My Masters studies a couple of years ago focused on the global development sector. We often studied a wide variety of programs designed to transform the lives of women around the world. In one such working group, as we were discussing empowering women, I asked what role we were leaving for men and what guidance we were giving them to adjust? There was a moment of awkward surprise as everyone acknowledged that nobody had really considered that part of the paradigm at all. It is my personal belief that this is also the case here at home. I believe modern American men, amidst a sea of change, are left in a vacuum of positive role models. In a culture that has drastically changed over the last many decades as a result of the Feminist movement, there exists a void of masculine role models for the current paradigm much less role models for the future paradigms we’d like to reach.

The Bernie and Hillary bid for the Democratic nomination created an environment where a huge discussion around this this play out, and it has been interesting. While some go so far as to call Bernie a sexist for running against Hillary and refusing to drop out until all of the votes are counted, far more people praise him for being a better Feminist than Hillary. Generally, I think the majority of people seem to deeply respect Sanders. In fact, I have heard a lot of concern from people who are deeply torn between who they considered to be a better candidate and their strong desire to see a woman as President.

For those of us who do view Bernie as exceptional, more specifically, for those Feminists who are torn between what a great role model Bernie is versus the powerful message of a female President – I have a question that has recently started haunting me. When you consider all of our countries gender issues, when you reflect on what you believe are the roots to our problems, what kind of role model do you feel would do more good for our country? A role model for women, a female President with a remarkably high disapproval rating? Or, and this is a radical notion, a feminist role model for men, a male President who exhibits authentic characteristics of love, respect, and support for women? In today’s world, who is more in need of positive role models for a future paradigm of equality, men or women? And, finally, did we become so focused on the ideal of a female role model that we’ve completely missed the opportunity to provide men with an revolutionary role model?

The post Bernie Sanders as a Feminist Role Model for Men appeared first on zasKoda.

After the 1992 election cycle, the percentage of Americans identifying as Independent rose steadily for half a decade and then fell back down as the Republican party rose in 2004. However, since 2004, both parties have continued to tank while Independents are on the rise, now at historic levels.

At this very moment, the day after Super Tuesday, Pundits and talking heads are on the news explaining what voters like me are thinking – how we are going to react. I don’t think they get it at all. However, I’m not going to try to explain or sell you the Independent point of view. What I do want to bring attention to is the momentum behind the indie movement in politics happening right now.

Today, I’m supporting and expecting to vote for the Democratic Socialist, Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders decided to run for President via the Democratic party. He does not identify as a Democrat. As a party outsider running on their ticket, he is drawing an enormous amount of support from Democrats. So much so, he may win their nomination – holy crap! On the flip side, he is still bringing over Republicans as well. From my father, a devout conservative: “If it’s Clinton and Trump, I’m voting Trump. If it’s Bernie and Trump, I’m voting Bernie.” This is not an uncommon sentiment. Bernie has support for reasons that have nothing to do with party affiliation. Those who are very focused on party politics are just not seeing what’s happening outside of their context.

My significant other and I recently moved out of our apartment and started a community house. Looking for housemates, we posted a Craigslist ad that included a mention of being Bernie supporters. We were overwhelmed with Bernie-centric responses. Many wrote that they knew they wanted to live with us based on that one point alone. While it would be easy to trivialize that experience as an inconsequential story, it had a profound impact on my perception. I now see that the energy of Independent political thinking is driving the momentum of the Bernie Sanders campaign – and it’s beautiful.

Bernie is building a culture of participation and immediacy. The people – especially Independents –  love it. He is building a “machine” made of people. He is enabling those people to have a voice and know they can use it. The “machine” behind the political revolution really is us. It is growing in size and running in the background of this campaign, quietly shifting the tides. Will Bernie win? I’m not entirely confident that he will be the Democratic candidate – perhaps. However, I think that Bernie will probably be our next President.

Bernie may not get enough delegates to supplant Hillary. What will happen next? It is a fallacy to believe that Bernie is a dedicated Democrat. I expect him to choose to stay in the race. He would then have the lion’s share of support from the 40%+ of Americans who identify as Independent, including myself. He would pull over a huge portion of the Democratic base, which is already below 30% of the nation anyway. He will also attract many of those fleeing Republicans who comprise even less of the nation than the Democrats. Those numbers add up to a win for Bernie.

The only message more powerful than electing Bernie Sanders as President will be doing so without the support of a major party.

The post The Rise of the Independents appeared first on zasKoda.

Meanwhile, I realize that my activity on Facebook is keeping me from Blogging… More on that later, if I get around to it… (irony)

I have been actively trying to take it a little more seriously though. I’m a bit undisciplined like that, I know myself. I decided that trying to get outside help was going to make it so I had to get stuff done. I think it’s working. https://the-indexer.com/ has been giving me instructions on things I probably should have been doing to the site from the get go. I can’t wait to see the end result. We should have a little before and after post and talk about it!

The post Welcome to 2012. Let’s learn web desing! appeared first on zasKoda.

Hi. I’ve been paying attention to Occupy Wall Street. This evening, I had a chat with my girlfriend about the spontaneous eruption of democracy that is Occupy Wall Street. We had an idea I have to share with the rest of the 99% out there.

We create a new party where candidates agree to a much more specific job role during their political term. They would agree to:

• Inform the public of their progress as real time as possible. For example: live stream all meetings, post materials related to all votes, post video updates multiple times a day, etc.
• Vote on all issues using popular vote. Use some yet-to-be-built voting platform to collect votes from anyone who wishes to cast a vote. Something as reliable as Reddit or Digg is enough, and I have no doubt we could build something significantly better. I want to see something completely open source and distributed in nature.

The post Electing The 99%, an open letter…. appeared first on zasKoda.

First, leave your bank for a local credit union. Credit unions are owned by their members and are not-for-profit organizations.

Second, spend locally. Buy local food. Consider trades people in your social network. Look for privately owned businesses or co-ops. Think about where you do business.

I’m sure there are a lot more ways of detaching from Wall Street… and I think detaching could make for a powerful change.

The post Detach from Wall Street appeared first on zasKoda.

The post #occupywallstreet vs #thathighmoment appeared first on zasKoda.

In 2007, I was hired by a big name health and fitness company to develop an online community. The effort began well, but was quickly derailed by many of the most common mistakes that big companies seem to make. I departed the venture in 2008 and moved on to social media centric projects. I went back to check on their progress and found that the entire community, one that used to be hundreds of thousands of users strong, was wiped from the face of the Internet entirely.

I started sifting through my mental database of experience. I also had a couple of high level conversations about community building. Some of my contacts from the 2007 project have moved on to viable community and social media projects elsewhere. While thinking about the viability of these projects, I was suddenly struck with just how much the atmosphere has changed in the 15+ years since I first fell into the game.

One of my contacts, in particular, hit the nail on the head pretty hard when he mentioned sites like Facebook. Community development changed social networking came onto the scene in force. Now, successful community development plans need to include social media and networking giants. Furthermore, a highly successful community development project can exist entirely on top of the technology platforms provided by these giants.

The entire game is different now. It’s as if the open spaces of the Internet have all been industrialized. Now, instead of building in an open field, you have to find space in a high rise complex. Technology paths are seemingly locked down and users are settled into routines and assumptions that will be extremely difficult to crack. The major game players have establisehd themselves. Some are more stable than others, but the top dogs aren’t going away any time soon.

Is the world a better place now? No. We’ve shaken the world of copyrights and intellectual property. We’ve create new ways to create and share information and media. We’ve empowered people with new technologies. We’ve done a lot of good things. However, if you look at the big picture, the revolution of the Internet has had precious little impact. Propaganda and misinformation are still rampant. Our online experience is still heavily controlled by large corporations. Our connectivity is grossly overpriced. The entire system is laden heavily with scammers, liars, cheaters, and manipulators.

Not only are citizens around the world being heavily fined for violating the intellectual property rights of major corpporations, but major corporations are making profits by respinning the intellectual property the masses are freely creating for them. We don’t own our data, sites like Facebook and Youtube own our data. It is nice that more and more people are beginning to question how and why the system is what it is. Still, there’s precious little momentum for change and what momentum that exists is on the decline.

We’re still mostly a world of consumers. One has but to compare the number of people passionate about the Free Culture movement to the number of people passioante about the iPad to clearly see just how far we are from evolving. We humans spread out from Africa. We constantly discovered new wonderful places to explore and develop. We took rich natural wonders and turned them into poluted cities full of crime and noise. We slashed, burned, dug, and paved our way into our modern metropolis while precious few wrote utopian stories of how things could be. When we finally got the the digital open spaces of the Internet, we treated it the same way.

I figure… if we haven’t figured this out before we leave this planet, we’re going to do the same thing to the Moon, to Mars, and where whatever else we manage to touch.

The post Building Community: The Game Changed appeared first on zasKoda.

And that’s how some people want to approach the issue of illegal immigrants in the USA. Everything I know and understand about life aligns clearly to say that building a wall between the US and Mexico is a horrible idea. It’s not like Mexico is mounting an attack and we have to defend the castle. They’re sneaking into the country to find jobs. To cover the issue from my own perspective, I’ll offer three planks and then a plan.

Plank 1: The actual problem.

The most widespread problem with illegal immigrants is the notion that they are a cost burden on government funded social services. This is a legit issue, but it’s also an overly exaggerated issue. There’s also a pile of attached issues that fall out of immigrants being “out of the system.” As an example, an undocumented immigrant can’t obtain a license to drive nor insurance – leading to an increase in uninsured motorists.

Plank 2: Recent rise in illegal immigrants.

From my own memory, illegal immigrants were considered more of a “resource” in the early 90’s, rather than a burden. In any significantly large southern city you’d find a street corner were mostly Hispanic laborers would gather waiting to snag a job. Somewhere around the turn of the millenium it seemed that the attitude shifted. It also seemed that the numbers of illegal immigrants what on a rapid rise. It seemed this way because it was on the rise. After 9/11, the number of illegal immigrants coming into the US increased well over 20%.

Plank 3: We made legal immigration harder.

Something else happened right around 9/11 that just might relate to that huge increase in illegal immigrants. The US made it significantly harder to legally come work in the US. You can find out about some of this here and here and here. It does seem logical that making it harder to do something illegally might increase the number of people doing it illegally. Take, for example, our completely failed war on drugs.

Solution: An easy legal path.

Immigrants flock to the US for one main reason – opportunity. Illegal immigrants take low paying labor intensive jobs. These are jobs that Americans, no matter what they claim, generally don’t want. To the laborers, these jobs provide better income than what they’re able to find at home. If we lose all of these laborers, I strongly believe it will increase the cost of goods and services across the board. Regardless, building a wall and increasing the amount of man power at the borders has not only cost us enormous amounts of money, but it has completely failed. More ironic is the fact that, as our economy tumbles, we’re seeing far fewer illegal immigrants. Unfortunately, we need them now more than ever.

Given all of this, why not create an easy to access foreign worker program. This isn’t a new idea. In fact, it was proposed by George Bush. This was the Bush plan previous to 9/11 and was related to NAFTA. Such a program could make it easy to document and track workers. This would create a system where we can regulate access to social services and track the impact of migrant workers.

Wrap Up

The problem is that we’ve resisted the flow instead of working with the flow. Any surfer or martial artist knows what happens when you try to fight a flow of energy much larger than your own. It’s a huge investment. However, catching the wave can take you on a ride you could never otherwise achieve. Unfortunately, I think that most of the public discourse on illegal immigration has turned into petty racial hatred and blaming. When so many lives are negatively impacted, the way our economic slump has done to so many, folks really want someone else to be angry at. Getting “tough” on illegal immigrants is like going outside and kicking the dog when you get mad at your spouse. If we use this negative energy to create our immigration reform, like what we’ve seen in Arizona, we’ll only be digging a deeper hole.

The post Solving America’s Illegal Immigrant Problem appeared first on zasKoda.

Virility refers to any of a wide range of masculine characteristics viewed positively. It is not applicable to women or to negative characteristics.

Those of us that are men, and that’s about half of us, have probably – at some point – thought about what it means to be a man. Sure we get to pee standing up without the aid of special hardware, but what else is there? Often times people ask, what does it mean to be a real man? The nice thing about the word “virility” is that no matter how our society changes, the word itself still retains the same meaning. The traits that make up virility today may not be the same by society’s standards 100 years from now; however, virility is defined as the positive traits, whatever those may be.

This brings us to a brilliantly confusing discussion, what defines virility today? This question is important to me. I’ve spent a lot of time working on it. It truly seems to me that, in our current time, we lack clear positive role models. We live in a time when our counter parts, women, have changed significantly over the past few generations. Powerful role models have shaped and changed the concept of what a woman should be. Where are the male counterparts?

As I’ve worked on this problem for myself, I keep encountering paradoxes. It’s difficult to form any clear conclusions to build a strong framework around. However, I have recently come to a powerful conclusion on the issue of control. I’ve noticed patterns in nearly every human interaction that can be discussed in terms of control. The conclusion I’ve drawn can be viewed in two parts, external and internal. First, lets discuss the external:

A man of virility does not exhibit control over another individual.

This concept is easy to grasp and extremely difficult to actualize. I believe that controlling others was once a trait of virility. It’s easily confused with leadership and strength. In fact, I would say that it takes a great deal of strength to maintain control over others. However, such behaviors often manifest from insecurity. A modern man of virility grants every human individual bot the right and the responsibility for personal choice. The word “responsibility” is important here. There are those that, for some reason, seek domination. These behaviors also seem to manifest from insecurities. A man of virility is aware of his individuality and seeks to be surrounded by those who are also aware. That said, lets move on to the internal component:

A man of virility does not allow others to control him.

This is a more difficult concept to fully grasp. When we consider who has control over us, a lot of gray areas arise. Not allowing others to control you does not mean walking up and spitting in a police officer’s face. However, it does mean that when you look at a police officer, you are fully aware that you can spit in his face if you choose. This may seem silly in this context, but when extended to relationships, it starts to show value.

If a man allows another to control him, he will appear weak. In our modern culture, a weak man is not an attractive man. A weak man will be used and tossed aside. This is rarely more obvious than in the mating game. Yield to a woman’s every wish, and watch her sleep with someone else.

If a man attempts to exhibit control, he will attract the weak. In the mating game, a man might find himself sorting through the emotional drama of a needy clingy woman. It’s hard enough to find happiness for yourself, no man should be responsible for the happiness of two people.

It is extremely difficult to maintain a life flow that follows both of these principles. While it may seem that, at times, the two come into conflict – they don’t. This can be seen, again, in the mating game. When a man has control over himself and shows absolutely no intent to control another, he attracts a certain type of individual. Once again, this is highly pronounced in the mating game. Such a man is extremely attractive to women, showing confidence and general satisfaction.

This is when a true kind of magic can happen. A man who is in control of himself but unwilling to control another can only attract a woman with the same traits. Upon an encounter with such a woman, both can have the confidence of knowing that any mutual desires are truly mutual and not a product of manipulation.

The post The Virility Discussion: Control appeared first on zasKoda.

If you haven’t followed the media noise over Lily Allen and filesharing lately… it’s a lot to catch up on. The highlight came, for me, when Lily started an anti-filesharing blog, reposted another author’s content without citing the source (irony much?), and then took the whole blog down when she was getting too much “abuse”… I can’t speak enough about how brilliant and accurate Dan Bull’s response is. Go get the MP3 and share it!!!!

The post Brilliant Resonse to Lily Allen from Dan Bull appeared first on zasKoda.