Some Unique Perspectives on Politics, News and World Events

copyright Jonathan Zap, 2013 (A review of the Lance Armstrong/Oprah Winfrey interview. Watch excerpts on the: OWN network website) There are liars, damned liars and then there is Lance Armstrong, who was, literally, a liar on steroids. Lance was a brazen, defiant, bullying and litigious liar. For example, here’s what he said in his victory speech on the podium after his seventh and last Tour de France win, “Finally, the last thing I’ll say to the people who don’t believe in cycling —the cynics and the skeptics, I’m sorry for you. I’m sorry you can’t dream big. And I’m sorry you don’t believe in miracles. But this is one hell of a race and this is a great sporting event and you should stand around and believe, believe in these athletes and you should believe in these people. I’m a fan of the Tour de France for as long as I live and there are no secrets. This is a hard sport and hard work wins it.” Lance was an abusive, destructive liar who called one of his whistleblowers “crazy” and a “bitch” and implied that another one was a whore. He threatened several of them with extreme physical violence, [...]

copyright Jonathan Zap  2012 painting copyright Nathan Zap see a gallery of my dad’s paintings here: Nocturnal Visions—the Paintings of Nathan Zap (This painting was based on a Kodachrome slide I took of a roller coaster with colored lights silhouetted  by a sunset. My dad asked to borrow the slide to make the painting.) August 7, 2012  Some strange threads came together today and formed a nexus in my mind  that began to reverberate with the strange attractor of possible futures. I was riding with two friends, young intellectuals (in the truest sense of that word) who were entering PhD programs, one of them in Semiotics in Estonia. The other, some sort of advanced mathematics at CU. Both seemed to have a much darker sense of the prospects of the human species than I do. They had both been living in Europe and had been out and about seeing more of the world than I usually do. There was a cognitive dissonance because one of them had inherited a beautiful, late model Saab convertible which we were riding with the top down from Boulder to Nederland— a drive that surrounds you with beautiful high desert canyon vistas. Boulder is so much [...]

The tragedy of people getting shot at a showing of The Dark Knight Rises, is not a random, incomprehensible event. Mass shootings, like the one that just happened in Aurora, have become a recurrent nightmare that haunts the collective psyche. As the nightmare repeats, we see patterns emerging. Movies are a collective dream delivery technology. Some movies that have high access to the contents of the collective unconscious, are what Charles Fort called “window zones,” or portals between realms, and weird and uncanny things happen in their wake. Particularly, movies about dark, occult things have a long history of these crossover effects.

Subjugation and abuse of women is one of the most critical social issues in all of human history. Violent oppression of women has been, and remains, a serious obstacle to the full intellectual growth and evolution of the human species. In recent years the subservient position of women suffering under Islamic regimes has become somewhat common knowledge in the western world where most people seem familiar with the oppression of women, particularly in Afghanistan. Yet for so many women and girls living in Islamic and Hindu communities, reality is far worse than what most westerners imagine. This eye-opening article is by Sean Moffitt of the Women’s Assistance Fund

I think I just realized why I get into trouble with so many people—-somehow I never realized what now seems obvious—-reality testing is politically incorrect! Whether you are a religious fundamentalist or a New Age fundamentalist, on the right or on the left, if it feels emotionally satisfying, then it’s true.

Written just after 9-11 I discuss the “temporary indeterminate zones” of history when everything is in flux. I present a theory about why prophetic time lines are usually wrong. Finally, there is a disussion of a theory of generational cycles and what distinguishes the Boomers from Gen-X and the Millenials.

My Take on Corporate Controlled Media Underplaying Celebrity Pregnancies

This essay covers, among many topics, projection as the key to understanding conflict in the Middle East and violence generally, the problem with fundamentalism and particularly Islamic fundamentalism, some thoughts and personal experiences related to anti-Semitism and it concludes with one of the most amazing synchronicites of my entire life which occurred as I worked on this, and that even has implications of the spirit surviving the death of the body.

Written days after 9-11 this is a rant mostly on the human tendency toward projection, particularly shadow projection and it criticizes left and right.

One of the most obnoxiously persistent themes in so many people’s lives is money. For most people the issue is scarcity and right livelihood, but even people with an abundance of money have issues.

What is money? Hard to write about something without some working definition of what it is. Money is essentially a magical artifact, a power object in this World of Warcraft and Consumerism.