Well, there’s good news and bad news from Canada. First, the good news is that Canada is generating news of any sort. Okay, Canada, we know you’re a shy country not given to flashy self-promotion like some North American nations (ahem!), but the rest of the world was thinking about checking your pulse. Everyone knows you’re America Lite, which isn’t such a bad thing, really.

Canada gets to unload all their pesky talented people that tend to draw a lot of attention to themselves on the USA, where that sort of thing isn’t frowned upon. Our second-tier entertainer and B-list celebrity rosters are teeming with Canadians, who we’re fairly certain would have enthralled and enlightened us with their unique artistic visions if Canadians were permitted to have such things.

The bad news from Canada? The Canadian telecommunications giant (now there’s a phrase you don’t hear everyday), RIM, the makers of the very expensive and popular (there’s one that you do) Blackberry phones, just surrendered to the censors in Saudi Arabia. How very Corporate American of them!

It seems that the Saudi Thought Police had already gotten the giant internet servers to aid and abet their interception of personal computer messages, but the advent of smart phones and their e-mailing capabilities made it harder for the minions of the royal family to eavesdrop on their subjects.

Now, Blackberries aren’t the only smart phone on the market, and the Saudi market is a lucrative one, so the head honchos at Blackberry surrendered the necessary codes to Saudi authorities rather than lose market share.

Blackberry’s American competitors have been adept at pretending to resist censorship while cutting back room deals with tyrants and kings, so the RIM Corporation cut right to the chase and just gave it up without any tedious hand-wringing or comment, Canada style, if utter lack of style can indeed be called a style.

So that’s it for news from Canada until this nation that is defined by Winter loses every event at the next Winter Olympics, even at the oddball quasi-sports like curling and ice hockey that they invented. Other than the cold fronts that blow down from there every December, you’re more likely to hear Botswana mentioned in the news than Canada before then.

A funny thing happened on the way to the future. If anyone remembers any of a hundred science fiction books and movies, there was going to be some sort of global communication network that was beamed into every home, office and public space all over the world. It was to be be tightly controlled by some all powerful world government, or a corporation that got so huge that it runs the world.

This global network would be the only one in existence, and would be tightly censored, broadcasting only officially approved content. In this way every human would have his or her life closely monitored and controlled, all of humanity finally under the Big Thumb of Big Brother.

You know the story, you’ve seen and heard it so many time you could probably wake up out of a deep sleep and write a pretty decent one yourself. Only thing is, the reality of a world wide communications web is here now, but it features stuff like fat guys playing “Stairway to Heaven” with armpit fart noises on YouTube. So much for Big Brother and his army of censors.

So the first part of our science fiction story came true alright, but the part with some James-Bond-villain-in-a-Nehru-Jacket kind of guy controlling the thought police and calling the shots while small underground cells of rebels figure out ways around the tight security of the overlords to send out messages of hope and freedom to the oppressed masses, well… that part never happened. Didn’t have to, thankfully.

Somehow, the World Wide Web belongs to no one, and literally anyone can post content or retrieve whatever data they feel like. For free, no less, and that includes as many repeat viewings of fat guys playing  their armpits to the tune of “Stairway To Heaven” as one’s heart desires. All this must be killing the wannabe Big Brothers of this world, men who possess obscenely vast fortunes and wield enormous power.

How this small but influential class of beings missed the boat of owning and controlling the internet is astounding. These people had TV, radio, publishing and the mainstream press locked up for decades, and enjoyed unfettered access to every important politician in the world, and outright control of a great many of them. Not much that was broadcast, reported, filmed, recorded or written was released outside of the strict supervision of one titanic corporation or another.

Television was a wasteland of the same old same old. Until stiff competition from Cable TV came along, an honest show on network television was as rare as an honest game of 3 Card Monte. Movies were bland imitations of one another and popular books were rehashed variations on several well-worn themes. This corporate uniformity, safety and predictability of our art was becoming  as bland as a mini-van, and about as threatening as a kitten.

Even the music industry had been taken over by indifferent corporate suits who didn’t care whether they sold washing machines or records. The result was a bunch of bland, sound-alike corporate rock bands or homogenized silky-smooth R&B acts, triggering another round of music-saving rebellion in the form of Rap, Hardcore, House, Hip Hop and Indie music, which in turn were snapped up one by one, assimilated, homogenized and corporatized into copy cat tameness by Big Music.

Enter the Internet. Free access. No censors. Instantaneous worldwide dissemination, far outstripping the reach of any television network or radio station. People started writing letters again, called e-mail. Every business not wishing to perish started doing e-commerce. Google provided the road map to negotiate the millions of websites and social networking pages.

Corporations and governments put up elaborate websites, and so did families, showing snapshots of junior, videos of their barbecues and graduation announcements. Something called chat rooms sprung up for the lonely, the  voyeuristic, or both. A Golden Age of Pornography was born, with an astounding variety of flavors available, putting Baskin-Robbins to shame (and often to good use).

Writers wrote what they felt like, musicians recorded what they wanted to and the results were available to anyone anywhere. Blogs were born, on-line newspapers sprang up overnight. YouTube, FaceBook, MySpace and all sorts of other social websites have hundreds of millions of accounts, with few rules regarding the content that people place on their pages.

Musicians are saying screw the record companies and marketing their own music online, as are authors, painters, photographers and other artists. People are texting and tweeting and Skype-phoning each other on the opposite side of the world all the time and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.

The internet is doing nothing less than completely transforming human society, on a par with The Bronze Age, The Navigation Age and The Industrial Revolution. We don’t notice it since we’re right in the middle of it,  any more than a foundry worker in Manchester in 1837 figured he was on the cutting edge of history. The forest for the trees and all that…

But that is exactly where we are, at the Dawn of A New Age, the very beginnings of the Internet in its exciting formative stages. Perhaps one day this era will be called The Age When No One Owned The Web And Fat Guys Armpit-Farted on Video. A little wordy for naming an Age, perhaps, but an improvement over the sterile sounding Information Age. That doesn’t begin to describe the far reaching and humanity-changing events of today, with perhaps one of the biggest changes being the lack of private ownership.

To help celebrate Expo 2010 Shanghai, that 6-month long celebration of  Capitalism, Chinese style, bobcrespo.com has compiled a new list of Chinese Proverbs. Througout history China has provided the world a rich legacy of wise sayings, and very little else. No more. They now provide the world with everything but proverbs, which are in short supply. These days their wisdom is pretty jumbled, what with their leadership pretending they are still a Communist nation when they in fact abandoned Marxism years ago in favor of state-run capitalism, a new hybrid form of government that retains the iron fist of Communist oppression and combines it with the worst tendencies of Capitalism, sort of a huge, hyper-polluting Kleptocracy where the rules only apply to domestic dissidents, journalists and foreign governments. It was difficult to locate any new Chinese Proverbs since the People’s Government owns the rights to them now, but diligent research and a couple of expatriate Chinese hackers have allowed these new nuggets of Chinese sagacity to surface.

Who can deny, a brown sky is more attractive than a blue one?

The voice of a single eagle is mightier than a thousand parrots, and so that eagle must be slain.

Nature has provided coal and fire to turn the wheels of progress.

It is written: He who hungers, dies.

Waste no money building sturdy schools.

The wise man knows that life and human rights are fleeting.

Sell a man a flawless product, and meet him but once. Sell him one that breaks down often, have a customer for life.

Practice equality towards all, even dissident dogs and Tibetan swine.

So it is written, the patents and copyrights of the West are so many paper kites in the East.

None can deny, an e-mail worth sending is an e-mail worth official inspection.

A journey of a thousand miles begins with but a single application for official  travel documents.

It is etched in jade, that Taiwan belongs to the People’s Republic.

The river of life flows through the hydroelectric dams of progress, and those living downstream must drink elsewhere.

The sagacious worker bends to his task, and to authority.

He who would report the news must adhere to truth.

Truth is what the People’s Government says it is.

In a shocking development, a huge international corporation grew a conscience. The search engine Internet giant Google, who had earlier bowed to the Chinese government’s demand that they censor their content in China, reversed themselves and refused to alter their site. They shut down their Chinese operation and directed users to their Hong Kong site, which, though still in China, is not censored. This is a huge deal and an international confrontation between a brand new Superpower feeling its oats and a communications giant that dominates the world wide web, these days the most essential and influential communication and marketing tool in the world.

The whole idea of the Internet is the free and uncensored flow of information for the benefit of all, a place where anyone can communicate and do business across the entire globe in an instant. Somehow, miracle of miracles, nobody owns the damned thing, by its nature no one can own it. Since no one owns the world wide web, no government can nationalize it. There’s nothing to take possession of with armed troops. It is the most insidious of enemies; silent, invisible and completely democratic, not caring one way or another who reads or writes any of the information it contains. Anything goes on the internet, and it’s just getting started.

The prospect of where it will go from here must scare the shit out of tyrants. Think of how rapidly it has changed and progressed from one year to the next, and how a typical web site of 5 years ago is antiquated and low tech by today’s standards. Without realizing it, computer users all over the world have constantly learned new and better computer skills to keep up with the flood of new technology. As astounding as it has become, even more awe-inspiring is its potential.

Now there’s things like Twitter, the slacker’s silly pastime in America, but something that proved to be a very effective communication tool in times of global crisis. During last year’s riots in Iran, for example, their government tried to black out any news broadcasts of any sort. Turns out they didn’t figure on Twitter and, in 140-character bytes, the cat was out of the bag on some fairly nasty brutality by Iran’s Republican Guard. The same ever-changing technology that keeps us all on our toes trumps the tin pot dictators’ efforts to suppress this massive and very indifferent flow of data.

The Internet doesn’t give a crap about cultural differences or the whims of leaders, it’s just there, and people will find a way to access it. As lethal as armies, information and education can topple oppressors. When you’re in the business of telling a country the sky is supposed to be yellow, the last thing you want is more information about the outside world handy. The tighter they control it, the quicker people upgrade their skills to beat the censors.

Granted, some totalitarian governments can and do censor the web every chance they get, mostly having to do with sex and politics, but they require the cooperation of large corporations to do that. As anyone who has even heard of a corporation knows, lots of money turns their principles into loose guidelines at best. Ironically enough, most of the world’s computers are manufactured in China. In exchange for cheap labor and overhead, computer manufacturers agreed to install a censorship gizmo in computers sold to Chinese citizens so they couldn’t hook up with the world they are supplying with computers.

One after the other, they caved. Last year alone more than 40 million personal computers were sold in China. In order to gain access to 1.3 billion potential customers, corporations knowingly participated in beginning the process of bringing the Internet under control. Control means ownership. Even the dominant e-mail carrier and search engine Yahoo caved in, along with Google, betraying the wide-open medium that made them wealthy beyond their wildest dreams. They were biting the hand that fed them billions.

Then Google changed the game by growing a conscience and a pair of balls. They told the Chinese government to stick their censorship where the sun don’t shine. Few governments can be as unreasonable as the Chinese government and right now they are at the height of their power, the second most influential country on Earth. Never in her 5,000 year history has China wielded even a fraction of the global power and influence she enjoys today. Modern China is a manufacturing and financial powerhouse, much like Japan of the 1980s.

Lucky for the future of the Internet, the people who run Google grew up in America, the most influential nation on Earth and a place where people pick up radical notions like Liberty, Equality, Freedom of The Press, Free Speech and so forth. Although it is hard to portray a mega-rich corporate giant as some sort of David standing up to Goliath, it’s at least an Us vs. Them deal. Google is doing the right thing and should be applauded and supported in this confrontation. Supported by their fellow communications giants and computer manufacturers too. They’re rich and successful with or without China, and got to be so in an atmosphere of free and open exchange of ideas.

Even if the Chinese government doesn’t blink and banishes Google from their shores, Google wins. It’s still Google, the preferred search engine all over the world. China is all about commerce these days, and without Google they are handicapping themselves. World opinion seldom sways the new Commu-Capitalists in China, but loss of market share gets their attention every time. World opinion will make Google even stronger in what has become an international debate over Internet censorship. The Google executives hold the high ground, the side of no private or national ownership for the web.

They have to remember that they didn’t get to be Google in an environment of censorship, ownership and control. LIke brilliant innovators in every age, they came up with the right product at the right time, made a huge fortune and became a household name, synonymous with accessing accurate information. Its users trust Google to direct them anywhere on the web they choose to go and billions of people use their services many times a day, every day. The advertising revenue alone handled and distributed by Google is in the hundreds of billions a year, with their take over $10 billion, about $1.30 for every person on the planet.

These people have a huge stake in keeping the internet just as accessible and freewheeling as it has always been, the glorious make-it-up-as-you-go-along dynamo that has literally transformed human life. It is that powerful, that universal, and such major a step in history that the beginnings of the Internet will overshadow everything else that happens in this era, as dramatic as they may seem to us. The story of the Internet is bigger, more important, and permanent.

We might not recognize the internet 100 years from now, but we are living the beginnings of the next Age of Man, like the first guys with Bronze swords back in the day, or deck hands on the Santa Maria. The temptation to seize control of this behemoth like the Conquistadors took the New World will always be a powerful temptation for powerful men. Someone somewhere had to stand up to them and  say “no more!” To our surprise and delight, it is Google. In the battle for ownership vs. no ownership of the Internet, it’s Google – 1, China – 0.

If they lose, we lose, because that will be a blow to freedom of information and the beginning of the end of this People’s Forum, the Internet as we know it. The Chinese government won’t be the last to try to own and control the web, and it is in everyone’s interest whose life is even remotely touched by the Internet (in other words: everybody everywhere) to thank them to keep their grubby hands to themselves. It is refreshing to see a corporation take a stand on something besides their bottom line, to take the initiative in a battle over (!) ethics. Most of us thought that went out of style in corporate circles back in the ’60s. Kudos.

If you want to see how all this turns out, just Google it. If you can’t, we lost.

For the first time in 13 years, the Chinese Communist Party has issued a new ethics code. Apparently the universally proclaimed (by communists, anyway) superior virtue of just being a communist needs periodic reinforcement. The founder of Chinese Communism, The Great Helmsman himself, Mao Zedong, was always revising his list of dos and don’ts for his fellow Chinese, most notoriously by starting the Culturual Revolution 23 years after his Regular Revolution secured him undisputed power. Mao was seriously addicted to revolution, murder and rule making, so in 1966 he started the Cultural Revolution that was a perfect combination of his three passions and resulted in millions and millions of deaths of people who weren’t even his enemies. And yet somehow this monstrous butcher gets to be remembered as some kind of cuddly old Grandfather of His Country.

The current regime is a bunch of button-down capitalists who are communists in name only, a curious combination of good old fashioned police state dictators and robber barons, the first generation of Chinese leaders who did not participate in the revolution of 1927 to 1949. Now that those Communist puritan founding fathers and grandfathers are safely dead and the government no longer makes war on their own citizens, communism is pretty much what these commu-capitalist tyrants says it is. There are no more expensive and futile efforts to remake humanity into some sort of ideal beings working for the common good, and their disastrous 5 Year Plans are also history. And instead of implying what is wright and wrong and showing people the errors of their ways by killing them when they don’t take the hint, the new Chinese dictators, in line with their corporate leanings, issue detailed directives spelling it all out. Consider these puzzling new rules for Chinese Communists.

No Communist Party official shall endanger profits.

Copyrights and Patents are decadent Western concepts.

In order to ensure that our comrades’ mail is delevered perfectly, all personal communications, both electronic and traditional, will be thoroughly inspected for spelling errors by party officials.

Foreign journalists working in China will be granted the privelege of having their stories and reports improved by officials at the People’s Better Writing Bureau.

Members of Opposition Political Parties and Movements will be given the opportunity to pursue increased physical stamina and personal discipline at The People’s Sleep-Away Camps For Grownups.

Effective immediately, all technical support representatives dealing with America customers will henceforth use the only the names Betsy or Butch. This will simplify the process and gain the trust of the American Running Dogs of Socialism.

All good Communists will henceforth read the Little Green Book, a collection of the wisdom of Warren Buffett on international markets, value investing, aggressive accumulation and how to create a state-sanctioned monopoly.

In order to eliminate corruption in the Worker’s Paradise, any rewards paid to Party Officials by corporations for favorable treatment will be called “incentive bonuses” and “stock options.”

All references to the “incident” in Tiananmen Square in 1989 will be henceforth referred to as “The Tiananmen Square People’s Disco Bash.”

History books will be amended to reflect the desire of the Tibetan people to be liberated from the ruthless tyranny of the Dalai Lama and his barefoot monks.

An area of The People’s Republic the size of Pennsylvania called the “Former Lead Battery Capital of The World” has been closed for repairs for the remainder of the millennium. The New Lead Battery Capital of The World is being constructed by The People’s Buddhist Monk Volunteers Brigade in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet.

In an effort to allay the fears of citizens in the so-called “earth-quake alley” of northern China, all new construction of dams and nuclear power plants shall be built on top of a 12-foot foundation of shock-resistant and water-absorbent Sham Wow Super Absorbent Wipes to soak up any floodwaters and nuclear waste material in the event of another earthquake, which will be wrung out afterwards by The People’s Buddhist Monk Volunteers Brigade.

With China now having the largest number of people in the world who speak English, the People’s Republic has commissioned a Linguistics Conference to do something about the letters R and L. Until such time as a satisfactory resolution is reached, no Chinese shall use the words “inscrutable,” “lollipop” or “irregular” unless absorutery necellaly.