Prediction is the sharpest tool the human animal has devised — the chisel with which we sculpted survival out of chance, the fulcrum by which we lifted civilization out of survival. Among the greatest gifts of the imagination, that crowning curio of consciousness, is our ability to alchemize hindsight into foresight, to chart the most probable course of the future by drawing on our experience of the past. And yet, like the tragic flaw of the Greek hero, our great strength is also our great vulnerability. It is salutary to remember how often our predictions have been wrong, how again and again they have withheld entire regions of reality from us as we have continually mistaken the known for the knowable, our ways of knowing for the path to truth.
The shape of the Earth.
The organizing principle of the Solar System.
The bat.
Art by Tove Jansson from her Moomins series. (Brooklyn Public Library)
If we fed what we know about mammalian anatomy and the physics of avian flight into a predictive algorithm, it would fail to produce a flying mammal. In theory, which is how we model reality in the mind, bats should not exist. And yet every evening, all over the world, winged improbabilities scribble across the gloaming sky their stenography of the possible.
Metabolism is what makes all life possible and the metabolic engine of animals hinges on breathing — hemoglobin carries oxygen from the lungs throughout the bloodstream, where it reacts with sugar from food to produce energy. Our mammalian lungs resemble a bagpipe that inflates with each inhale of oxygen and deflates with each exhale of carbon dioxide. Birds have an entirely different respiratory system — air sacs acting as bellows move oxygen through the pipe-like lungs during both inhalation and exhalation. This unidirectional air flow allows birds to fly across great distances at high altitudes where the oxygen concentration is low.
Bats have mammalian lungs. They should not be able to fly. And yet they do, their flight more metabolically efficient than that of hummingbirds. Ranging in size from the lightest known mammal — the tiny Craseonycteris thonglongyai, weighing a mere 2 grams — to the Asian flying fox with its 2-meter wingspan, they have adapted to extreme environments thanks to their virtuosic oxygen and carbon dioxide regulation.
A study of Chile’s eight species of bats found that they have a respiratory area sixfold that of other mammals and lung volumes 72% greater. Their heart — the transport system for oxygen in the blood — is larger than that of any other mammal relative to body size. At rest, their breathing rate is similar to ours. But as soon as they take flight, it increases up to seventeen-fold, reaching as many as 400 breaths per minute synchronized with their wing beat frequency to minimizing energy expenditure by combining muscle contractions. These almost supernatural lungs are sheathed in a blood-gas barrier much thinner than that of other animals, allowing oxygen to enter the bloodstream rapidly, disposing of carbon dioxide just as rapidly.
Javan slit-faced bat (Nycteris javanica) and reddish-brown lip bat (Noctilis rufus) from Natural History and Illustrations of Mammals by Heinrich Rudolf Schinz, 1824. (Available as a print and a postcard.)
This respiratory and cardiovascular ingenuity allows bats to conserve energy during cold periods, not paying the metabolic cost of generating body heat that other mammals would — they are among Earth’s few true hibernators, capable of dropping their heartbeat sixteen-fold and their temperature to that of the cave walls that encastle them in their kingdom of darkness.
Greater false vampire bat (Megaderma lyra) from Natural History and Illustrations of Mammals by Heinrich Rudolf Schinz, 1824. (Available as a print and a postcard.)
These astonishing adaptations are the sum total of myriad small defiances of prediction — chances taken on the improbable and the untested, wild guesses at the shape of the possible — without which bats would not exist. But they do, and we need them. We need bats — “swallows with spools of dark thread sewing the shadows together,” D.H. Lawrence called them — for the same reason we need apricots and lichen and the great blue heron: to remind us that the universe could have remained one homogenous sea of matter swimming in light, for nothing in the laws of physics demands that the world be beautiful or could predict the dazzling diversity of forms that makes it so. The bat is just as defiant of prediction as the Big Bang — small winged evidence that the possible is always vaster than the probable and the imagination of life is always greater than that of the living.
“We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.”
–IRIS MURDOCH
Dame Jean Iris Murdoch (July 15, 1919 – February 8, 1999) was an Irish and British novelist and philosopher. Murdoch is best known for her novels about good and evil, sexual relationships, morality, and the power of the unconscious. Wikipedia
I first learned about the incredible work of Brenda Snow when I found her book, Diagnosed: The Essential Guide to Navigating the Patient’s Journey. Over the years I have had to deal with several health challenges in my own life including asthma, chronic pneumonia, bipolar disorder, as well as some rather exotic diseases that impacted my kidneys ( Glomerulonephritis) and adrenal glands (Pheochromocytoma). I am now a full-time caregiver to my wife, Carlin. I know I am not alone. No one gets through life without being a patient and/or a caregiver.
Brenda Snow has pioneered patient engagement for the life science industry with her agency Snow Companies, which she founded and, until recently, lead as its CEO. Brenda’s leadership is grounded in her own experience as a patient with multiple sclerosis and her ability to share her story with millions of women and men who have had to deal with a frightening diagnosis.
“Here’s the first thing I want you to understand,” Brenda tells us, “You are not alone.”
I had the good fortune to interview Brenda on my podcast. You can watch the full interview here. Hearing Brenda share her story not only reminds us that we are not alone, but that we have a caring guide who understands what we are going through and can help us survive and thrive.
“If you’ve been sucker-punched by a terrifying diagnosis,” Brenda says, “you might feel alienated from the life you used to live. You feel foreign to the person you used to be. It’s isolating, lonely, and scary.”
After thirty years of living with a chronic illness, and twenty-five years working with thousands of people managing a chronic or terminal disease, Brenda Snow is an authority on living a full life as a patient as well as the skills and courage necessary to be a loving care-partner.
“I’ve seen this healing Journey enough times that I recognize its stages,” Brenda explains, “Yes, there is a Patient’s Journey. Similar to the Grief Cycle, patients tend to journey through a recognizable series of experiences as they cope with their illness and process what it means for their lives.”
She recognizes that following phases and stages:
Phase I: Putting out the Fire
Pre-Diagnosis
Diagnosis
Grief
Anger
Acceptance
Phase 2: The Rest of Your Life
Endurance
Optimize Your Relationships
Optimize Your Care
Rebuilding
Impact
Phase I: Putting Out the Fire
“The first half of the Patient’s Journey is relatively linear,” Brenda says. “Phase 1 encompasses the early, acute part of your Journey: you’re dealing with your body’s most debilitating symptoms and putting out the fire. Phase 1 is brutal, but — if you can move through it — you will get beyond it.”
Pre-Diagnosis
“In the Pre-Diagnosis stage, something weird is happening to your body and you don’t know what,” states Brenda. “Your behavior may be characterized by a mixture of denial and frantic Googling attempts to self-diagnose.”
Diagnosis
“The Diagnosis stage brings both relief and sadness,” says Brenda. “Relief, because you finally have a name for what’s happening to your body. Sadness, because — what the hell — you can’t believe that this is going to be your life now.”
Grief
Grief comes when it starts to get real, when you realize this isn’t going to go away.
“These are ugly, painful moments that confirm: ‘Yes. I really do have this. This is part of my life now and I can’t make it go away,’” Brenda explains.
Anger
Anger and grief often go together.
“A lot of people are angry about what their disease took away from them,” says Brenda, “Their health, their job, their physical appearance, their ability to run around with their kids or make love to their partner.”
Acceptance
“Acceptance is hard,” affirms Brenda. “I don’t want to sound like Pollyanna here.”
There is much we can’t control about chronic illness.
“But one thing you can control: the glasses you put on to perceive your reality and determine the way you show up. You can choose how you see the world.”
Phase 2: The Rest of Your Life
“Phase 2 is not linear,” Brenda explains, “because you will engage in every one of these latter stages for the rest of your life. They may occur simultaneously or in a different order.”
Phase 1 must be engaged first.
“You won’t have the energy you need for any of these latter stages,” says Brenda, “until you turn the corner of Acceptance.”
Endurance
“You will need to endure your illness on a regular basis,” Brenda states, “because just when you think you’ve got the nut cracked, you’ll realize there’s some new shit you’ve got to figure out. Of all the Patient’s Journey stages, this is the one that lasts the longest.”
Optimize Your Relationships
“The Patient’s Journey instigates profound changes in patients, care partners, and everyone touched by the disease,” says Brenda. “It causes relationships to evolve. Everyone must learn new roles and new ways of engaging with one another.”
Optimize Your Care
“You’ll need to keep tweaking, retooling, and revisiting the plan to architect your Best-Case Scenario as you move through different seasons of life and as your disease potentially changes or new treatment protocols become available,” Brenda tells us.
Rebuilding
“Rebuilding is all about architecting fun and normalcy back into your life,” Brenda says. “Life is too short to be serious all the time, and that’s a truth you now know with greater sureness than you ever have before,” announces Brenda. “Surround yourself with people who ‘get it,’ who make you laugh.”
Impact
“And now, patients begin to ask, ‘What am I going to do with it? How am I going to give back and leave the world a better place?’ That’s when you arrive at the Impact stage of your Journey,” Brenda says. “As a patient, you’ve been freshly and brutally reminded that we’re all going to die one day. That universal truth now has personal immediacy to you.”
Women and Men as Patients and Caregivers
Although we all are going to die some day and we all will become patients and/or caregivers at some point in our lives, women and men often face different challenges. Women are more often caregivers and men more often face life-threatening illnesses, though our greater resistance to getting professional help often keeps men in denial.
According to Dr. Will Courtenay, author of Dying to Be Men,
“Although traditional men are socialized to be providers for and protectors of others, they tend to be poor guardians of their own health. Men in the United States have greater socioeconomic advantages than women, but despite these advantages men — on average — are at greater of serious chronic disease, injury, and death than women.”
As someone who has spent his professional career as a healer working with men and their families, I have experienced these gender differences over the last sixty years.
“For nearly all 15 leading causes of death [except Alzheimer’s], men and boys have higher age-adjusted death rates than women and girls,” says Dr. Courtenay. “These 15 leading killers account for more than 80% of all deaths in the United States.” [Based on statistics gathered by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.]
One of my goals in my life has been to help men live fully healthy lives so we don’t have to die before our time. Along the way I’ve learned to become a better caregiver to myself, my children, my parents, and my wife.
Both my wife and I are now in our 80s. In addition to the diagnosed illnesses we’ve had, we also have to deal with the realities of being old. We’ve been married for forty-five years and have six grown children, seventeen grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren. Brenda Snow’s experience and expertise has helped us navigate our Patient Journey as well as our Caregiver Journey. Yet, we still have more life to live and more lessons to learn.
If you’d like to know more about Brenda Snow and her work, you may do so here.
To see the interview and discussion we had together, you may do so here.
If you would like to read more articles about health and wellbeing, I invite you to subscribe to my free weekly newsletter here.
Best Wishes,
Jed Diamond
Founder and VHS (Visionary Healer Scholar) of MenAlive
The big-beautiful-actually-big-ugly bill that passed through Congress and was signed by the President on July 4th will cause untold damage to our country. Ironically, the pain will be felt most acutely by those who have supported the President the most. Many legislators who voted for the 940-page bill have admitted they didn’t actually read it, but rather took other people’s (namely Trump’s) word for it that it didn’t, for instance, cut Medicaid – which it decidedly did, and to the tune of a trillion dollars.
As if depriving almost 12 million people of their healthcare isn’t enough, that’s not even the most dastardly thing about this bill. The most dangerous piece of the legislation, one that cuts into the very heart of our Constitutional system, is its expansionof ICE. The 2024 ICE budget was $9.7 Billion; it now will be increased to an annual expenditure of $48 Billion. Over the next four years ICE will receive $170 Billion, making it bigger than most of the militaries of the world. The ICE budget will now be more than the FBI, the ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearm), the DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency), US Marshalls, and the Bureau of Prisons combined. The bill orders 10,000 new ICE agents, adding to the 20,000 ICE agents already active.
The annual budget for detentions now rise from $3.4 billion to $45 billion a year, constituting a 365% increase. While ICE is currently holding around 59,000 detainees – nearly half of whom have no criminal records – the new bill calls for adding 100,000 more.
And the power of ICE lies not just in its size. It operates outside of due process and the judicial system, meaning the administration has effectively hired its own private police force to do whatever it is they decide it should do. Just as Trump forces have managed to effectively neuter the U.S. Congress and our Supreme Court, with the latest changes to ICE they have effectively neutered the regulatory statutes that protect us from police overreach as well.
This is not normal.
The President campaigned on getting violent criminals off our streets – a goal no one would argue with – but what’s happening now is much bigger than that. The administration is not going after criminals; if that were the case, it wouldn’t be pardoning some of the biggest while collar criminals in America. They’re not going for criminals; they’re going for numbers. Stephen Miller is demanding 3,000 arrests be made per day, even suggesting that ICE agents stand outside Home Depots and see who they can round up. They might target one person, then they just pick up whoever is standing near them whether they’re on a target list or not.
This is not about helping America, it’s about reshaping it.E Pluribus Unum – the “Out of many, One” First Principle of the United States – provides for a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural society united by common principles of liberty and justice for all. Yet those principles are considered anathema to the White Nationalists, Christian Nationalists, and techno fascists who are behind all this. Their goal is to shred the Constitution and demolish our democracy. Victor Orban didn’t hang out at Mar-a-Lago just for the scones. Between Project 2025, this Big Bad Ugly bill, and a militarized ICE, they’re following a specific blueprint for war on our basic institutions.
Millions are asking, “My God, how did all this happen?” There are complicated answers to that question, but what should not be underestimated is the role of Trump’s propaganda machine. As with Hitler’s Nuremberg Rallies, he has mesmerized millions with the performative power of his lies. In both my campaigns for President, I stated often: “Trump has ushered in an age of political theatre, and we will not be going back.”
Using the biggest megaphone in the world, Donald Trump gained the power to do such hateful things by propagating hateful ideas. He then injected them like poison into the veins of our body politic.
Remember when he rode down his elevator and announced about Mexico, ‘They’re not sending us their best people?” That was the first shot not in a war against Mexico, but in a war against the United States. Now he’s gone all the way to suggesting that immigrants have “criminal genes.” This is more than fear-mongering; it’s strategy. The biggest mistake we can make is to laugh at anything he says.
Without the President’s strategy of demonizing our immigrant community, none of this could have occurred. Those who so often said, “Take him seriously, but do not take him literally” were seriously wrong. He’s not just trolling. He says he hates you today, and he comes after you tomorrow.
And he’s not done. He now calls liberals and progressives “Left wing lunatics” and he says Senators who disagree with him are people who “hate their country.” He went so far in fact as to say he hates Democrats. “Don’t you?” he asked his audience. He actually said that he “can’t stand” us. When a reporter asked a reasonable question about the the Camp Mystic tragedy, the President said that only an “evil person” would ask such a question.
What is being perpetrated here is grand plan to transform the United States from a flawed democracy to an authoritarian dictatorship. It’s unwise to assume that the forces behind all this have any intention of stopping with immigrants.
Yesterday the President said he’s “giving serious consideration” to taking away Rosie O’Donnell’s citizenship because she’s “a Threat to Humanity.” This is something the Constitution does not give the President the authority to do. But Donald Trump has obvious disdain for anything the Constitution says that might limit his power. Already, he has called for ICE to go after American citizens, and both Trump and Pam Bondi have called for a plan to denaturalize some who have become American citizens. The fact that an idea is deranged doesn’t make it any less dangerous. DOGE has worked with ICE to create the federal government’s first “national citizenship data bank.”
If all of this feels to you profoundly Un-American, it’s because it is. If it bothers you, rankles you, and infuriates you, that means you’re a patriot. And you are not alone.
Even Joe Rogan is now going after the President on this, unhappy at all the innocent people who have been arrested in the ICE raids. But none of that should surprise him; it’s not like all of a sudden the President became a pathological liar. None of this is new. The only thing new is that he doesn’t even try any more to cover his tracks. From crypto deals to outright bribes from Middle East power brokers to intimidating media companies to selling his own brand of fragrance, the President’s corruption knows no end. He has increased his personal fortune by billions since he was inaugurated in November.
At this point, the question isn’t more “What will he do next?” The most important question is, “What will we do next?”
The only thing that can save us now is for the American people to wake up. A spiritual awakening, mocked and derided by America’s pseudo-sophisticated political class (you know, the guys who lost to Trump twice) is the most powerful antidote to the forces of hate. If we allow it, those forces will kidnap more than our bodies; they will kidnap our spirits. But if we’re truly dedicated to love, then the purveyors of hatred cannot snatch our soul. From there it follows that they cannot snatch our mind, and then they cannot snatch our country.
Love does not make us weaker, it makes us stronger. It makes us stronger because it makes us smarter. It restores reason and not the other way around. Evil is the mental energy of love when inverted. Recognizing the existence of evil, the loving mind understands how to prevent it (start by not allowing tens of millions of people to live for years in chronic economic anxiety, lacking health care, economic or educational opportunity) and knows what it takes to override it (provide those things now). It recognizes the anger and despair which people lacking such things feel, making them vulnerable to all manner of societal dysfunction. Disease doesn’t start on the level of symptoms; it starts on the level of feeling and thought.
And that’s where we must counter it. We must meet the forces of hate with the force of our love. Today’s “arsenal of democracy” begins in the mind. No one can take away your conscience unless you are willing to surrender it. Do not allow anyone to limit your willingness to love your fellow man.
That is not woo woo; it is the salvation of the human race. Totalitarianism is an extreme and perverse consequence of a world in which we’ve been taught to think that the needs and interests of others must be seen as secondary to our own. It is the opposite of “love they neighbor as thyself.”
Let’s not forget Elon Musk told Joe Rogan that “empathy is the biggest weakness in Western civilization.” And damn right that was a Nazi salute. He didn’t even deny it; I don’t know why anyone else would.
Hannah Arendt, premier political philosopher of the 20th Century, said “the death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.” She said a lack of empathy, as well as a lack of critical thought, could lead people otherwise not inherently evil to acquiesce to atrocities.
Arendt felt that the modern mind’s obsession with itself led to what she called the “loss of the world.” We become so self-referential that we stop caring about one another, seeing the notion of a “common good” as some quaint relic of former times. This has disunited the United States, endangering us as a country and weakening the gates to the city. Barbarians at that point inevitably come in.
Hitler himself said this: “They refer to me as an uneducated barbarian. Yes we are barbarians. We want to be barbarians; it is an honored title to us. We shall rejuvenate the world.”
So much for “It could never happen here.” In our arrogance, our complacency, our distractedness, and our social and political irresponsibility we made it way too easy for the barbarians to enter. Now that they are here, they are sacking the city.
So what do we do now? There are some who are seriously focused on the political externalities of the 2026 and 2028 elections, and well they should be. This will include countering all efforts on the part of the administration to rig or even suppress all upcoming elections. TrumpWorld’s forces have already begun with plans to further gerrymander Texas, criminalize the behavior of election officials who don’t “safeguard” our elections, and so forth.
Traditional political and legal efforts are needed, and they are needed badly. But they alone will not be enough to compensate for the lack of moral clarity that made us vulnerable to all this to begin with. That is what we lost, and what we must regain if we are to defeat fascism in our time.
Reclaiming that power is up to each of us. No matter what happens, do not allow yourself to lose your own commitment to the humane treatment of other human beings. Do not let them take from you your own moral compass. Do not compromise and do not surrender to the administration’s excuses, much less glorification, of sadism and human cruelty. No, “Alligator Alcatraz” is not funny. It is sick and it is inhumane. It is not hyperbole to call it a modern internment camp, and the savage conditions described by those who have been inside the facility are brutal. What is happening in America today is barbaric.
To those who say “Well, this is what we voted for,” I do not believe that. I know good people who voted for Trump, and I don’t believe that in their hearts they thought they were voting for human cruelty, or masked goons disappearing people, or any of the trauma or terror that our government is now perpetrating on innocent men, women and children.
I think many of those who voted for Trump do not know what is actually happening, because many of his voters who I’ve spoken to, when I show them evidence of certain things, make comments like, “Well that wouldn’t be right.” And I’ve realized that our opponent here is algorithms. Their algorithms are so different than ours – we’re not just seeing different content, we’re being shown different universes. Greedy, sociopathic elements in our society have fostered those differences. Media and social media giants who could care less about providing an honest, objective presentation of facts and care only about their already multibillion dollar profits, will one day be looked back on as some of the biggest villians in this story. At the end of all this we will have a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and it will be a doozy.
Others who voted for Trump were simply reacting in anger to a system that had failed them, and had the Democratic party responded to their despair in more fundamental ways – universal health care, a raised minimum wage, repealing the 2017 tax cut when we had the chance, increasing access to higher education and tech school – the rise of a political strongman would have been far less likely. As it is, the political elite in America chose to ignore every lesson in history and allow this scourge to fester. The Republican party lost its mind over the last few years, but it didn’t help that the Democrats lost their spine.
The institutions we have lived our entire lives thinking would protect us from any enemies of democracy have either fallen, or been deeply compromised. The message of history is now this: “American people: over to you.” I know in my heart we have what it takes to rise to the occasion, to handle this moment, and to save our dying democracy. In the words of Winston Churchill, “Never give in, never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense.”
That’s our charge today. This isn’t an easy time, in fact it’s heartbreaking and infuriating. But dark chapters challenged our ancestors too, and they responded with strength and courage. Now so must we. We are called to be deep and serious and mature and wise, and all those things we were born to be. I have no doubt in my mind that we have it in us. The choice whether to become the people we need to be, in order to do the things we need to do, is up to each of us.
Adam and Eve (between 1597 & 1600) Art: Peter Paul Rubens
A.Word.A.Daywith Anu Garg
Last month, when I featured a week of kings who became words one of those was Herod. I had mentioned that the Massacre of the Innocents is generally considered apocryphal.
A reader challenged me with Matthew 2:16. When I pointed out historians’ skepticism, he quickly admitted some Biblical tales may be more allegory than fact.
I’ve read the Bible and I was struck by how many vivid idioms have seeped into English. This week, we’ll unpack five of them.
Adam and Eve
PRONUNCIATION:
(AD-uhm uhn/uhnd EEV)
MEANING:
noun: 1. A beginning. 2. A set of ancestors or founders.
ETYMOLOGY:
After the first humans in the Biblical account. Earliest documented use: 1789. See also: Adam’s ale and adamite.
USAGE:
“If we grant that the Adam and Eve of American poetry, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, invented the modern poetic sequence … then it seems natural that every American poet since has at least attempted a long poem to contend with and extend the work of their progenitors.” Jeffrey Skinner; Writing the Poetic Sequence; The Writer (Manchester, UK); Feb 1994.
“Our heart knows what our mind has forgotten. It knows the sacred that is within everything. Through a depth of feeling we can once again experience this connection, this belonging.”
Llewellyn Vaughn-Lee (b.1953) British Sufi Writer
AN OPPORTUNITY FOR DAILY REFLECTION BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE SCHOOL OF PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY
New Thinkin Jul 13, 2025 Gabriel Kennedy (aka Prop Anon) is the author of Chapel Perilous: The Life & Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson. He is also a visual artist and musician. Here he relies largely on the thinking of Robert Anton Wilson concerning the damage inflicted over history by stupid actions. He points out that we are all vulnerable to acting stupidly from time to time. A great risk occurs however when stupid actions are undertaken by individuals with political or financial authority. Authoritarian organizations, in particular, are prone to foster stupidity – by punishing those with the temerity to contradict the “top dog.” 00:00 Introduction 03:11 Stupidity cuts across all class lines 09:01 Hard to see stupidity in oneself 14:15 Wilson and Leary’s analysis 23:53 Stupidity, authoritarianism, and war 39:21 The double-bind 43:18 General Semantics 48:29 Game theory 55:10 Conclusion New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. He is Co-Director of Parapsychology Education at the California Institute for Human Science. (Recorded on June 25, 2025)
Expanding Consciousness through new paradigms of wholenesss
In the midst of cataclysmic changes we will use this weekend experience to explore the Ontological message : Back and behind the universe of time, space, and change lies a fundamental and changeless reality.
It is exactly in times such as these that we have the opportunity to turn our vision from “wars and rumors of wars” to the ever-living Truth that provides each person with their keystone for bringing Integrity forth in their personal life and finding their way to communal wholeness.
The upheaval of our times reminds us of the patterns of race memory that hold persons and populations in the grip of fear and aggression impulses. The Prosperos’ message – that there is a way out, that the patterns of the past are not all-powerful – is more essential today than ever before. What’s more, the application of Mind to the energies of the day can reveal the prospect of hitherto undreamed of solutions for seemingly intractable conundrums. Potential developments transcend our greatest imaginings.
Join us for this unparalleled opportunity to respond to our times.
Featuring
Updated lessons from Thane’s seminal Cosmic Intention Therapy class
“Companions” sharing sessions
Hawaiian themed Aloha Banquet
FRIDAY – MONDAY SEPTEMBER 5 – 8, 2025
ISLAND PALMS HOTEL, SHELTER ISLAND SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA
FEES:
Special Event Fee, $279 Early-bird rate of $249 until July 31, 2025
Fee includes attendance at all events and the Aloha Banquet on Sunday evening
We are thrilled to confirm that the venue for this extraordinary event will be a beautiful hotel highly suited to our Hawaiian island roots : The Island Palms Hotel (see a video introduction). Arrangements have been made for very reasonable room rates, given below.
HOTEL RESERVATIONS
Room rate : $179 Prosperos special rate – book by August 7
When making a reservation you can use the edit link on the right of the link’s landing page in order to customize your arrival and / or departure dates.
Alternatively you can call Best Western’s Group Reservations department at 1-(800)-922-2336 and mention the name of The Prosperos as the group name when booking.
If you run into any particular trouble booking, you’re welcome to get in touch wit Joseph Stanley, Sales Coordinator, 619-222-0561, jstanley@islandpalms.com
We look forward to seeing you !
PROGRAM
The Assembly 2025 program is under active development. Check back here for updates
Anthony Novak v. City of Parma; Kevin Riley, Individually and in his Official Capacity as an Employee of the City of Parma, Ohio; Thomas Connor, Individually and as an Employee of the City of Parma, Ohio
Decided
April 29, 2022
Case history
Prior actions
Novak acquitted of disrupting public servicesMotion to dismiss denied on most claimsSixth Circuit affirms denialNorthern District finds qualified immunity
The parody page, which strongly resembled the real page, had led to Novak’s arrest in March 2016 and a subsequent trial for disrupting public services, which resulted in Novak’s acquittal.[1] Novak then brought suit under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 for retaliation and prior restraint. An initial decision of the Sixth Circuit in July 2019 allowed most of the suit to proceed, leading to a February 2021 ruling that Novak’s arresting officers both had probable cause and were protected by qualified immunity, which the Sixth Circuit upheld in April 2022.
In August 2022, Novak petitioned the United States Supreme Court for certiorari, asking them to review the case. The Onion‘s amicus brief, submitted at the suggestion of Novak’s counsel and drafted in consultation with the publication’s writers, emphasized the importance of parody in political discourse, while also making absurd claims such as that The Onion “enjoys a daily readership of 4.3 trillion”[2] and calling the federal judiciary “Latin dorks”.[3]The Babylon Bee, a conservative satirical publication, also supported Novak’s petition in their own amicus brief, and commented favorably on The Onion‘s brief. The subsequent denial of certiorari let stand the Sixth Circuit’s decision.
Background
“We no crime” Facebook page
In March 2016, Parma, Ohio, resident Anthony Novak created a page on Facebook mimicking that of the Parma Police Department, except with their slogan of “We know crime” changed to “We no crime” in the “About” section.[1] He did so anonymously from his phone while waiting for a bus, to express his criticism of the department’s policies.[4] Posts on the page included job postings that discouraged applications by members of minorities and an offer of “free abortions for teenagers provided by police in the Wal-Mart parking lot”.[5] Novak took the page down after about 12 hours,[5] during which time 10 people reported it to the police via 9-1-1.[6]
Novak deleted comments that called the page fake, and when the police department posted to the real page warning about his page, he made the same warning on his.[7]
Novak’s arrest and prosecution
Parma Police obtained Novak’s information from Facebook[4] and arrested him on March 25, 2016, a few weeks after the page’s brief existence.[5] They also searched his residence and seized his electronic devices.[8] Novak was accused of disrupting public services, a fourth-degree felony;[6] he spent three[1] or four days in jail.[6] He was indicted in April.[1]
At trial in August 2016, prosecutors argued that Novak’s actions had disrupted police activities. Novak’s attorney, Gary Vick, countered that the department’s statements at the time had focused on the derogatory nature of Novak’s comments. The jury acquitted and Novak immediately announced plans to sue.[1]
Section 1983 suit
District Judge Dan Polster presided over the suit.
On appeal in July 2019, the Sixth Circuit dismissed Novak’s claims “related to anonymous speech, censorship in a public forum, and the right to receive speech” but allowed the case to proceed otherwise. Judge Amul Thapar, writing for a unanimous three-judge panel, stressed “Our nation’s long-held First Amendment protection for parody does not rise and fall with whether a few people are confused”[10] and that parody is judged by “a reasonable reader standard, not a ‘most gullible person on Facebook’ standard.”[11] The court noted the United States Supreme Court’s statement in Reichle v. Howards that “This Court has never recognized a First Amendment right to be free from a retaliatory arrest that is supported by probable cause” and the general rule under Nieves v. Bartlett that a plaintiff cannot sue for retaliatory arrest if probable cause existed. It found that Novak’s speech did not fall under the exception made in Lozman v. City of Riviera Beach for “official policies of retaliation”, and found that the exception made in Nieves (laws that are rarely enforced) could not be invoked because the Supreme Court’s decision in Nieves postdated the arrest.[12]
In February 2021, Polster found that the officers had probable cause to arrest Novak, that they had “followed the proper procedures” and not been “hot-headed police officers seeking revenge”, and that they had qualified immunity.[13]
Opinion of the court
Circuit Judge Amul Thapar wrote the opinion of the panel.
A unanimous three-judge panel of the Sixth Circuit affirmed Polster’s ruling in April 2022.[6] Thapar, again writing for the panel, expressed the court’s “doubts” about the decision to prosecute Novak, but agreed that the city and officers had qualified immunity.[14] Unlike in the 2019 decision, in which the court had implied that probable cause could have come only from Novak’s speech,[6] Thapar wrote that it was reasonable for officers to think that Novak might have been impersonating a police officer, which unlike parody is not protected speech. Thus, he reasoned, there was probable cause for the arrest and it could not be retaliatory under Nieves.[7]
The court also rejected Novak’s Fourth Amendment, malicious prosecution, prior restraint, and municipal liability claims, and found that the officers had statutory immunity against “a jumble of state-law claims” because they did not act “with malicious purpose, in bad faith, or in a wanton or reckless manner.”[7][15]
In the weeks before submitting the certiorari petition, Patrick Jaicomo, counsel of record for Novak, contacted Jordan LaFlure, managing editor of prominent satirical newspaper The Onion, through a mutual friend[19] and asked if LaFlure would help with the case.[20] According to Jaicomo, The Onion management saw the ruling for Parma as a potential threat to their writers.[20] On October 3, 2022, The Onion submitted an amicus curiae brief,[16][21] its first ever.[19]The New York Times described it as having been written by The Onion‘s lawyers with help from some of the publication’s writers,[20] while NPR reported that The Onion‘s head writer, Mike Gillis, wrote “most of the arguments and jokes”, with the legal team supplying relevant precedent and context as part of “an extremely collaborative process”.[19]
The brief states The Onion‘s interest as amicus curiae in the form of a series of parodic statements, beginning:[2]
The Onion is the world’s leading news publication, offering highly acclaimed, universally revered coverage of breaking national, international, and local news events. Rising from its humble beginnings as a print newspaper in 1756, The Onion now enjoys a daily readership of 4.3 trillion and has grown into the single most powerful and influential organization in human history.
The Onion cannot stand idly by in the face of a ruling that threatens to disembowel a form of rhetoric that has existed for millennia, that is particularly potent in the realm of political debate, and that, purely incidentally, forms the basis of The Onion‘s writers’ paychecks.[25]
The brief argues against the proposition that parody must be labeled to avoid risking criminal consequences, often using humor to make that point. For instance, to illustrate the statement “It Should Be Obvious That Parodists Cannot Be Prosecuted For Telling A Joke With A Straight Face”, the brief promises “a paragraph of gripping legal analysis” before devolving into an assortment of random law Latin phrases, having previously asserted that “the federal judiciary is staffed entirely by total Latin dorks”.[3] At another point, the brief characterizes the situation as absurd, saying “Much more of this, and the front page of The Onion would be indistinguishable from The New York Times.”[26]
The Onion defends Novak’s comments as obvious parody under the “reasonable reader” standard established by prior jurisprudence,[27] adding “True; not all humor is equally transcendent. But the quality and taste of the parody is irrelevant”.[28] The brief highlights the importance of parody in mocking authority[8] and engaging in critique in general, referencing Jonathan Swift‘s A Modest Proposal (and then calling Swift a “hack”).[29]
Subsequent developments and denial of petition
The Babylon Bee, a conservative satirical publication, filed an amicus brief as well, beginning “Truth is stranger than fiction. And fiction is illegal. At least in the Sixth Circuit.” It said that:[30]
The Onion may be staffed by socialist wackos, but in their brief defending parody to this Court, they hit it out of the park. Parody has a unique capacity to speak truth to power and to cut its subjects down to size. Its continued protection under the First Amendment is crucial to preserving the right of citizens to effectively criticize the government.
The Bee listed a number of its own articles that could be said to violate the same statute Novak was charged under; referring to its ban from Twitter at the time as “a brutal life sentence in Twitter jail”, it wrote that “[i]ts writers would very much like to avoid a consecutive sentence in a government-run facility”.[31] It also published, but did not file, an additional brief satirically siding with the police and their “badges and guns and stuff”, saying that “when assessing whether particular speech is protected by the First Amendment, courts must also consider whether that speech hurts someone’s feelings.”[32]
In a final round of briefing in January 2023, Novak’s lawyers framed the case as an opportunity to either reconsider qualified immunity or better balance it with the right to free speech.[33] The Supreme Court denied the petition on February 21, 2023,[34] letting the lower courts’ decisions stand.[35] Novak expressed concerns for future implications for “others who poke fun at the powerful”, while an attorney for Parma praised the outcome.[35]
Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for morePractice Delight, with Ross GayHope Portal, Session 7THE ON BEING PROJECTJUL 12READ IN APPRoss Gay is a poet, community gardener, and teacher who brings another way of wisdom to the conviction that we have to know what we love and what delights us. And that we have to tend to that as fiercely as to what is broken and what we’re called to make better, what we’re called to make more just. Knowing what we love and knowing how to take delight are fuel even — and especially — in times of great challenge. This is something we can practice moment to moment, he teaches, through every ordinary day.
Journaling prompts for Session 7
Give your curiosity and your journaling during this week over to a practice of delight. As you move through your smallest interactions, look for moments/sightings/experiences that bring flashes of light into your day. Do you notice “unambiguously pleasant public physical interactions”? What is pleasant and sweet and tender?Can you feel how attending to delight as seriously as hardship nourishes a reality-bending imagination and passion for justice and hope that is as joyful as it is fierce?We’ve created a beautiful journal for the whole seven weeks, with full-size printable pages, that you can download for free . Ross Gay — Hope Portal, Episode 7
Find an excellent transcript of this show, edited by humans, on our show page.Just beginning? Read our introduction for a possible way to organize your experience.The Hope Portal and this series are adventures in opening the deep enduring teaching that lives inside the 20 years of On Being. We would be so grateful if you would let us know how it goes for you and how it might be refined, by writing to us at mail@onbeing.org.
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