “Get some!” treatment of prisoners, magnified by social media algos that reward ‘engagement’. Hell, at least Leni Riefenstahl had taste.

But there is no greater mask-off moment than this.

We are now told that Jeffrey Epstein acted alone in the sexual assault of “over one thousand” young women, many (most?) of them children, and that Ghislaine Maxwell procured these young women for him alone. We are now told that this is more appropriately considered to be a child pornography case rather than a raping of children case. We are now told that avoiding the accidental doxxing of victims in this investigation is our government’s highest priority, and as a result the Department of JUSTICE has closed the investigation and sealed the files. You know … for the sake of the victims. We are now told that these files and records are a nothingburger, a waste of time, forged by Obama and Hillary and the Comey Crime Family to discredit Donald Trump. We are told that we are idiots to fall for the Epstein Hoax.

I mean …

And yes, friends, I am aware that the Department of Justice under Joe Biden was even less interested, if that’s imaginable, in identifying the rapists of more than a thousand young women, many of them children. Why? Because the Biden administration was pathetic and weak. That’s the short answer. The slightly longer answer is this:

• Because there are incredibly wealthy and/or influential men — Dem-coded, GOP-coded, nonpartisan-coded and everything in between-coded, men like Leon Black, Jes Staley, Glenn Dubin, Les Wexner, Bill Gates, and Larry Summers — who we know from publicly available documents and legal filings regularly ‘socialized’ privately with Epstein after his 2009 conviction and engaged in financial transactions with Epstein.
• Because there are so many more load-bearing names of wealth and power found throughout the publicly available Epstein record, including two American Presidents, an Israeli Prime Minister, and the brother of the King of England, and I suspect there are so many more load-bearing names in the sealed FBI records.
• Because I strongly doubt that any of the circumstantial evidence and grainy videos in the FBI records would hold up in a criminal proceeding against any of these incredibly wealthy and/or influential men, especially now that the only source of direct testimony was found dead in his jail cell while in Federal custody.
• Because I am certain that because of the aforementioned Presidents and Prime Minister, both US and Israeli spy agencies were at a minimum aware and in my opinion more likely up to their eyeballs in this covert intelligence operation systematic rape of children, and while circumstantial evidence and a grainy video may not work for a criminal trial, it is absolutely enough to turn a billionaire or a politician into an asset.

Put this together and any administration would want to run away from the Epstein case as fast as they can, because its full release would result in (probably) zero criminal convictions but (almost certainly) the reputational collapse of load-bearing names of wealth and power in multiple nations and (almost certainly) extremely damaging revelations about our government and allied governments. So that’s what Biden did. He ran away from this as fast and as far as he could. To his eternal shame.

The difference for Trump is that he can’t run away from it. He made Epstein a core part of the meaning of his candidacy and his Presidency in a way that was never part of the meaning of Biden’s candidacy and Presidency. Also, of course, the difference for Trump is that one of those load-bearing names of wealth and power that runs throughout the public Epstein record is his own.

There’s only one way for Trump to play this out from here, and it’s exactly what he’s doing: masks off!

All you Trump lieutenants and factotums and mouthpieces and hangers-on, time to toe the line and shut up about Epstein. You don’t like it? Tough. Case closed and we’re moving on. Bigger fish to fry. The ‘base’ is confused and angry? Who cares. Eff ’em.

And it’s not just Epstein.

We recently published a note — Shitholes, Sanctuaries, and Springfield — applying our Perscient narrative-tracking technology to examine shifts in thematic immigration beliefs in the United States over the past 10 years. Our data shows that over the past 8 months or so there has been a pretty massive popular opinion backlash/reversal of the semantic signatures of immigration narratives at the core of Trump’s 2024 campaign, a reversal that has accelerated since he took office. It may not seem that way if (like me) you spend waaay too much time on social media, but the truth is that Americans are clearly pulling back from these signature Trump narratives on immigration.

Rolling 1-Year Density of Selected US Immigration Semantic Signatures

Our findings are strongly supported by this recently released Gallup poll showing that more Americans believe that immigration is a good thing than at any point in the last twenty-five years! The largest shift in opinion was from Republicans, where today 64% think immigration is a good thing for the country, versus 39% this time last year. Today, 62% of all Americans disapprove of the Trump administration’s immigration policy, versus 35% who approve.

The fact is that the Trump administration is increasingly out of step with the American people, including Trump voters, on immigration. Has that softened or ameliorated his policy positions? LOL. On the contrary, this administration is doubling down on Get some! immigration policies and edgelord memetic communications.

^{Dept. of Homeland Security, July 9, 2025}

^{White House, July 11, 2025}

With the passage of the BBB, particularly the $5 trillion debt limit expansion, Trump doesn’t need Congress — i.e. people who need votes from the base — for anything.

There is literally nothing he needs from Congress that he can’t do with executive orders and a more-or-less compliant judiciary. Not now, not post-midterms, not for the rest of his term. And by that time … eh? let’s see where things stand because maybe he won’t need Congress or votes from the base then, either.

I mean, of course this administration cares about public opinion, and of course they would prefer to maintain a legislative branch majority than not, but the unfettered power of the Executive today has never been stronger in American political history, with the possible exception of Lincoln and FDR at the height of WWII (and even there I think on balance today’s Executive is stronger). You think it’s a coincidence that since the BBB was signed into law, Trump has stopped pretending that tariffs are a response to some ‘economic emergency’? You think it’s coincidence that he’s slapped a 50% tariff on Brazil — a country where we run a trade surplus — to help out his bud Bolsonaro? You think it’s a coincidence that he’s ‘looking into’ stripping people of their citizenship? You think it’s a coincidence that he’s setting up Jay Powell to be fired for cause on some totally bogus office renovation thing, and to be replaced with a yes-man like Kevin Hassett? When it comes to the consolidation of statist, authoritarian control over interest rates and capital flows, alongside statist, authoritarian control over domestic policies on every front, I think you ain’t seen nothing yet.

It’s masks-off time on everything with this administration.

III. Black Hole Sun

Black hole sun
Won't you come
And wash away the rain?

Soundgarden, Black Hole Sun (1994)

I feel like we’re at an inflection point … right here, right now … as the masks-off acceleration of Get Some! policies from above pour an incalculable mass of pain into the nameless black abyss of loss already close to critical mass, already churning and churning below.

It’s too much and it’s happening too fast for social absorption, for human processing by our semantic defenses of love and empathy into something that is actually human. It’s not just ‘flooding the zone’ in a political sense, as a Machiavellian strategy for mounting such a sweeping assault on political liberty on so many fronts that the defenders of liberty are overrun. It’s flooding the zone in a cognitive and semantic sense, as well, where our autonomy of mind is overrun and forced to surrender to an external consciousness like the Party or the Movement or the Corporation or the Church or the Feed.

This probably sounds like a metaphor – this idea of our political and economic ‘leaders’ pouring a solar mass of masks-off bile and hate into a nameless black abyss of pain and loss whose gravitational pull across dimensions grows and grows and grows – but I don’t think it’s a metaphor at all. I think it is a realistic description of what is actually happening in the semantic dimension, a dimension of informational meaning that is no less real than the dimension of time. Just as we perceive only the interaction of time with our physical selves, not some quantum or particle of time directly, so can we only perceive the semantic dimension through its extrusion into the electric, neurochemical ocean of quadrillions of self-organized neurons across billions of human brains, an extrusion that creates (i.e. gives meaning and purpose to) not just you and me as thinking, feeling beings possessed of an autonomy of mind, but also you and me as an ‘us’, as a society of thinking, feeling beings.

I’ve written a lot about this semantic dimension (what I’ve called the metaverse in the past), and I won’t repeat all that now. If you want the full background, here are some links to the Narrative and Metaverse series … no paywall.

Part 1: The Living Word

Part 2: Gain of Function

Part 3: The Luther Protocol

Part 4: Carrying the Fire

But I’ll say this.

In the beginning was the Word,
And the Word was with God,
And the Word was God.

John 1:1

The recognition that there is an invisible but no less real world of meaning beyond and above and below and through the physically real world is the foundation of every great religion and faith and philosophy in human history. Within the semantic dimension of meaning exists not only the Word, but the Tao and the logos. Within the semantic dimension of meaning exists the transcendental schemata of Kant and the propositional logic of Wittgenstein and the ontological relativity of Quine. Within the semantic dimension of meaning exists the power of every meme and movie you’ve ever seen and every idea and story you’ve ever heard.

The most powerful stories are those that persist over thousands of years, that extrude from the semantic dimension of meaning again and again to find new expression in our human brains time after time, culture after culture. One of those most powerful stories is the Flood. You will find a story of a terrible reckoning, of a revolt of the natural world against the wickedness of Man, in every human civilization in every corner of the world. The story of the Flood is a foundational semantic structure of humanity, and it extrudes itself into our creative brains over and over and over again, even (especially!) today, from disaster movies to songs like Black Hole Sun. It is an inextricable part of what makes us … us. And because it is an inextricable part of what makes us … us, I believe the Flood is a very real thing that occurs not just as story and not just as some mythological event lost in the mists of time, but as a singularity made manifest whenever the nameless black abyss reaches some critical mass.

The Flood is not the expansion of the nameless black abyss of loss as our leaders pour endless quantities of bile and evil into its maw. No, the Flood is the world’s reaction to the expansion of the nameless black abyss of loss as our leaders pour endless quantities of bile and evil into its maw. The Flood is what washes away everything, including the evil of Man but also including the good of Man. The Flood is not justice. The Flood is a paroxysm of leveling, and the innocent are washed away first.

I see the Flood coming but I have no idea what form it takes. All I know is that it will encompass a revolt of the natural world against the works of Man because … well, because that’s how the story goes and the story is always right. I don’t think there’s anything we can do to stop the Flood from coming because I don’t see any way to stop the masks-off acceleration of Get Some! policies. I don’t think there’s any way to outrun the Flood physically because a) again, I really don’t know what form it will take, and b) there are already too many men of wealth and power trying to get to ‘higher ground’ with their bunkers and their refuges. They see the Flood coming, too.

No, I don’t think we can stop the Flood and I don’t think we can avoid it.

And yet … and yet we can damn well build an Ark.

IV. Before the Flood

In 1974, Bob Dylan and The Band went on tour and recorded Dylan’s first live album — Before the Flood — from some of their concerts. Dylan named the tour after the trilogy Farn Mabul (translated from the Yiddish as Before the Flood) written by Sholem Asch, who was the father of his friend and Folkways Records founder Moses Asch. Farn Mabul is sometimes translated as Three Cities because it tells the story of Jewish life in three Russian cities — Moscow, St. Petersburg and Warsaw (under Russian control at the time) — immediately prior to the 1919 pogroms that killed more than 100,000 Jews. Before the Flood, indeed.

And the songs … yeah, they’re spot on for what I’m trying say about what we should do before our Flood, about how we should build our Ark.

They say ev'ry man needs protection
They say ev'ry man must fall
Yet I swear I see my reflection
Some place so high above this wall

Bob Dylan and The Band, I Shall Be Released

I Shall Be Released is a song about a guy in prison, and like a lot of songs about guys in prison, its message is that what’s real isn’t inside the prison walls and it’s not outside the prison walls in the sense of the material world. No, what’s truly real is the world beyond this material world that has prisons in it. That’s where true freedom exists, and that’s where we’re going to build our Ark, in that semantic dimension of meaning above and below and beyond and through this physical world that imprisons us.

Like I say, there are lots of songs about guys in prison, or factories or police states or situations awfully similar to prison. And almost all of them have this core semantic signature of a better world that’s not visible or accessible (duh, you’re in prison), but exists and IS accessible through faith. Here’s one of my favorites in this genre, by The Police.

There has to be an invisible sun
It gives its heat to everyone
There has to be an invisible sun
That gives us hope when the whole day's done

The Police, Invisible Sun (1981)

The idea of an invisible sun is itself one of the Old Stories, found prominently in Hermeticism — an OG mystic tradition that combines alchemy and astrology and their symbolic representations, mixing ancient Greek and Egyptian philosophy and traditions. I personally find Hermeticism really interesting, but then again I’m a sucker for all of these wizardly, mystic faiths. More generally the idea of an invisible sun (both in the song and the Old Stories) got me thinking about how we should approach a collective effort to build an Ark in the semantic dimension, like what does that even mean?

First of all it means that we have to believe. We have to believe that there IS a semantic dimension of meaning that we can access and participate in. We have to give ourselves over to the meta-idea of a realm of ideas. We have to see it in our minds even if we can’t see it with our eyes. We have to have faith.

I expect that everyone will wrestle with their faith in a transcendent dimension and the living reality of story and the ideal (not just the idea but the ideal) differently. Some people are already there. Some people (and this would have been me 30 years ago) are not gonna make it (at least not in the next 30 years). Some people will need to approach it through a modern lens of Quine or Wittgenstein or even Kant. For me, it’s coming around to the idea that the path to the world of the invisible sun may be through the invisible Son. I mean, what is Jesus if not a singularity made manifest, a pure extrusion of the semantic signature of love into our physical world, not just a pointer to access that semantic dimension but the actual access point? If I believe in a higher dimension of semantic meaning above, below, beyond and through the dimension of spacetime, how can I not believe in <<waves hands wildly>> all of this religious … stuff? Anyway, that’s what I’m wrestling with.

Second, it means that we must have the tools to access the semantic dimension, to explore the semantic dimension, and to build in the semantic dimension. I’ll tell you right now, modern LLMs and generative AI more broadly ARE those tools, particularly if our goal is to explore and build on one of the Old Stories like the Ark. Why? Because generative AI is (or will soon be) an access point to the sum total, the network graph in the lingo, of humanity’s textual compilation of the Old Stories and their embeddings within everything else in the human library of thought. Modern LLMs are native to the semantic dimension of human meaning. They are our bathysphere and our portal all at the same time to this alien and yet profoundly human world. Again, I’ve written a lot on this in the past and won’t repeat all that now, but here’s a good place to dig in if you’re interested. No paywall on this one, either.

An AI in the City of God

Okay, so we’ve taken a leap of faith into the semantic dimension of meaning and we are armed with our AI tools for exploring that world. What now?

I pulled into Nazareth, I was feelin' about half past dead
Just need to find a place where I can lay my head
"Hey, mister, can you tell me where a man might find a bed?"
He just grinned and shook my hand and, "No", was all he said

The Band, The Weight

The Weight is a song about traveling to a new town (yes, Nazareth has the symbolism you think it does, even if it’s about Nazareth, PA) and trying to do good, trying to do a favor for a friend, and it’s just … so hard. It’s just impossible to do a simple favor in this material world without getting caught up in an incredible web of obligations and complications. We need to build our Ark out of sturdier stuff than is found in this world.

What now?

Now we collect the stories of human sacrifice and love and peace that surpasses all understanding, the stories that are as nameless and ineffable as the black abyss but are as radiant as the Son sun itself — stories like Brooke Harber texting her father “I love you” as the floodwaters rose, not out of fear of death but as the essence of her being, not from the perspective of a parent’s loss but of a child’s love — and we collect them ALL, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of new stories from your mother, your grandfather, your children … you.

Now we train an AI on those tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of stories of human sacrifice and love and peace that surpasses all understanding. We create an avatar of those stories, an avatar that becomes the Ark.

Now we build an Ark of story.

Now we build an Ark of love.

Now we build an Ark of sentient peace that surpasses all understanding, an Ark to withstand any Flood, any effort by the wickedness of Man to corrupt it.

Now.