Quick Tip: More on Condiments/Mustard

Ok Ok Ok. So I've been at a professional conference all week, and I haven't been stellar about doing daily tips every day anyway. Soooo, I'm going to change the term to quick tip and get them up as often as possible. Life has a way of getting in the way. So onto the tips.

So the last post was about vinegar. There are in fact several other condiments you can make for yourself and cut out the middle man. The simplest is probably mustard. Buy some mustard seed (NOT Ground, trust me on this. You really don't want to grind the mustard before making your mustard). Now put the mustard seed in a sealed container with vinegar overnight. This is why you don't use ground. Were you to grind it right away it would be REALLY hot mustard. The soaking mellows the mustard's spicy sharpness considerably. I've always eyeballed this, but I figured for this post I'd get some ratios for people. 5 tablespoons to about a half cup of vinegar is pretty good. You can go any vinegar for this, the home made from the last tip is nice. You can mix in other stuff like wine or probably even beer. The trick is to keep it at least half pickling quality vinegar. The recipes I've seen say this keeps for 2 weeks. That's hogwash. I've talked with people who make mustard and have checked on this. As long as your liquid is at least 50% pickling quality vinegar then you're dealing in microbially hostile acidity levels. If you use all vinegar honestly it keeps . . . well practically forever in the fridge. I recommend making batches of the stuff and keeping it in small jelly mason jars. It works beautifully.

Way cheaper than store bought if you can find a bulk source for the mustard seed (read: Sam's club or online), and you can do whatever you want with the flavoring. Also a nice way to make something snazzy with that half a glass of white wine left over that you really aren't sure what to do with.

Daily Tip: Make Your Own Vinegar

So I was just going to do a condiment post, but this one ended up a bit monstrous. So I'm doing it on it's own and I'll post others later. My focus is going to be on products that are overpriced and not particularly high quality in the grocery store.

White Wine Vinegar: This isn't exactly a sandwich condiment, but some people use a ton of vinegar in their cooking. I am one of those individuals. Store bought white wine vinegar is in fact mostly distilled. It's for lack of a better description over priced crap. You can make your own with some mason jars, a little cheesecloth, a bunch of cheap white wine, and a little starter (a small bottle of unfiltered, unpasteurized apple cider vinegar in our case).

So first a word about cheesecloth. This product is crazy expensive in the grocery store. I suggest buying it in bulk. It might seem like a big investment, but if you're going to start doing things on your own in the kitchen more regularly you'll find it very worth it. I use cheesecloth ALL THE TIME. If I had to buy it in the store I'd have filed for bankruptcy by now.

Next on choosing white wine. The huge jugs, or the boxed wine will do. When I first looked up how to do this all the guides said "pick a wine you would drink, because the better the wine the better the vinegar". This is true, but not true enough. The vinegar I've made from cheap boxed wine is excellent. As in some of the best vinegar I've ever had, because we're all used to the mostly distilled waste passed off as wine vinegar in the grocery. As this blog is about being self sufficient and doing for yourself I am NOT going to recommend that you go out and get snooty wine to intentionally spoil. That's just silly.

Now to make the vinegar. Start by running your mason jars and rings through the dishwasher with a hot dry. Then take them out while they are still hot and fill them 80% of the way with your wine. Between the alcohol in the wine, and the acid in the vinegar it will become this is all the sterilization I've ever needed. Now put enough apple cider vinegar in each jar to leave about an inch of air space. Now take a few layers of cheesecloth and lay it over the top of the jar and put your rings on. There, the work is done. Put the jars in the back of a cabinet somewhere and forget about them for . . . oh say 3 months. (Hey it's easy, I didn't say it was fast) Take the vinegar out and test it by tasting a little. If it doesn't taste and smell enough like vinegar put it back and check once a month for flavor. When it's how you want it replace the cheesecloth with mason jar lids. Technically at this point it's a living breathing thing. So if you blast through vinegar at a rapid rate then you are in fact done. It will be good for probably 6 months this way, give or take depending on conditions. (I won't lie that's me being conservative and not wanting to give bad advice. I've kept this type of vinegar longer than 6 months, but I don't know for sure how long it will last. So be careful if you try to go longer) If you use it in raw applications like salad dressings then the live culture is quite good for you. It will be cloudy, and will never settle if you leave it alive. If you want to keep the vinegar for more than a year then you want to give the sealed mason jars a 10 minute boiling water bath, make sure the water doesn't reach the rings. If you really want it to keep there is a process for adding sulfides to the vinegar to extend it's shelf life, but I've never done that and used my vinegar for up to a year or so past when it finished brewing. So I don't recommend it, the sulfides aren't really good for you anyway.

If you boil the vinegar then the particulate will start to settle and you'll eventually be able to "decant" the clear vinegar off the sediment. There is nothing bad about the sediment, but the clear vinegar does have a cleaner taste, and is more attractive if you care about such things.

So some background on why you take some of the steps you take. The vinegar requires oxygen to brew. So the cheesecloth let's oxygen in, while keeping dust and other nasties out of the liquid. I tried a few other approaches and I found that the brewing just took way too long. Using the cheesecloth approach I was able to brew the vinegar much faster than trying to keep it in bottles.

Second a word on pickling. If you follow specific pickling recipes I do not recommend using this vinegar. Pickle recipes are carefully calibrated around a specific acidity, and that acidity is necessary to make the preservation safe. That said if you are willing to go out and buy some ph test strips you can play the chemistry game of getting your vinegar to the exact same acidity as distilled from the store and going from there. Because I don't use specific pickling recipes when I pickle I just make sure that my vinegar is more acidic than distilled (which I keep around for cleaning purposes) and go from there. I test this by weighing out a set amount of baking soda on my scale and then using a dropper I put drops of distilled vinegar on the pile of baking soda till I get a drop that does not react. I then do the same thing with my home made vinegar, and if the reaction doesn't stop happening faster with my home made vinegar then I let my acid keep brewing. It's not precise, but as long as my vinegar is more acidic than distilled then I know I'm in safe territory. Also, because it's brewed and not distilled even at higher acidity it has a more delicate flavor. So I don't have to worry about overpowering myself. If you want to use your vinegar for pickling you MUST take the pasteurizing step of running your vinegar through a water bath. The live culture will do all sorts of strange things to the pickling process.

I know this was a long post, but a lot of people love my vinegar, and I wanted to share. I know this might seem like a lot of work, but you never take more than a couple steps on any given day. It's mostly just about patience. I guarantee you'll never buy vinegar from the store again.

What does the Everyday Radical Stuff Really Accomplish Anyway?

So every time that I go to post one of my little "Radical Anarchist Martha Steward" pieces of advice something in me wonders if what I'm trying to say really comes across. So I figured I'd write a little bit about the very layperson economics of what I'm trying to accomplish, and a little bit about my feelings on the subject in terms of what's happened to us over the last couple generations and how to fix it.

First the economics of the whole thing. So when you buy something, anything really you can think of yourself as paying 4 different prices. 1st you're paying the lateral price. This is the part of the money that goes to someone at more or less your level of the food chain and mostly in your community. In a corporate store like a Target that is the portion of the money that goes to the store staff, and the local delivery men who deliver the goods to the store, and the part of the overhead that pays local bills like electricity and waste removal for the store's trash etc. You get the idea. It's the portion of the money you're spending that stays in your community.

The second part of the cost is what I'll call the elevator cost. This is the portion of the money you spend that goes up and out of your community. So at a corporate store like Target or Wal Mart this is the hunk of cash that goes up to the corporation. It doesn't stay in your town. Now this doesn't all go to the "1%" as it were. Some of it goes to secretaries in corporate offices, and some of it goes to janitors in those offices, and national delivery drivers etc. Still this is the portion of your purchase that goes away from your local community. Even in a small local co-op some of your purchases are going to be products that shipped from another state or country. So some portion of almost any purchase is going somewhere else.

Next are the taxes. The first are government taxes. Really in the US this is state and in some cases city or county sales tax. There isn't much to say about these taxes. Really all fairly straight forward.

The final portion is the corporate tax rate. This is the portion of the price of your purchase that goes to credit card fees. Even if you only shop with cash there is still a corporate tax because early experiments with charging people who use credit cards more for the portion of the transaction that the banks take off the top failed. So stores include the credit card charges in their overall prices and average it out across all their sales.

No one of these expenses is necessarily good or bad. Money flowing between markets in general is healthy because of the lifestyle it allows. The convenience of credit cards is certainly worth some price, and responsible use of credit can facilitate a standard of life that living without credit does not allow. The same is true of government tax and the money that stays local. They each have their place and can be both good and bad for the economy.

What becomes a problem is when these four cash flows go out of balance. We now live in a world where entirely too much money goes to the top. The portion of commerce that goes to credit card expenses goes almost exclusively to corporate profits, and the corporate portion of our general commerce (McDonald's products, Wal-Mart's infrastructure, etc.) also syphon money away from us. This is something the Occupy movement has put a lot of effort into illuminating.

The imbalance in the system is facilitated by a pronounced and unhealthy dependence on the supply chain. There was a quote I saw about how we have become a species where no one knows how to create anything. The example that was used is that no one knows how to create a computer mouse. That might seem impossible, because obviously they are created every day, but no one person has the knowledge necessary to produce the mouse. Petroleum must be drawn from the earth, then refined, then processed into plastic, then manufactured into the case of the mouse. Metal must be extracted from the earth, then refined, then turned into the wiring for the mouse. Silicon must be refined to create the micro circuitry. The protocols and standards of the USB specification must be followed, and then there are drivers and other software involved in the system. No one person has the knowledge necessary to take all the steps I have listed above and those are only the ones I can think of in 30 seconds off the top of my head. I'm sure that the production of a basic $15 PC mouse is much more involved than what I have just detailed. That same concept can be applied to just about anything we do. This supply chain was a huge innovation and allowed for separation of labor and a standard of living that could have never been imagined in the pre-historic days before trade really took off, or even 100 years ago before we expanded it to the monolith it is today.

However, like anything the supply chain can be abused. You can become so dependent on it that dysfunction grows out of that dependence. Leveraging the supply chain to produce something like a computer mouse is an incredibly positive example of using this structure. However, when you can't buy raw ingredients and make your own food, or pull out some thread and fix a small hole in a pair of shorts then the supply chain becomes a source of oppression, not human potential. That is what we are seeing in our culture more and more. Once upon a time the poor did not have servants of any kind. Service wasn't something the poor could afford. The poor had something the rich did not have though. The poor had expertise. They knew how to do for themselves. There was an independent streak to the culture of poverty until very recently. If you doubt that, or want me to cite sources then I cite our grandparents. Go out and talk to your grandparents, especially the ones who lived through the great depression as children. I know there are very few survivors of the great depression left, but they knew how to do for themselves.

When we move to a "service based economy" as so many people like to talk about, everyone just pays someone else to do for them. You know how to do the one thing that you "do for everyone else" but is that one thing really a complete thing? What if you work in a McDonald's, perhaps as management, maybe even making a decent living? So you know how to handle frozen foods pretty well, but do you know how to properly bread a piece of raw chicken? Do you know how to handle ground meat without overworking it? Can you control heat on a stove at home? The answer to these questions is very possibly not. So then something really interesting happens. As the people setting the prices realize that everyone HAS to pay for service, because it's no longer a luxury, it's a necessity caused by their lack of knowledge they can begin to charge as if it's a necessity. If you're paying to not have to do dishes one night because you're tired you'll pay one price. If you're paying to . . . well . . . . get food that's edible because you can't make a dish for yourself at home you'll pay a very different price, because you HAVE to eat. That is the world we have found ourselves in.

So what does this everyday radical stuff accomplish? It accomplishes breaking that relationship. It's about taking back our ability to get by without services. I have seen so many people complain that the "poor" aren't really poor because they have cable, and eat out, and buy trendy cleaning contraptions, etc. when they should be paying their rent. The cable bit I'll agree with, I think most people should just ditch cable altogether but the rest of it is a matter of generational conditioning, and the atrophy of life skills in our society. So let's work that muscle out again. It gives us more say in how our money shapes the economy we live in, and takes a little bit of power back from the big guys.

In closing I will just say the little ideas that I pose on this blog and on the facebook page aren't really meant to be ends in and of themselves. They're starting off points. Ok, so I can make cleaning liquid out of white vinegar and water, what all can I do with it? What other cleaning materials can I make? How hard is it to make soap? My thought it less about just giving out occasional home and garden (and little ways to screw the banks) tips and more to get people thinking about the things they could do for themselves and taking that control back.

Ideally I'd love to see some other people start to post how they do things for themselves on the page, and I hope that people are using some of the ideas I'm throwing out there. I'm sure there are better ones, but it's what I had to start with.

Daily Tip: Move to using Good Search

If you haven't, give Good Search a try. It's based on a model where you use it as your search engine, and the ad revenue is donated to the charity of your choice. There are all sorts of charities, but you can easily give to organizations that promote democracy without ever really having to do much more than lift a finger. One thing after another does really start to add up.

Daily Tip: Package Individual Portions of Leftovers

Growing up when there were leftovers it usually meant either 1 huge piece of tupperware in the fridge, or the pot everything was cooked in just thrown into the icebox. Take a little bit of extra time when you're packaging up your food to put it into individually portioned microwave safe containers. It makes it way easier to grab and run on your way to work, or to throw into the microwave when the tradeoff is leftovers or the fast food joint down the street. Anything to help avoiding spending money on other people processing your food is helpful.

Daily Tip: Click on Financial Ads

Whenever you see an online advertisement for a financial company click on it. In many instances these companies pay per click, or at least pay more per click. This is a very quick, very easy way to impact the banks bottom line without really inconveniencing yourself at all. It also has the delightful side effect of making the profit to expense tradeoff for online ads less attractive.

Daily Tip: Start using Mint

So this one might seem a little counter intuitive, but it's worth it. I started using http://www.mint.com about a year ago and it made me aware of fees that I far too easily missed on my bank statement. Because of mint I discovered that my bank Old National at the time had started to charge a fee if I didn't keep a minimum balance in my account. Mint screams at you at the top of the screen when you login whenever you have additional fees. It helped me curtail my spending by highlighting exactly how much interest I was pulling on my credit card, etc. In general it just made me a more disciplined customer, which means I save money and give less to the banks. A good approach for all concerned. Even if it is a somewhat corporate product it helps make you a less profitable customer for the banks and minimizes the impact of their fee structure. Anything that prevents the stealth that they design into their fee structure is pretty awesome.

Daily Tip: Weekend Cooking Parties

Have friends over for get togethers on the weekend where you cook together. Make big batches of things that you will split up and share with each other. If one person is an awesome baker they can make a huge batch of some fun snacky sweet, and another person make an amazing stew they can be on the stove top, and a third person makes an amazing hummus then you've got an array of options. It's a fun way to try new amazing foods without the overhead of paying someone else to make them, and maybe you can learn a thing or two sharing kitchen space while your friends make their specialties.

At the end of the cooking break out the tupperware/aluminum foil and split the spoils of your labor. This is an amazing way to avoid having cooking time cut into your social time, and expand your skills while your at it. Anything that expands your skills and knowledge without requiring a sacrifice on your part makes it not just easier to take the time to cook, but easier to stay independent and pay only for what you need to pay for in the future.

Daily Tip: Weekly Cash Day

Ditching credit cards and debit cards removes a major revenue stream from the banks. They take a slice out of every transaction, even if you never carry a balance and have to pay interest. It can be incredibly difficult to keep up the organization and planning necessary to give up cards altogether though. You can take smaller, but still useful steps though, like keeping a small stash of cash in your house and making a point of taking it with you one day a week. So commit to making every Friday, or Saturday, or whatever day works for you card free.

If the one day a week structure doesn't work for you then you can take different approaches to reducing how much big bank tax you pay. If you like to go out dancing and to the bars and you've gotten in the habit of opening a tab keep a stash of bar cash in your apartment and take it with you when you go to the bars. The bartender will thank you for giving cash tips, because they don't have to report it all, and you don't have to worry about closing your tab when you're 5 drinks into the night.

You can also keep a stash of cash in your wallet so when you hit restaurants you can leave cash tips, even if you pay the bill with card. Again the waiters will love you because they don't have to report all of their cash tips, but they do have to report all of their credit card tips and you're helping the business because they aren't paying the credit card fees on income they aren't making.

If doing anything systematic like that still doesn't work for you then just make a point of patronizing that little shop down the road where everything is dirt cheap but they only take cash. There are two near me, one is a little Vietnamese bakery that is absolutely out of this world, where everything is half what it would be anywhere else, and the other is a neighborhood bar and grill with the most outstanding drink and dinner specials I've ever had in such a fun little hole in the wall. While I have to hit up an ATM before I go to either establishment, it's worth it, and as long as I stick to my bank's ATMs no one is making any secondary profit off the transaction.

Please post comments about little ways you can think of to work cash back into your every day spending cycles, without making huge changes to your lifestyle.

What the 99% Wants

So there has been a lot of discussion about what the OWS movement's demands are or should be. I've seen people like Matt Taibbi from Rolling Stone talk about how he thinks the movement is doing the right thing because at the moment they should keep their message vague and keep growing because that is an end in it's own right. Then they can whip out the demands later.

I have also of course heard the complaints on Fox News about how the rabble are unfocused and useless because well . . . it's Fox. Hence why I'm not linking to anything because I'll be damned if I'm going to give them one cent of banner ad money.

Thus far these are the two strongest arguments I have seen, the strong argument for OWS, and the strong argument against OWS, but they both miss a very strong point.

What if the "demand" is just simply a demand for democracy? Here is how I was taught about democracy growing up. It's not a simple definition. It's more of a philosophy, but it is kind of necessary groundwork for why I think what I do about OWS.

There are multiple sides to an issue, but we'll say for simplicity of explanation that there are two sides to an issue. The people who feel strongly about those two sides come together and talk about what they want, why they want it and why they are opposed to to the other side. You find common ground and accept that you will at least act on that common ground. Then each side sees if they can accomplish what they want and need while not doing the things that the other side is opposed to. By trying to accommodate the other side, while not sacrificing the things that are truly important to you more common ground is identified. Someone puts together a decent draft proposal that includes the common ground you've come to. It's voted on and after tweaking your solution enough to convince the majority it will be better than what you have right now it's passed, whatever it is. No one person gets everything they want, some people will always be against the entire proposals, but the wisdom of multiple points of view are taken into account. It's a slow process, a messy process, a process that bruises egos. In the end it's a terribly flawed problematic process that just happens to be better than everything else humanity has tried thus far.

There, democracy in a nutshell. The issue with it is that it requires people to actually try to solve problems. The instant the goal isn't actually about solving the problem at hand the entire thing falls apart because the basis of negotiation falls apart. That is what we have been living in since Obama was elected (and to varying degrees for decades before that). The Republican leadership has very clearly stated that their primary goal is making Obama a one term president. It's not that they want to be a counterbalance to his excessive liberalism (I'm sorry, I'm going to need a moment to go laugh hysterically in the corner having just typed that), but instead their goal is just to get him out of office by making sure that nothing gets done while he's president. They assume that the population won't notice because they control the messaging, and are used to a populace that doesn't really pay attention. It's just kind of how it is. The politicians are bought, and they are only interested in maintaining their power structure. No matter how corporate Obama is, and no matter how much he isn't fighting for as much change and hope as he should be, he is fighting for some legitimate movement in the right direction and that terrifies those truly in power (read: corporate political complex).

The 99% has a single demand, but it is a demand that is so completely foreign to America at this point in our history that we don't even recognize it. They want democracy back. So what are they doing about it? They are participating in democracy whether the rest of our country and especially our country's power base want them to or not. There has been a lot of talk about how non violent everything has stayed, and that is starting to get more and more attention which is what makes the events in Oakland that much more powerful and the response from the mayor incredibly powerful.

It's not that the movement "should" keep growing then at some magickal point "decide" on some demands and hand them over to our leaders. The Occupy movement IS the people, and that's not how the people work. What the occupy movement should, and I suspect will end up doing is exactly what it is doing now. It will continue to grow while the politicians stare at it and try to figure out what is going on, like a 2 year old learning social skills they might some day get it. It will be a messy, but ultimately healthy process just like the rest of democracy in action.

The more people start to talk about this, talk about the nature of democracy and stop trying to figure out "What the protesters want" as if any democratic process EVER lead to a coherent goal or set of goals, the sooner we will make real progress and our society can get back on track.

Everyday Radical Tip: Skip Money Altogether!!!!

Ok, so I know I just posted something, and this is kind of a followup to that post. I have this AMAZING little coffee shop just a few blocks from my apartment called Kitchen Sink. They are a little independent place with decent prices, great food, and great coffee. For my readers in Bloomington I can eat their bagels. After years of conditioning by BBC I am in fact capable of eating the bagels at this place. Enough said about how much they care about quality.

So the other day I was in there talking to one of the baristas and lamenting all the tossed out espresso grounds. Why do they throw out espresso grounds? Well note what I said above about quality. To pull a perfect espresso shot you must use exactly the same amount of grounds every time. That means carefully settling the grounds to just fill the mechanism, brushing off the excess and tamping properly. That excess gets discarded. Sad Face. :( It makes great espresso Happy Face :D

So I commented a couple weeks ago how that was a shame, and the barista working said "Yeah, but it's just part of pulling a good espresso shot". Fast forward a week, I've been thinking about this and I'm in Kitchen Sink again with the same barista and I say "You know, I think I mentioned this to you before about the wasted espresso grounds, but they'd make a mean liqueur." To which she offers them to me. She just says, "You want em?" A plastic bag later I'm walking home with maybe a third of a cup of espresso grounds, all ground that day and home I go to some rum and a mason jar.

The delightful barista, who's name I did not get (again sad face :( I need to fix that) said I could claim them whenever I wanted. Which I probably will.

Moral of the story, patronize local businesses and chat up the workers. You never know what might happen, and specifically ask your local cafe for their discarded grounds. I'll comment on here in a week or so when I have a good extraction and tell you all how it turned out.

In the mean time I LOVE KITCHEN SINK!!!!

Everyday Radical Tip: Liquers for Christmas

Forgo Christmas shopping by making your own liqueur and bottle it at home. Buy a couple huge bottles of neutral liquor. I find Bacardi is most affordable in my area, but vodka works as well. Don't buy budget brands here. This will still end up being affordable. Throw some herbs/spices/dried flavorings into the bottles. I have used cacao nibs, coffee, cinnamon, chai. Sweet things are easiest, bitter herbal liqueurs are harder to figure out.

You'll have to make room in the bottle for whatever flavor element you add (shucks you'll have to drink some rum), and you'll have to taste it occasionally to make sure it's strong enough. Leave the bottle for between a day and a month depending on how the taste is coming along.

Now strain the infusion through some cheesecloth squeezing the cloth after straining is done to get all the liquid out.

Boil up as much simple syrup as you have infusion after the straining in a stock pot. Simple syrup is a mixture of equal parts sugar and water boiled just till it's all dissolved. Let it cool for a few minutes so it's not steaming so strongly and then add the infusion. Taste to make sure it's sweet enough, if it isn't mix in some honey till it's as mellow as you'd like.

Finally bottle for your friends. If have a long gift giving list to take care of I suggest the bottle I used last year. If you don't have to give quite as many gifts then I'd recommend the bottle I'm using for my liqueur this year. The second bottle isn't quite as attractive, but it is much larger and more affordable.

I recommend throwing the bottles in the dishwasher right before using them and putting your precious liquid in while the glass is still piping hot. You mix will be roughly 40 proof, but it still never hurts to use good process. Ideally you want the bottle to sit for a month or so before you drink it. Things mellow a bit. Not sure of the chemistry, but it's true. So that's why I'm posting this so early.

All in all this year I'm going to end up with 12 giftable bottles of liqueur for roughly $70. These are really exceptionally luxurious gifts as well.

Every day we can do things that cut into the structures in our society that move money upwards. Having worked in high end kitchen retail though I can tell you that many business operate at a loss all year, and depend on the ridiculous consumer culture that has grown up around the holidays to make their entire business model profitable.

If society were distributing money to everyone then that really wouldn't be a problem. In a world where all the money flows to the top though sooner or later people are going to start doing for themselves again and the people at the top are going to have to remember that they NEED us to buy goods from their precious corporate stores. I say why wait till you have no choice. Learn how to make a good stuff now.

The Revolution Will be Tweeted

I've been thinking a lot about the Occupy Wall Street protests. Specifically about the lack of leadership and how much that seems to be confusing and frustrating the mainstream. I've been thinking about it and I've come to the conclusion that while everyone is trying to figure out what's going on the answer is right in front of us, and has been foretold by our history.

It isn't that the situation is different, or that there is some special magic about what the specific crisis is right now. What is different is . . . us. How are we different you ask? We are different because of Twitter and Facebook and Google Plus. Now lots of people have talked about these tools in terms of what they allow us to do, and how they facilitate organization, but I don't want to talk about that. I argue that they have in fact changed who we are as individuals and as a people.

I am going to go back in time a bit and talk about previous movements in history that have lead me to this conclusion. Now I haven't done exhaustive research, so I'm not really going to talk about details, but more the general knowledge we all have about those moments in time.

First I want to travel back to the civil rights movement. We all know there were huge names in that movement, or at least names that people associated with the events of the time politically. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and as much as people thought about it even if he isn't deserving of the same pedestal John F. Kennedy. We can look at the situation and ask what was different about that struggle from the struggles of today and the answer is . . . well nothing really that would explain why leaders would or would not be relevant. If we fast forward to the beat generation and the hippie movement that came a bit later we see a brand of leadership that is a bit less centralized, but at the end of the day still centered around certain personalities. Ginsburg, Lennon, any number of other bands, and of course let none of us forget Jack Kerouac. Now these weren't leaders in the same sense necessarily, but they were still centralized figures that were necessary for the movement to catalyze at all.

When we turn around and look at Occupy Wall Street there is no sign of this phenomenon. Social networking has been around for a while. If it was just that social networking provided the tools to allow for this phenomenon then wouldn't the Tea Party have been as decentralized and resistant to organized structure as OWS? Wouldn't we have seen something else like this before? We really haven't seen anything like this, and I think it's because it's not what social networking provides as a tool set, but how it's changed how we are empowered and think about the world over time.

What I mean by this is in the past most people didn't think they could do anything. If you were in the middle of no where you only heard about movements from what the media was willing to tell you. Publishing and distributing a "zine" could be a huge undertaking and a huge deal. Someone who could get the word out was powerful, someone who wasn't able to figure out how to get the word out wasn't powerful. Accomplishing any kind of meaningful communication took huge collaboration between people, which inherently meant that the people who ended up leading these movements had to be incredibly charismatic, and really required a bit of cult of personality because they needed the direct help of others to get anything major done. People who grow up with this type of charisma know by the time they are old enough to be motivated to a cause that people will follow them. High school and college cement these individuals with that empowerment. They are taught that they can act and the world will move with them. What about the rest of us? Well before social networking the rest of us did not have this empowerment. What difference did it make what a random person thought or if they had a great idea? If one wasn't good at motivating others to realize that idea nothing would come of it.

Now I want to fast forward again, not quite to the current day, but to 1991. Something small and strange happened in this age that immediately preceded social networking as we know it today. A Finish programming student posted an operating system he wrote to the newsgroup comp.os.minix. That student was Linus Torvalds, and the operating system was Linux. He wasn't a hugely charismatic individual, and in all honesty he still isn't. I've watched interviews with Linus and he has none of the conniving of Bill Gates' early career or the pure motivating charisma of Steve Jobs. This phenomenon was pretty much unheard of before this event. Now because we had not yet "been reprogrammed" this still developed into a structure where one monolithic person was in charge of the program that became Linux. That said it didn't start because of Linus' charisma, but rather just on the merits of the little piece of software he posted to an internet newsgroup. In the long run that little kernel of software ended up fueling Tivo, and a healthy swath of the netbooks in the world, more of the internet's servers than anyone could have imagined in 1991, and every Android handset on the market. The phenomenon hadn't reached the level that we see it today, but the first signs of what was coming certainly revealed themselves.

Now we'll fast forward again this time to June of 1999. Another very interesting phenomenon happened. This one was called Napster. I'm sure everyone remembers good ole' Napster. It was born out of a technological desire to innovate past all the private under cover FTP servers that were floating around the internet in those days providing MP3 sharing functionality. This was all terribly illegal. Napster tried to systematize this in a corporate structure that would protect the individual. Ultimately what they were doing was declared illegal and shut down in July of 2001. Several attempts to fix this came afterwards. Networks that didn't emphasize music, so the centralized company thought they were safe declared illegal. Networks based on an open protocol that unfortunately still required some sort of centralized maintenance service declared illegal and then . . . bit torrent. Bit Torrent did something very different from everything that had come before it. It took the centralized server out of the equation altogether and did not incorporate initially. The software, and service were both open source software. There really was no one who could be prosecuted. The creator of the software made sure that the first implementation of their software was legal. It was used to serve distributions of Linux, which are very large and very expensive to host. Suddenly almost every community distribution of Linux was using Bit Torrent to lower their oppressive server bills. Now plenty of illegal content is also distributed with bit torrent, but the creator has no part in that process. An individual has to setup their own tracker, and host the individual files. So there is no centralized person to sue. The entertainment industry has spent enormous amounts of funding trying to find a way to prosecute this new beast. They have failed to make any progress on that front. Bit Torrent did eventually develop into a business to help develop the software, once it was quite clear there were no grounds to prosecute them with their development structure. What is significant about this is the lack of a figure head to attack, this is incredibly important.

Now we jump forward to the future, past all the silly discussions about Web 2.0 as a buzzword and it's "business potential". We now live in a world of Facebook and Twitter, and Google Plus. All of these communication protocols are very much like Bit Torrent in that they themselves have some centralization, but they are completely insulated from what happens on them. I honestly don't think they are quite as decentralized as Bit Torrent, but they have done something that makes that unimportant. They have turned us into Bit Torrent. It's taken years, but we have seen the rise of web comic artists fueled by internet social connections, and collaborative movies facilitated by social networking. We have seen Pompalmoose, and the random but often brilliance of viral videos, Strong Bad, and then we have Iran. Watching the protests in Iran you begin to see how the different way of approaching organization and creativity plays out in extreme political circumstances. Now because of the authoritarian culture those protests happened in regime change was not in the cards, but then we see Egypt and Lybia, and now the U.S.

When we look at the occupy movement, and the way it's organizing, the way it moves with no head it is like a creature with no centralized nervous system. Where ideas evolve through group collaboration instead of through power of charisma. It is easy enough to see where we have learned to function in this way. When you go onto facebook and make friends, and take part in conversations you never would have been able to before. Concerts improvised in meetups on Google plus barely a week or two after it went live, focusing on feedback and participation instead of just performance demonstrate the kind of shift in how we work and organize compared to our past.

We have been reprogrammed as a species by this shift. By knowing that information is always at our fingertips, we only need to decide we want to access it, by knowing that our contribution is just as valid as someone else's, by knowing that seeing inspiration and sharing it is a worthwhile act in and of it's own right we have changed. If someone sees something and is inspired by it, what are the million little neural and interpersonal connections that led to that inspiration, and is any one firing that was required to reach the true inspiration any less meaningful than any other firing, no matter which person's head it was in? This is the power that can be seen in the Occupy Wall Street protests, in perfect display for anyone who wishes to look.

This is no less than a change to the foundation of who we are and how we create as a species. If we can create and move and act in non violent moral ways with no leadership whatsoever than what is the purpose of leaders? Why do we need government or corporation, or centralization at all? Are we ready to give them all up, probably not, but what will another century of this development look like? What will happen when those who are now 18 and 22 and even 30 are the ones running whatever government we have at that point? What will happen when every person in a political position cannot remember a time when one voice was considered more important than another? When no person in power remembers a time when one year wasn't profoundly different technologically and socially than the year before? What does that mean about fear of change, and how much less of it there will be? What do decisions made in the absence of that fear of change look like?

Any one of these questions has revolutionary implications about the innovation of the functioning of the human species. Taken together they are . . . almost more than one person can think about. Maybe they aren't more than we all can think about though.

What is an Everyday Radical?

What does it mean to be an everyday radical? It means adopting the radical idea that we don't have to accept the unspoken truths that are shoved down our throat by those in power. We don't need anyone's permission to walk up to our societies coat check and get our lives and our money back.

I have started by creating a facebook page to allow for dynamic community involvement in Everyday Radical. I am creating this blog page to post longer more in depth pieces. I am going to try and make sure everything I post adheres to the following basic ideas.

1 Anyone can do it: This is primarily about making people realize their own empowerment. I don't say it's about empowering people because I am of the firm belief that people are empowered they just need to realize their own potential.

2 Nothing Promotes the Perfect being the Enemy of the Good: One of the societal lies that has always bothered me is that if you can't go whole hog it isn't worth it. 1000 people wasting 10% less is just as good as 100 people living a perfectly holistic waste free life, and the first goal is a LOT easier to attain. I tip my hats to people who only buy local, and make everything themselves, and are off the electricity grid, and never forget their re-usable bags when they bike to the store, and compost, and grow their own food using only natural fertilizer created by their compost, and . . .well you get the idea. How many of us can take all that on? Not very many, but how many of us can mix up some vinegar and water instead of buying S.C. Johnson Wax products? Plenty and is it still worth doing? Yes.

3 A strong emphasis on collaboration and networked thought: The 99% movement has gotten a lot of attention from people who want to know "Who their leaders are" "What they want" "What their focus is". What they do not realize is that the Occupy movement is basically the bit torrent of activism. They don't lack a leader or a single issue because the situation we find ourselves in is different than the previous generations situations. They are organized differently because they grew up on Napster, and MP3.com, and Bit Torrent, and re-shared ideas on Facebook and Twitter. They have watched protests in Iran and Egypt fueled by these social media platforms and more importantly the collaborative nature of the internet has broken down our need for a leader. When you look at projects like the It Gets Better Campaign the "leader" or "creator" Dan Savage repeats over and over again that he isn't really responsible for the Campaign. The people who took part are. Now he coordinated, and helped nurture it's growth, but he's right. Every person who posted a video, every person who re-shared the videos that touched them, the people at Google who were ready to back date the project so it could keep growing before Dan and Terry even knew what had happened are the true heroes of the project. That is not unique to It Get's Better. It is the core spirit of not just action on the Internet, but how the Internet has taught us to take action in all aspects of our lives. So I will try and emphasize the sorts of structures that facilitate that phenomenon.

4 Non Extremes: There is a place for extremism in all honesty. The goals of extremism are never the right ones, but sometimes you need a little anarchy to break up established structures. Then when the dust settles you need the better angels of your nature to step in and start to work things out. Even at the height of rebellion though there is a place for laying the groundwork of the peaceful period that follows the revolution. The 99% seem to have the revolution covered. It is my hope to tackle some of the rest of what is coming.

So that's what this is all about right now in my mind. As time goes on and other people start to contribute I fully expect the focus to evolve and change. While I'm going to use this space to post larger ideas and thoughts that won't fit on the facebook page, so it kind of belongs to me I hope to create a space on facebook where others will post their ideas contributions. Hopefully these will include posts from other people's blogs and at the end of the day that I won't own this any more than anyone else.

So go to the facebook page, see what's going on and throw in some of your radical ideas, and read some of everyone elses. The simpler and more casual the actions are the better. :)

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Everyday-Radical/280811658607907