Sunday, August 19, 2012

Iron Rice Bowl and The Ryan Budget




The is an ancient expression from China regarding an “Iron Rice Bowl” and it has to do with Bureaucracy and being fed for the rest of your life once you pass the civil service test and serve the Emperor, god on earth.

The communist mechanism of Mao used the phrase also and it indicated the ideal state in which all in service to the state in a communist sense would be fed forever.  The state might not be perfect but the iron rice must, should go on forever.

Young Paul Ryan who is a perfect Catholic, but without any traditional “social teaching” values from all accounts, and who has served all his adult life in service to the state and not in private industry has come up with an proposed financial outline to remake the United States Federal Budget and Bureaucracy on a scale not seen since Lenin, Stalin and Mao and not since the Russian and Chinese Communist revolutions.

It is amazing how the elitist front office ideas of private industry have invaded government thinking and are being proposed in a lopsided theoretical manner by green country club gated community minded types like Paul Ryan.  Doesn’t he know how painful to 40 to 60 percent of the population his redistribution of wealth and rice from the iron rice bowl will be in reality to 40 to 60 percent of the population who would get a voucher and like with some stick thrown for a dog, get the master's command to “go and fetch suitable healthcare with that voucher" (a worthless in reality piece of paper).  Yeah right.  Wishful fantasy I think and not very “brilliant” managerial social engineering.

Same thing with food stamps. Like taking food out of the mouths of the young, the poor, the disabled and the elderly and in return getting a pamphlet from the government on the virtues of self-reliance and telling the story of President Romney’s ancestor’s trekking through the wilderness to the paradise of Utah and by the grace of God and all that.  And why aren’t you self-reliant and why should I feed you with taxes on my billionaires when my ancestors set a standard of performance “you” little “people” seem to fail to understand or grasp.

A lot of hungry people start revolutions and pull monarchs out of their Versailles beltway bubbles or Winter Palaces when the Iron Rice Bowl of the state fails to deliver on its social contract with the governed.

This recently resurrected elitist eighteenth and nineteenth century view of the world as opposed to a world and its modern interconnected global needs just doesn't cut muster or the mustard with The Ryan Budget thingy and the “modern” GOP.

These out of touch at the top elites in business, politics and religion are about to find out by the simple rules of physics, of the shift of gravity that happens when the 99% start jumping up and down and cause earthquakes.  Palaces and penthouses will collapse down to street level with the people already on the ground, practiced in the politics of everyday rice bowl reality.

History will repeat itself unless the greedy pull back and learn to live with mere billions and not trillions of private wealth.

“Scepter and Crown must tumble down and in the dust be equal made with the poor crooked Sithe and Spade.”

Forget your Bullshit Budget Paul Ryan!  Where are the jobs?




*   *   *

What is Rice Christianity?


Ran into this term the other day. Rice Christianity? Went to Wikipedia.



Rice Christianity:

Becoming or being a Christian for its advantages of easy access to food, shelter, education, health care benefits, business networking or any other financial gain. 

*   *   *




St. Mary’s School in Platteville Wisconsin – a Valuable Lesson in Humility?

Fr. John del Priore
Fr. Faustino Ruiz
                                                 


You can sometimes judge a story by the way the local press deals with a story as in the case of St. Mary’s School in Platteville Wisconsin which I believe is now closed.  I say the local press has not gone much beyond the handed out press releases or public letters of Bishop Morlino of Madison Wisconsin, Paul Ryan’s local bishop, because there are no good visuals or images of St. Mary’s available on the Internet.

The skinny and or gossip is that Bishop Morlino imported some nice looking white boy priests from Spain, some sort of Jesuits to man the factory floor, mass factories in his diocese.  Looking at a diocese site there they actually have pictures of the clergy there and the parish listing and a limited work history.  Kind of like an Internet dating or religious meat rack.  I guess you want to see what color the priest is in the local Catholic church before you set foot in.  Want you to feel all comfortable in your warm comfort zones and prejudices. 

Well the skinny on the skinny of that is that I only count one or two dark faces and the rest of the priests of Madison County Diocese are white even if they have Hispanic and or Spanish sounding names.  It’s the visual that Madison Avenue has us trained on these past decades.

I have read about South Asian Priests and African Priests being imported to places like the Allentown diocese. I have to wonder if the mail order catalogues the bishops get their priests overseas from have their pictures posted or maybe the importation fees listed next to the pictures is a more important consideration, the money that is and not the look, on that in every diocese devoid of native son priests.

That is why celibacy is not an issue with the locals RC bishops. Priests are an interchangeable part even if you can’t decipher their fractured English or strange outlooks on life based on their native cultures. Celibacy is not an issue.  If Americans don’t want to be priests, plenty of starving third world types to fill in the personnel gaps.

With St. Mary’s they say that the imported priests would have none of the altar girls in the sanctuary thing. The cultural preferences or prejudices of the Spanish culture get put under labels or categories like Conservative Catholics? Etc.

The people in the pews rebelled and voted with their pocket books, even signed a petition to the bishop and the Bishop’s response was a typical these days in America – Fuck You.

The dissenters at St. Mary’s get threatened with excommunication or something close to it – “interdict” – and Paul Ryan gets a free pass on his temporary masturbation love, flirtation with Ayn Rand atheism.

No money. They close the school. The respect the landlord, the bishop, the guy with the deed gets goes a lot to do with the bishop’s generosity in extending financial help to keep a school open. 

No respect, no kissing of Morlino’s stinky toes and the local Catholics in Platteville Wisconsin are taught a valuable lesson about Christ – the golden rule – they that have the gold make the rules. 


*   *   *


St. Mary's Catholic School Platteville Wisconsin


.

What Religion is the Koch Brothers?



Is it any of my business? Well they sort of with their billions are poking their noses into my private world one way or another.  Their paid for political whores like Scot Walker or Paul Ryan do their bidding in their new property or toy called Wisconsin.

I believe the skinny on them is that they are lazy greedy business men who can bribe with political contributions to do dirty industry at a profit and leave the land behind scarred and unusable for dozens of generations.  Screw the planet!

I want to know what god besides money they worship. What went wrong with their potty training in whatever Sunday school that they were probably chained to as children.

Their father was a founder of the John Birch Society which is some far right white nativist group as if Europeans were the first natives in America.

The thing is this. I am curious and nowhere anywhere is a reference to their presumed basic belief systems for me to get an angle of understanding into my neighbors’ point of view and try to talk to them across an imagined old fashioned town square. Are they atheists?

I see their name on the PBS TV show NOVA which turned me off to watching their science sponsored show.  They do the opera thing in NY where I presume they have penthouses far from the reality of the average American on the average American Street.

I have to wonder who John Birch is. Is he another Joseph Smith type con artist/prophet kind of thing.

I see that one of the infamous Koch Brothers paid $2.3 million in 2011 for the only known early photo or “daguerreotype” of the hired for money gun killer Billy the Kid.  

A lot of money to me. Chump change to him. Still a lot of cash for a piece of what looks like a piece of junk that most people throw out everyday into the trash. Whatever

Still don’t know what religion the Kochs are unless Greed these days in the new global economy is a god and or religion – the only real god and or religion?




*  *  *