How about when I was 14 years old?!

Yes, why not!

At around the age of 14 I came across a book detailing the many mysteries of the assassination of JFK. I did not immediately realise the significance of the book both in terms of the importance of the event, having not even been born when he was murdered, but also in terms of the effect that the information would have on my life.

One thing was certain, Lee Harvey Oswald, whether involved or not, patsy or not, communist or not, was certainly not solely responsible for the murder of JFK.

So what difference did that make? Well, to cut a long story short, I spent a while thinking about it and came to one horrible conclusion...

If the US government, the CIA, the FBI, the NSA and a host of other grossly over-funded organisations could not see the obvious conclusion that anybody with a handful of the information and a half ounce of common sense could see, then, I decided, one of two things must be true.

1. The various agencies are hopeless at what they do or;

2. The various agencies had a suspicion that the evidence against Oswald was not entirely convincing but that the nation needed a "conviction" and they got one...Case closed.

But it was never really a case that ever closed, was it? To this day we are still finding new pieces of video, new documents and new witnesses. Doubtless, some of it can be rejected out of hand as good old-fashioned conspiracy theory, but the sheer amount of this new evidence suggests that at least some small part of it must be conspiracy FACT.

Why were the Secret Service agents pulled off of the motorcade as the car left the airport? Why was there a change of route at the last minute? How did the security checks carried out for weeks prior to JFK going to Dallas of the surrounding area and all companies within it manage to miss out the fact that a guy called Lee Harvey Oswald who had renounced his US citizenship, defected to Russia, given all and any military intelligence that he may have to the "enemy" in the Cold War (a war that lasted for decades without any real plan to "win" or a visible enemy - sound familiar?), married a Russian, brought her back to America, was given a full US passport on his entry to the country and then settled back down to daily life handing out anti-Castro paraphernalia in the streets whilst getting into fights with Cubans, was working in the book depository??!

Odd...To say the least.

But I am not here to convince you that JFK was killed by Jack Ruby, Lindon Johnson, the CIA, the Cubans, the Mafia or even the Bush family for that matter (which, incidentally, there is a lot of information that actually points to a possible involvement there too! It just goes to show that you can make a story out of anything if you spend long enough looking for the links that you need!)

So what am I here for?

I am here to tell you the truth as I see it. I have been doing it for over a year now and, quite frankly, I have been stunned by your reaction.

Starting out as a mailing list, the Revolution was always supposed to be more of a Revelation. The idea that events like JFK could take place over 4 decades ago and yet, due to the internet, people were still dissecting the "facts" of the case led me to believe that something was missing...

An up to date, daily record of the lies and spin that governments and private businesses would have us believe is the truth when clearly, and with a very small amount of digging, the opposite was patently true. A full record of the events of the time that gave no "wriggle room" when they suddenly decided to tell us that black was white after all. Start The Revolution was launched three months later on the 1st October 2005 and the rest is history...

So what of the future?

Well, that is what I am here to tell you all...There may not be a future for STR. I have spent the past year spending all of my savings developing the site, writing the articles, editing those written by others (for the past 8 weeks - prior to that EVERYTHING was written by me), designing the site, finding the information, researching the stories, downloading/watching/uploading the videos, but, most importantly, and with the exception of the 3 months that I was stuck with my wife in the UK after she fell ill during her pregnancy with what would have been our second baby boy, only to lose him at 6 months, I have spent the best part of 14-16 hours every single day, working on this site.

We went from around 6,000,000 in the Alexa rankings in May 2006 to around 5,000,000 by June of 2006. Wow...1,000,000 places in a month, thought I, the dream is alive...We can really do this...

"Let's design t-shirts...People have actually e-mailed us asking if there were any STR t-shirts so selling a few should be no problem."

I have given more away as gifts than have been sold to everybody else put together and I have given away the sum total of FIVE!

T-shirts that do not get bought do not pay the bills!

The end of July found us running at around 2,000,000-ish and getting about 5,000 hits per day. The end of August 1,000,000 and getting about 10,000 hits per day...

"Ok, time to put some adverts on the site. I really had run out of money by then, but that was not going to stop me...Yes, adverts, they should help..."

But ads that are not clicked on generate around $3.00 per day on a good day and that simply does not pay the bills!

"Not to worry...Keep going..."

September arrived bringing with it a position of about 150,000 and an increase to around 50,000 hits per day! WOWOWOW!

"Time for a rethink on the advertising...Still haven't actually made it to the $100 minimum to receive a payment yet..."

The most wonderful moment of excitement happened when Matt Engelman. author of the brilliant "Genuine Freedom" wrote to me to ask about advertising on the site...A deal was struck and, obviously with the number of readers we were getting, sales for him were a foregone conclusion...

Hhmmm...That didn't work out, did it?!

One month later and I think it is safe to say that both myself, a friend and a member of our forum bought the book and the ad was worthless to all concerned. Matt had basically wasted his advertising money and we were too poor to even offer it back to him as we would have liked to.

"It must be a problem with the ad...A full redesign and an offer to place it for free for a month to see what would happen. This must make a difference...A flash ad with moving parts...A big question mark that required an answer...Perfect!"

"We may not be able to give him his advertising money back but we can sure as hell help him to sell some books...Right?!"

Not so, referrals to Matt's site have been about as abysmal as they were with the old static ad.

Oh well...On to the next, thought I, not considering for a moment the prospect that the credit card debt had now reached levels that meant that we could no longer use one card to pay the minimum payment on the other each month as we had been.

Having received an e-mail from a blogger called Winter Patriot, and the promise of help, the much needed motivation came flooding back. Yes...Help at last.

And help he did...Many great articles and four wonderful new writers signed up to the cause later, and, to cap it all, the site really was due a complete overhaul!

The idea, you see, was to get a better site with more features that was easier for me to run, thus leaving me more time to write and more time to spend with my family, who have gradually become a one-parent family, whilst not losing any of the pace of the information turnaround on the site or the quality of the content.

So, 18 hour days ensued, 12 hours on the redesign and 6 hours on the present site. Winter Patriot, TAS, Cyspace, William Blum, Bob Koehler, Gandhi (the blogger and NOT the Mahatma!), Daithi MacLochlainn and DJBarney all chipped in dutifully and thus the site stayed alive...

So why am I telling you all of this?!

OK - At the beginning of October we put up a donations section on the site. This was accompanied by an explanation that any donations received would be treated as a stakeholder investment and would, were the site to continue to grow and turn a profit one day, receive a share of any such profit.

It also included an explanation of how desperately we wanted to keep the site alive but that we needed the money to do it...

And, for about a week, the donations flooded in...£40, £50, even a £100 donation. One person in particular even donated twice, which, considering he had already indirectly donated to the site in another way, made it his third donation!

£280 later and the whole thing ground to a halt.

In the meantime I was still working 18 hour days, I was still "living around" a one parent family and I was gradually getting more and more tired.

During October the site has hit the dizzy heights of 10,527th in the world and currently has an overall ranking of some 63,907 and climbing fast and yet the ads seem to bring in even less money, the donations are still not coming and I am getting ever more tired.

And then last night it hit me...It literally came like a bolt from the blue and the solution was obvious...

I wrestled with it all night hardly getting a wink of sleep even though I truly needed it after the past few weeks of endless new page designs. I tried, for once, to deny the truth as I saw it but that just felt like I was cheating the very point of the site itself. I tried to think of ways to fund the site...Sell the car...that would keep us going for another 3 months...But it won't pay back our very dear friends who lent us the money to keep us going for the past 3 months.

I went to the bathroom and threw up, I had a drink of water and a cigarette and resolved to get some sleep and then, when I awoke, the whole thing would feel completely different and I would have a new plan that would save the day...

For a while at least.

And so I awoke...Stomach still churning and head still groggy and a single word still ringing in my ears as if I had not closed my eyes for a second...

STOP!

And that is what I feel I must do.

I have worked hard...VERY hard. The new site is almost ready and the old site is getting more popular by the minute but there is a serious problem...

Why am I working so very hard to get the "word" out when I can find out what I need to know in under 2 hours every day, spend the rest of the day at work earning a living and then come home to my beautiful wife and child (soon to be children if the next 4 months go as planned)?

And the answer?

Because I had some crazy, foolish notion that my reason for living was to help others to know what I knew, to break free, to live a real life and not the insulated, plastic rubbish that we have come to accept as existence.

But there is a problem in the equation...

All of my money into the site + all of my time into the site = The loss of any real quality contact with my family + exhaustion, poverty and feelings of fear, loss and desperation.

Why do all of the people who are prepared to try and tell the truth as they see it, whether they are always right or not, have to live in poverty whilst the governments who lie, cheat, kill and make war IN YOUR NAME get handsomely paid whilst feeding a mainstream media industry that reaps the real profits off the back of those actions?

Some have found ways around this, usually through some form of public notoriety and good luck to them. Some have managed to find a good balance between the truth and the real life that they must also lead. Me, well, I just cannot seem to put it down for long enough.

the truth is that I have done everything that I can. I now ask for your ideas...

If you can think of any way or any person that can help me to continue the work that I have begun then please let me know as soon as possible. Come November the 5th 2006 the site will either explode and disappear or it will rise like a Phoenix from the flames...

There can be and there will be no half measures. I cannot carry on the way that I have been as the stress is too much to bear. I need to raise enough money to see the site through for the next year and cover my bills (around £15,000 per year in total, which is actually pretty cheap when you think about it!)

So think about it...Do you know anybody that has some money to invest in a very fast growing internet business? Do you know anybody who has a server that could host the site and all of its video and traffic free of charge thus reducing the amounts required to cover the costs? Do you know somebody who may want to buy half of the site but not take ANY editorial control whatsoever?

My Revolution began when I was 14. For some of you it may have started 10 years ago, 5 years ago, 1 year ago, today when you found this site, but mine "began" with the murder of JFK. That was a long twenty years ago and the amount of knowledge and information that I have crammed into my poor little brain since then has left me bewildered and breathless, confused and ashamed, enlightened and confident in equal measures and for equal amounts of time.

I have been accused of being a socialist, a right-winger, a left-winger, a Democrat, a Republican, a Communist, a lunatic, a visionary, a political stooge, grumpy, a shotgun-mouthed liberal with an itchy trigger finger. Oddly, not one single description, with the possible exception of grumpy at times, is even close to the truth.

I have found some amazing new friends along the way. Some interesting people. I am sure that I have made some enemies too. But, most of all, I kept my word...

I never did anything other than speak the truth as I saw it, I never did anything other than my best and I never sold out...

And that is why, unless we can find another way around the bill mountain that looms large, my Revolution must continue down a very different path to this one and so must yours.

If the last year has taught me nothing else, it has taught me this...

The world is full of wonderful people living wonderful lives and trying their very best not to upset anybody else...

But those people are not the ones with any power and those people are doing nothing to join in the fight to do the one thing that, deep down at least, we all know we should...

Start The Revolution :: Because Life Should Be Better