The Downing Street memos are beginning to be hailed as the new Watergate — but are they? The Sunday Times certainly seems to have a Deep Throat, to be fed all this classified information. But the US and the UK differ rather a lot when it comes to state secrecy.

In fact the UK is one of the more secretive nations in the world. The reason for that is mostly down to the Official Secrets Act. This legislation, despite its reform in 1989, holds a very strong deterrent against leaks: both the leaker and anyone who gets the leaked document and then passes it on — such as a journalist or a newspaper — are liable for prosecution and jail time of up to 2 years.

This makes the little red email rather interested in the source of these highly secret documents, and very interested to know why the UK government hasn’t launched a criminal investigation, or slapped a gag on the Sunday Times’ almost weekly leak. It would seem that this unofficial leak probably has official backing: the Prime Muppet is most likely in on the scam.

But what can Blair hope to gain from this? Whilst he has hinted that this may well be his last term in office, he is a politician and as such, any claims of last terms should be taken with a pinch of salt. And on the face of it, his leaking these documents would seem to be tantamount to political suicide: in that they could lead to the impeachment of both Blair and Bush. But this may of course be precisely the reason Tony is leaking them: so that he can claim to W that it isn’t his doing. Why then is Tony not scared of his own impeachment? Possibly he is so far gone that he feels he is invulnerable. Perhaps he’s to be taken at his word (not a position the little red email would advise) when he claims this is his final term.

Perhaps this is a grudge thing: sour grapes at being treated as an afterthought in the greatest imperial plundering expedition in the past few decades. A stauch ally that was rewarded with not enough spoils geting its own back? Perhaps. The promised oil bonanza would appear to be the only reason the UK joined in to begin with.

The little red email posits an even odder idea: it could even be a middle finger to Bush’s increasingly corrupt and blinkered pollution policy, which started badly with the Kyoto refusal and has become more ostrich-like as time goes on. Blair on the other hand seems currently to be getting serious about CO2 and global warming, as the recent government reports suggest, and last Friday’s rumours that the G8 climate plans have been watered down at the US’ behest may be a fresh thorn in Blair’s side. Perhaps the current heatwave in the UK coupled with flash floods, and the knowledge that the UK has much less land to sacrifice to rising sea levels than the US does making the environment seem more urgent to Blair.

We note, however, that the original draft was leaked on May 28, around a month after the original Downing Street memo, so perhaps Blair’s complicity in the memo leak has another motive. What that is remains to be seen.

By 2007 consultant giant Accenture predicts that the number one web language will be Chinese. If that’s the case, there will be certain parts of the Chinese lexicon that won’t be on the World Wide Web — Googled in Falun Gong on the mainland lately?

Greedy IT firms, with an eye on the potential riches to be had out of the world’s most populous nation, have bent over backwards to accommodate the Chinese Communist Party’s demands for a restrictive internet that strangles any form of dissent.

Cisco and Sun Microsystems are the dominant two firms helping Beijing with the Great Firewall of China — the hi-tech system that ensures web surfers are greeted with the familiar ‘This page failed to load’ screen for any contentious website.

Then there are the search engines. Both Yahoo and Google self censor by way of ingratiating themselves with the authorities.

Most recently it has been the turn of the world’s most powerful software firm, Microsoft, to come in for some abuse from the global online community for its back scratching censorship it performs on its new mainland blogging facility, MSN Spaces.

Chinese bloggers using the service to post messages titled “democracy,” “capitalism,” “liberty,” “human rights,” “Dalai Lama,” “ Tibet,” “Falun Gong,” or “June 4th,” are greeted with a bright yellow warning. “This message includes forbidden language,” it scolds. “Please delete the prohibited expression.” Check out what the corporate scolding looks like at this website.

The restrictions were agreed upon by Microsoft and its Chinese partner, the government-linked Shanghai Alliance Investment run by none other than the son of former Chinese President Jiang Zemin. Human rights groups, including Reporters Without Borders, say Microsoft is sacrificing free speech principles in its headlong quest for profits and that the company should follow a higher standard. Money talks, they argue, while freedom of expression gets jailed.

“No one should break the law, but at the same time we all believe in universal values,” said Julien Pain, head of the organization’s Internet monitoring group. “If China required underage children to work, would you do it? Free speech is not an American value or a French value. It’s a human value.”

Last month, the Chinese government announced new rules requiring that all websites in China be registered. Since coming to power Hu Jintao has clearly been a much harsher leader regarding access to information. It is estimated that China has an alarming 30,000 cyber police.

Chinese software purchases have increased by 380% since 2000. Tim Bray at his Ongoing blog summed up Bill Gates’ Chinese actions best blasting the billionaire for being “ Beijing’s bitch to buy some bloggers”.

For more on our coverage on China’s continuing crack down on the internet, click here, here, here and err here.

Even as members of his own party called for its closure, George Bush, in that peculiarly contrarian way of his, has decided to award his VP’s old firm Halliburton and its subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root a $30m contract to build a new Guantanamo jail.

About 520 foreign terrorism suspects from more than 40 countries are still being held indefinitely without legal counsel in dreadful conditions that breach the Geneva Conventions at the Cuban base Amnesty International recently labelled “the gulag of our times”.

The good news for the occupants at the nerve centre of Operation Keep Mohammed Down is that the Halliburton-built Detention Camp #6 will have air conditioning. The bad news is that it is the first part of what might amount to a half billion dollar expansion of the reviled jail — the trawl for candidates for an extended stay under the Cuban sun without the cigars is clearly about to be extended across the Middle East.

“Guantanamo has become a symbol of abuse and represents a system of detention that is betraying the best US values and undermines international standards,” Amnesty said in a statement, adding that Bush should “disclose the situation in the USA’s shadowy network of detention centres around the globe.”

Democratic Senator Frank Lautenberg, a critic of past contracts awarded to Halliburton, blasted this latest crony contract.

“After all of Halliburton’s misconduct, why is the Bush administration giving them more contracts? It’s just another example of how in this administration, the foxes are guarding the henhouse,” he said.

In December of 2003, Halliburton, which was awarded a multi-billion no-bid contract  to rebuild Iraq’s oil industry, embarrassed the Bush administration after overcharging US forces in Iraq for fuel by up to $61 million.

Last week, Democrat Senator Dick Durbin compared interrogation practices at Guantanamo with methods used by the Nazis and the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot in Cambodia.

“If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime -- Pol Pot or others -- that had no concern for human beings,” he said.

For a full on report on Halliburton’s perpetual mischief, the folk at Corpwatch have published this rather splendid PDF.

The little red email’s personal physician, Dr Jim, returns this week, concerned about the health brain drain from developing nations.

Healthcare in the developing world is in crisis. Many countries do not have training for doctors or nurses, but the problem is being compounded by the attitude of the Western world. Countries such as Great Britain and the United States recognise that such areas are ripe for the picking in terms of skilled workers to bolster there own health services, and have no conscience about doing so. A recent editorial in The Lancet, casts further doubt on this practice suggesting that “to poach and rely on highly skilled foreign workers from poor countries in the public sector is akin to the crime of theft”.

Some countries outside the EU are “protected” from this practice by an agreement not to actively recruit in these countries for the NHS. Despite this agreement, analysis of the work permits approved for healthcare workers in 2003 is alarming. 5,880 permits were granted to South Africans, 2,825 to workers from Zimbabwe, 1,510 to Nigeria, and 850 to Ghana. All these countries are prohibited from NHS recruitment yet the migration continues.

Mauritius is marked by a well advanced education system, which produces healthcare workers that easily fit into the demands of Europe’s rapidly growing health sector. This makes it an easy target for recruitment. The British send recruitment agents who very discreetly make contact with the doctors and nurses, and directly negotiate the contracts. The state can not compete with the packages being offered for work abroad and many chose a new life overseas.

In South Africa, many doctors have been recruited by Canada and since 1991 the number of nurses leaving the country has risen eightfold. Half have gone to the UK. As a result, South Africa has become a huge source of medical staff, whilst 80 percent of doctors in its rural areas are now recruited from neighbour countries. This imposes huge pressures on an already failing system. Sub-Saharan Africa alone needs around a million more healthcare workers, and unless the situation improves drastically rates of HIV will spiral, disability from childhood disease will rise, and thousands more lives will be lost.

Traditionally medicine has always been a migratory discipline, with the great centres of the ancient world in Rhodes and Athens being replaced by those in the US and Britain. The key however is that in the past people would visit the centres to learn new skills and then return home thus disseminating new information. This rarely happens now outside of India where financial incentives ensure a highly qualified stream of workers make their way home.

The upcoming G8 Summit has been targeted by the British Medical Association as an opportunity for Britain in its position of leadership, to highlight this situation. Not all countries have an ethical code in relation to this issue but some argue that it is unnecessary. In Germany for example only 5% of medical staff are from abroad compared with over a third in the UK. In London nearly 50% of all working nurses are from outside the EU.

Ironically as your correspondent sits on a ward in an NHS hospital writing this article his attention was drawn to a new group of 12 nurses being shown round. They had been recruited from the Philippines, and the NHS had paid for them and their families to move to the UK. They will then be put up in subsidised accommodation while they work for the hospital. Typically they will be ferociously hard-working and often trained to a higher level than their UK counterparts, but the little red email fears for the healthcare system they have gratefully left behind.

Here’s something for the leaders of the top eight countries to chew over as they gather shortly at Gleneagles in Scotland to allegedly work out ways to alleviate poverty around the world: the US’ annual military expenditure is now equivalent to the combined GDP of the developing world, ie 61 countries. Likewise the combined sales of the top 100 arms-producing companies in 2003 was roughly the same as the developing world’s combined national output.

We have sifted through the excellent in depth annual report released this month by the well respected Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) and the statistics on arms sales are mind boggling. Last year, global military expenditure topped $1 trillion for the first time since the end of the Cold War; the US accounted for 47% of this spending.

Here are the main sticking points from the exhaustive report, which can be partially accessed by clicking here.

All the 19 conflicts recorded as ‘major armed conflicts’ in 2004 — those causing over 1,0000 battle-related deaths in any one year — were classified as intra-state conflicts. Only three of these — the conflict against al-Qaeda, the conflict in Iraq and the conflict in Darfur — are less than 10 years old.

The $1.035 trillion global military spend last year ranks 6% lower in real terms than the 1987-88 peak of Cold War military spending.

As a global average, 2004 global average corresponds to $162 per head and 2.6% of world GDP — ie more than enough to avert huge catastrophes that break out around the world especially in Africa.

Since the War on Terror™ (TWOT™) kicked off, the annual average increase in global military spending has accelerated to around 6%.

The top 100 arms companies increased their combined sales by 25% in 2003. In the top 100, 38 are American, and one is Canadian. These 39 account for 63.2% of arms sales by the top 100 while 42 European companies accounted for another 30.5%.

Of the 150 companies included on a table of arms data transparency in a table on arms industry data transparency, only 41 can be described as having fully and completely disclosed the extent of their arms sales in a company document.

Delving deeper, and with the soundtrack of Whole Lotta Love ringing in our ears, we examined the global top 100 firms and what was most revealing was that the highest riser — up from number 66 to number 12 — was Dick Cheney’s former company, Halliburton. Although we’re quite sure that’s just an odd coincidence which has nothing to do with Halliburton’s links to Vice President Cheney. The top 5 were rather predictable: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman and BAE Systems. Raytheon, General Dynamics and United Technologies also made the top ten.

Summing up the onslaught and ramifications of the US-inspired TWOT™, Alyson Bailes, the report’s editor, noted: “Today’s world cannot be secure without security for all, yet the events of the past few years have done little to bring global solutions closer.” That in a nutshell is the whole idea behind TWOT™ — it’s a replacement for the Cold War that the military industrial complex had been crying out for throughout Bill Clinton’s tenure.

The continued expansion of American and British waistlines is in part explained by the latest statistics released by NOP World on global media habits. It emerges that the two nations are among the leading couch potatoes in the world, with the Brits watching an average of 18 hours of TV a week and the Americans staying glued for 19 hours. Further fuelling fears of dumbing down, the British read the least in Europe, just 5.3 hours a week are spent with book in hand.

Globally, individuals say they spend 16.6 hours watching television, 8 hours listening to the radio, 6.5 hours reading and 8.9 hours on computers/the Internet (for non-work related reasons) on average each week.

Thailand topped the global TV-watching chart with a weekly average of 22.4 hours a head, six hours more than the global average, with Mexico coming bottom with just 11.6 hours. Nick Chiarelli, European director at NOP World, said: “From a UK perspective it’s perhaps not surprising that we rank so high in terms of television watching. TV has always been a popular leisure pastime in this country, but it is quite concerning how far we lag behind many other countries in terms of how much we read.”

Wary of declining exercise among Britain’s TV-addled youth one enterprising student at London’s Brunel University has invented a shoe that controls the amount of TV kids can watch.

The shoe — dubbed Square-eyes — has a unique insole, reports the BBC, that records the amount of exercise a child does and converts it into television watching time.  One button on the shoe records the number of steps taken by the child over the day. Another transmits this information to a base station connected to the TV. It calculates the time earned and once it runs out, the TV automatically switches itself off. The aim is to get girls to walk 12,000 paces a day and boys, 15,000 paces.

Such an invention can’t come soon enough since obesity is rapidly on the increase in the UK. In 1995, 9.9% of two to 10-year-olds were classified as obese. This rose to 13.7% in 2003. It’s a demographic time bomb with television as its fuse.

Worried about those rolls of flab from watching too many episodes of the Sopranos while stuffing yourself with Coke and crisps? Then here’s a work out regime for couch potatoes created by Bill Phillips who defines TV as “the biggest time vampire in modern society”.

And for why watching TV makes you fat click here, all part of the excellent Turn Off Your TV website.

Average Hours/Week Watching TV

Thailand	22.4	Spain	15.9
Philippines	21.0	China	15.7
Egypt	20.9	Korea	15.4
Turkey	20.2	Germany	15.2
Indonesia	19.7	Hungary	15.1
USA	19.0	Russia	15.0
Taiwan	18.9	Italy	14.9
Brazil	18.4	South Africa	14.8
UK	18.0	Canada	14.7
Japan	17.9	Argentina	14.0
Saudi Arabia	17.7	Australia	13.3
France	17.3	India	13.3
Hong Kong	16.7	Sweden	12.3
GLOBAL	16.6	Venezuela	11.9
Czech Republic	16.2	Mexico	11.6
Poland	15.9

While on the face of it the little red email, a proud lifelong member of the Pedestrian Club without a single driving licence between us, is in favour of stringent taxes for vehicles, the method outlined by the British government last week would make the state even more of a George Orwell creation than it already is.

The government is mulling charging from 2 pence to £1.34 per mile driven depending on the type of road and time of day, using satellite technology and black boxes in every car to track drivers’ distances. It is unclear whether the car type would be factored in, an important consideration in today’s SUV driven society.

The British already pay a whopping £42 billion in road charges, through an annual car tax disc and the punitive 85% tax on fuel, both of which the government says it would reduce in the event of the tracking tax coming into place.

The method of tracking would infringe further into the average Briton’s already heavily pried upon life, and is something we are completely against. Just across the Channel the French get by very well with motorway tolls — something the Blair government should be looking at, instead of satellite technology.

The Germans launched in 2003 a plan to use Global Positioning Systems for freight vehicles, a much less ambitious plan than outlined by the UK Minister for Transport, and it has already run into tremendous difficulty.

Under Blair, the UK has rapidly descended into a policed state, where everything is under surveillance. Soon ID cards will be made mandatory, with citizens forced to fork out £100 each for the micro-chipped privilege.

As of the start of 2004, the UK had 4.285m CCTVs, constituting 20% of the global total. Earlier this year Westminster council in London announced it would install listening devices into all lampposts.

Britain’s civil liberties are being crushed as fast as in the US, but more stealthily and with nary a protest.

The good news is that the little red email can help you in avoiding being tracked. Stop using your mobile phone for starters — it’s a perpetual tracking device carried in your pocket (and gives you brain damage to boot). Secondly, equip yourself with a laser key ring — point the aforementioned implement at a CCTV to blind it. Finally, if you’re a British driver, fear not — these GPS systems are not infallible. £5 will buy you a few caps, resistors, plugs and sockets and your black box can then pretend to be anywhere, as this fella, Chris demonstrates.

For more on the British state’s surveillance of its citizens click here.

Dig out your bucket and spade: it’s fast approaching sand castle time for one third of the world’s population. Desertification is now a threat to two billion people, according to a $22 million four-year global study by 1,300 experts from 95 countries entitled the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. Climate change and population growth have led to a serious squeeze on resources such as water for irrigating fields. According to the report, sponsored by the UN among others, 43% of the world’s cultivated land is in drylands.

“Desertification is potentially the most threatening ecosystem change impacting livelihoods of the poor,” it said.

“Desertification is not due to lack of knowledge and science, but to a lack of proper governance,” says co-author Uriel Safriel, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.

Safriel explains that the knowledge needed to generate sustainable incomes from drylands is available in the world’s scientific and engineering communities, yet doesn’t reach the people affected.

“The reason is either that their own governments are not very efficient or that the donor countries are not investing their systems in a proper way,” he says.

And don’t think that encroaching deserts in lands far away won’t affect you. Dust from the Gobi and Sahara deserts has, for instance, been linked to respiratory problems in North America and has affected coral reefs in the Caribbean Sea.

• This week’s wild weather ahoy story concerns wind. Prepare for a hell of a lot more of it, is the message from the US National Center for Atmospheric Research.

Warmer oceans, more moisture in the atmosphere, and other factors suggest that human-induced climate change will increase hurricane intensity and rainfall.

“Trends in human-influenced environmental changes are now evident in hurricane regions,” the report’s author Kevin Trenberth noted. “These changes are expected to affect hurricane intensity and rainfall, but the effect on hurricane numbers remains unclear. The key scientific question is how hurricanes are changing.”

Trenberth’s paper follows extensive tropical activity last year, including a record number of hurricane landfalls affecting Florida and typhoons striking Japan. The only bonus the Hong-Kong-based little red email can make of this news is that it will mean more typhoon days off.

About the only US military website the little red email checks regularly is the US Navy’s joint typhoon watch — essential slacker tracking in these summer months to check for possible days off work.

A hotchpotch of stuff we’ve found and enjoyed recently on the Weird Wide Web.

Get your lovely T-shirts while they’re hot!
Everybody loves a winner. Nobody likes a loser. Nobody likes to be a loser. So with this in mind, Canned Revolution have set it up so that you can now buy your own Canned Revolution T-Shirt, and pretend that you won it in our competition. We’ll back up any claims to being a lucky winner by anyone who purchases a freshly tinned t-shirt to help the cause.

Owning your own Canned Revolution shirt could be a great way of life for you — imagine the friends, the opportunities, the fame, the copious offers of gratuitous sex.

Don’t delay! Buy your way into coolness today by clicking here.

 

If you fancy your luck, on the other hand…
You could try our latest competition! Yes, that’s right: another chance to be cool for free. Head on over to here to try your luck in our latest revolutionary contest.

 

New group questioning cheap imports from China
The EU and the US are not the only ones with qualms over cheap Chinese imports. Chinese workers are also flabbergasted at the rubbish the West will buy, according to this exclusive in The Onion.

 

News every day the Haiku way
For those who like their news simple and concise: try Haiknews for a daily 5-7-5 of news.

 

We are all torturers now
Mr Fisk’s latest article is on the slippery slope many countries have taken with regards to torture in the name of TWOT™: turning a blind eye to it, facilitating it, instituting it, condoning its use, and even outsourcing it.

 

N’emmène pas Harry? We think not…
The local rags may have rejectected this gem, but we thought is cut the mustard.

 

Video: Iraq In The Name Of Freedom
This video shows the horrors that lie behind all the jingoist nonsense and the rhetoric about freedom and democracy.

 

Retarded Politician of the week award
Goes to one of the few true believers left: This guy is so retarded he still thinks Iraq had something to do with 9-11. On hand to tell him why that’s nonsense that even Bush and his cronies would deny, is Information Clearing House’s rebuttal, We attacked Iraq Because Of 9/11:  Is Clearly A lie.

 

Greg’s guide to the war for oil
Mr Palast’s most excellent timeline of the run up to OIL (Operation Iraqi Liberation).

 

Cooney gets long service award from his new employer, Exxon
In last week’s Stuff we pointed out White House staffer Philip A Cooney, chief of staff of the Council on Environmental Quality, and chief softener of two climate reports had come to White House from the oil industry lobby, the American Petroleum Institute (by a complete coincidence, naturally).
This week he has resigned (by a complete coincidence, naturally), calling it “a long-planned departure”. So where’s he bound? Well according The Associated Press:
“Cooney will join Exxon Mobil in the fall, company spokesman Russ Roberts told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from its Dallas headquarters. He declined to describe Cooney’s job.”
Well, now there’s a coincidence!

 

Former Bush aide says twin towers’ collapse was a demolition job
According to the Washington Times and UPI, former chief economist for the Department of Labor during President George W. Bush’s first term, Morgan Reynolds feels the 9-11 collapse was most like due to demolition charges. Reyonds said: “If demolition destroyed three steel skyscrapers at the World Trade Center on 9/11, then the case for an ‘inside job’ and a government attack on America would be compelling.”
“It is hard to exaggerate the importance of a scientific debate over the cause of the collapse of the twin towers and building 7. If the official wisdom on the collapses is wrong, as I believe it is, then policy based on such erroneous engineering analysis is not likely to be correct either. The government’s collapse theory is highly vulnerable on its own terms. Only professional demolition appears to account for the full range of facts associated with the collapse of the three buildings.”

 

Video shows war between developers and poor in PRC
A recent video sent to The Whitewashington Post shows one of the horrors of China’s capitalist miracle: the trampling over anyone who stands in the way of power plant development. It shows how the Hebei Guohua Power Company dealt with Shengyou villagers protesting against the construction of a power plant: they sent in the thugs. One of the heavies, Zhu Xiaorui, a bouncer from Beijing who was payed 100 Yuan for his work was captured by the villagers, and they are refusing to give him up.

 

Father’s day special
In the aftermath of Father’s Day, we were intrigued to find out in this report that the Aka ‘pygmies’ make the best fathers, dedicating the most time of all the globe’s peoples to active fathering. The Aka are a hunter-gatherer people who live in the border forests of Congo Brazzaville and the Central African Republic. So much for all the much-touted progress of the West.

 

I loathe Lucy revisited
Stuff previously went out on a limb to point out that Ms Rice resembled one Lucy form Peanuts. This week, one of the team noticed a rather more than passing resemblance to Mr Burns. You be the judge.

 

Satanic W
Whilst researching the evidence for the Condi-Burns resemblance, we came across this fantastic site: www.bushisantichrist.com. Enjoy.

 

Greenwald reloads for Wal-Mart
After laying into Fox with Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism and the Bush/Blair WMD-related cassus belli in Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War, Robert Greenwald is now gunning for the big boys: Wal-Mart. Read all about it at alternet.

 

Calling all adbusters
This week’s adbust comes at us from the wonderful Art not oil:

That’s right! You too can get one of our t-shirts. Simply brush up your Photoshop skills and send your corporate subversion images to adbusting@cannedrevolution.com, such as the one above to stand a chance of being selected the weekly winner of our brand new little red adbuster of the week competition. The winner will be chosen by the revolutionary collective here on our own Fantasy Island. Alternatively, for those who don’t fancy your chances of winning but are still budding anti-establishment artists and hanker for one of our shirts, you still have hope. Simply send us five of your designs in five consecutive weeks and, so long as the images, are yours (and we have ways of checking!), a t-shirt will be winging its way to you.
Adbusting — the choice of a new generation. For more on adbusting, click here.

 

Got Chav?
A Leed’s Metropolitan University student has written her Media Studies degree thesis on the subject of Chavs. As such she is perhaps the world’s first accredited chavologist.

 

Columbia
As we reported a couple of months back, BP has been a wholesale contributor in the terror wrought by the Colombian government as it pursues a controversial pipeline. Now the Independent reports that a collective of farmers are suing the oil giant for $15m. We wish them the best of luck. For our earlier article on the real truth behind the war in Colombia click here.

 

The Little Red Email Osama bin Laden Sweepstakes Shirt Contest!
Don’t forget: if you fancy a free Canned Revolution t-shirt, you can win one by simply guessing the date of Osama’s media debut as a US prisoner. Send your expected date of bin Laden’s first television appearance as an American prisoner to osamasweepstakes@cannedrevolution.com.