#This place looks much better on fire ;; RICO {aesthetic}

[theiirstoriies]

Rico tag dump !!

[fromtheringapron]

WWE New Year’s Revolution 2005

Date: January 9, 2005. 

Location: Coliseo de Puerto Rico in San Juan. Puerto Rico. 

Attendance: 15,764.

Commentary: Jim Ross and Jerry Lawler. Jonathan Coachmen joined commentary after match 4. 

Results: 

1. WWE World Tag Team Championship Match: Eugene and William Regal (champions) defeated Christian and Tyson Tomko.

2. WWE Women’s Championship Match: Trish Stratus defeated Lita (champion) to win the title. 

3. WWE Intercontinental Championship Match: Shelton Benjamin (champion) defeated Maven. 

4. Muhammed Hassan (with Daivari) defeated Jerry Lawler (with Jim Ross).

5. Kane defeated Snitsky.

6. Elimination Chamber Match for the Vacant WWE World Heavyweight Championship: Triple H defeated Batista, Randy Orton, Edge, Chris Jericho, and Chris Benoit to win the title. Shawn Michaels was the special guest referee. 

My Review

Man, New Year’s Revolution 2005 is awful. I happened to order the show on a whim back in ’05 and had the misfortune of watching it live. I thought it was so underwhelming and now, rewatching it 15 years later, I can say I absolutely stand by that opinion. This show took place at a time when WWE were really starting to pile on the amount of pay-per-views they were doing in a calendar year, sometimes having two within the same month. This often resulted in throwaway shows with paper-thin cards, and let New Year’s Revolution 2005 be exhibit A. It does have the unique distinction of being the first WWE pay-per-view out of Puerto Rico, but that only makes it all the more head-scratching why they didn’t bother to make the show a bit more special.

The undercard is a whole bunch of nothing. The first two matches are stricken with a bit of bad luck, with back-to-back injuries that completely kill the the show’s momentum out of the gate. The latter of these, Lita’s injury, ultimately results in her ongoing feud with Trish Stratus coming to an abrupt halt, which is disappointing as the Lita/Trish rivalry is genuinely one of the most iconic storylines in the history of WWE women’s wrestling. But if the injuries were purely accidental, there’s no defending what they do with the Intercontinental title match. I get Maven is just a throwaway challenger for Shelton Benjamin, but did they really need to resort to turning the match into one long, weak Maven promo? A card this threadbare can’t afford a lot of filler. I’d even go so far as to say it’s something they shouldn’t have even tried on Raw.

The Elimination Chamber match is far and away the best thing here, but it’s brought down by some frustrating booking. It’s easy to forget Triple H once had to vacate the World Heavyweight title for a short while, largely because it wound up being completely unnecessary. Triple H wins the belt back here, as anyone could predict, but why even go with the vacancy storyline to begin with if it’s never actually going to lead to any major change? Maybe they just wanted to build more intrigue for their first ever Puerto Rico pay-per-view, but surely there’s another way to do that without essentially running us in a circle. On the plus side, the actual match is pretty fun and does a great job of weaving in the slow-burn Batista/Triple H storyline. The subtle moments in building up that story shows how much effort all parties involved put in to make it something special. We even get setup for an HBK/Edge feud thrown into the mix, so at least the main event is successful in propelling some stories forward.

Overall, the first edition of New Year’s Revolution sees the WWE trying to get their calendar year off to a roaring start. Unfortunately, like many a resolution at the dawn of January, this show fizzles out quickly and barely results in anything of consequence. If you want to start the new year off the right way, I wouldn’t recommend watching this show. Maybe just catch up on some sleep or something.

My Random Notes

The show is aesthetically confusing. Palm trees and Puerto Rico flags are interspersed with . . . fire-breathing dragons and allusions to Armageddon?!? I feel like the latter stuff was planned from day one, but the former was tacked on at the last minute.

My mind drifted for much of Kane vs. Snitsky but, holy hell, Kane’s loosened boot is distracting as shit. I wanted to reach through the screen and tie it up myself.

Speaking of which, I’m happy to say this is the first show I’ve ever covered on here to feature the one and only Mr. Gene Snitsky. Snitsky is such a wonderful mid ‘00s oddity, exactly the type of character you could’ve only gotten from this time period in WWE history. This era had a lot of hosses who eventually fizzled out (Luther Reigns, Matt Morgan, Tyson Tomko, etc.), but Snitsky’s inherently bizarre affect ensured he’d at least be someone we’d remember.

Footage of WWE Divas lounging poolside at a resort air throughout the broadcast. Who in 2005 could’ve predicted that Diva Search fifth-placer Maria Kanellis would still have a steady role on WWE TV nearly 15 years later, especially one that sees her leverage her pregnancy for more airtime? Show of hands.

On Randy Orton’s 04-05 face run: Yikes. I seem to remember moments where it dipped into some seriously cringe-worthy territory. It felt like they were trying to make him the next Rock when he really had more of an Austin streak in him. He’d have better luck as a face later down the line, though ultimately none of his face runs have interested me much. Orton circa early to mid ‘00s looks like an insufferable Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue come to life who you wanna see get smacked and I wouldn’t want him any other way.

It’s so weird in hindsight how the iconic Trish/Lita rivalry reached its fever pitch amidst one of the most ludicrous storylines in WWE history - the Kane/Lita/Edge/Matt Hardy love square with a guest appearance by Snitsky. You always hear how much of a game-changer their rivalry turned out to be, with the pregnancy, miscarriage, slut-shaming, and wacky wedding hijinks that fueled a good part of it kinda mentioned as an aside.

The decision to forgo commentary for Hassan vs. Lawler is a weird one, for sure. It’s not really a match you’d want to hear without context. Was Todd Grisham or whomever not available for that block of time to step in and call it?

Needless to say, but JR and Lawler obviously look like the assholes in the Hassan feud. Like, major Trump-supporting assholes. It’s so hard to feel bad for them when they’re getting their asses whooped. There’s a lot to discuss about the handling of the character of Muhammed Hassan, but I’ll leave it right now at it’s really gross watching the face roster espouse post-9/11 racist ideology and having it embraced by both the company and the fans.

[ramrodd]

Are Marxists the unsung heroes of our time? Why were Marx's ideas so gravely betrayed?

COMMENTARY

Jason M. Becker: No, they are not unsung heros, they are totalitarians. Everything they say is about acquiring power, and nothing they do reflects what they say.

Tom Wilson: As the short version, Jason M. Becker is exactly correct. I went to Vietnam on this basis and I haven't changed my mind.

The longer version is more interesting and will defeat the Joe McCarthy Conservatives on 3 November 2020 by aiming at Mars.

First of all, it is useful to understand that the American Revolution, which spawned the French Revolution, is the inspiration for Marxism as an inverse expression of the Clausewitz Paradox as an essential economic engine, that is, Newt Gingrich’s and Steve Bannon’s formulation that Politics is a continuation of Warfare and the Military-Industrial Complex. This is where Marx and Newt Gingrich, as a pointy-headed college professor engaged in political insurgecy agree.

Politics as as a continuation of warfare is a formula for violent revolution. It is a core technology of Marxism. It is not a necessary core technology of Marxism: it can be swapped out for Democratic Socialism and get something like the Free Enterprise Marxism of Vietnam. It’s a little clunky, but it seems to be working pretty well. I have a friend, another Viet vet, who has moved to Hanoi and married a young single mother and is happy as a clam.

Marxism is sort of the Jewish version of the Protestant Reformation, when the economics of Western Civilization separated into two forms of capitalism: the verticle structures of the Vatican, where wealth is consolidated and trickle-down economics is the essential economic engine of feudalism and the mix of verticle and horizontal structures of modern, market-driven processes. The Protestant Reformation more or less dupilcated the destruction of the 2nd Temple economis of Judanism, a precrusor to the Vatical as a vertical structure established to consolidate the wealth of the kingdom for the arbitrary distribution of the powers-that-be, King Solomon around 1000 BCE and the Sadducces in 70 CE, when the emerging horizontal structures of the synagogue/kibbutz economics that persists to this day, which is characterized by an organic capital cascade of the grass roots capital organism.

Marx recognized that the verticle structures of the Oligarch capitalism emerging from the Industrial Revolution repeated the same mistake Constantine made when he disbanded the horizontal features of the Praetorian Guard and shifted entirely to the verticle stuctures of the several centers of the Roman Empire. His solution was, and remains, to return society to the economic status of the Children of Moses wandering in the Wilderness where Marxist Socialism would provide all the manna from heaven each according to his needs. while the State rumbled around the world, following a pillar of fire by night and a plume of smoke by day, implementing Politics as a continuation of Warfare.

I read Capital in the summer of 1962 in preparation for a career with the Green Berets. At that time, CO-IN (Counter-Insurgency) was the sexy career path for recent West Point graduates, what with Camelot and the swagger of the beret, itself. I didn’t read Marx to understand how it works, but, like the mongoose, to seek the moment to strike and to kill. The Communist Threat was a real thing and it was a potent agenda, especially the political insurgency element of the practical implementation Lenin and Trotsky worked out from the example of Jefferson and the French Revolution.

Jefferson spent most of his life as a self-absorbed and irresponsible dilettante who was excluded from the Constitutional Convention as redundant to the process and under a cloud for his dilatory behavior as C-in-C of the Virginia Militia. He was still widely admired in post-Enlightenment France and useful as a representative of the democrative values of the adolescent nation. While Ambassodor, he did what he could to foment what became the French Revolution in addition to the financial shock to the French bourgeoise and petty aristocrats when the America refused to honor the war bonds sold by Robert Morris. Jefferson was always far more of a lover than a fighter, and was always care that the roots of the Tree of Liberty that the blood of patriots must, from time to time, water, wasn’t his. He should have been appalled by what he helped ignite, but my impression is, he didn’t really notice.

Lenin and Trotsky did. And, in 1962, we were going head-to-head with the Trotsky Insurgency Process every where in the world, including Cuba, Vietnam and every place south of Juarez, thanks to Trotsky’s addition to the all ready volitile mix of Mexican politics. And the core technology of the Trotsky Insurgency Process is Politics as the continuation of warfare, which, like Marx standing Hegel on his head, is Marx standing Clausewitz on the head with the inversion of his maxim: Warfare is the continuation of political intercourse by the intermixing of means.

Marxists really love Marx: it’s a true love affair and it breaks their hearts when history bludgeons them into the realization that it is an unrequited love affair. My only test of an intellectual is to understand why intellectuals love Marx, a test I completely fail at. I have a similar response to Paul’s legal constructs in his Epistle to the Romans. But one of the characteristics of Marxism that drives the relentless, and ultimately impotent, abuse of power is the intellectual perfection of his arguments. Which I don’t share but a similar fanaticism is displayed by the Republicans who voted to ignore the treason Donald John Trump committed to get elected: an appeal to a greater outcome.

As I say, if the Communist Manifest was made into a movie, John Lennon’s “Imagine” would be it’s theme song, the Kumbaya of Dialectic Materialism.

Marxism is also very Puritan and prudish in it’s general aesthetic. There isn’t much room for humor or joy in Marxism: while the economics of Adam Smith is dismissed as “The Dismal Science”, Maxism embraces the “dismal” part of the equation as an organizing principle and essentially posits a future for the proletariat as the Second Coming of the Children of Moses in the Wilderness subsisting on a dreary diet of manna and without the celebraton of Passover or Chinesee take-out on Christmas. Doctor Spock and your basic Marxist are kindred spirits in at least the attempt at the rational as an exercise in following your bliss in a Bernie Sanders kind of way.

Which is to say that Vietnam’s Marxism, which has replaced violent revolution with Free Enterprise and the entrepreuneurial impulse as the core technology of their economic modeling, turns out to be a potent incubator for the Free Entrprise because much of the structural corruption of French Colonialism has been stripped away but the entrepreneurial spirit of Paris persists. The Pillar of Fire and Column of Smoke is being replaced by the consumer revolution of the electronic cash-transfer proletariat.

But, Marxism is still bullshit. Marx’s Transaction Theory is more derivative of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Purloined Letter than Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, The problem being that so is the Harvard Business model of Capitalism, as illustrated by Ray Dalio’s Transaction Theory: both Marxism and Harvard Capitalism are different sides of the same coin of economic theology. They are a corruption of Adam Smith’s Economics, which is an explication of the economics of Jesus as moral science.

Basis Tranaction Theory posits that Person A with Value B meets Person B with Value B to form a free, open and unbuffered market, exchange Values and leave, Person A with Value B and Person B with Value A.

Marx corrupts this basic process to prove that the Profit Motive is evil and Property is Theft, while Dalio corrupts this basic process to prove that economic policy based on white supremanist social constructs are divine truth

Here’s an interesting thing: I will provisionally stipulate to Dalio’s version of capitalism because it reflects the actual operation of the Free Entreprise economic ecology of American-British constitutional capitalism as a function of Democratic Socialism in contrast to the Marx or Harvard model, which reflects the Tory Socialism of 19th Century Oligarch capitalism. More to the point, both Marx and Harvard are mechanical operations based on the steam engine while Dalio is a mechanical operation based on the T Model Ford and the spark plug is the Free Enterprise dynamic missing from the Marx/Harvard assumptions.

The thing is, there is a newer, better model than Dalio’s capitalism and the Krugman-AOC Green New Deal intuits the possibilities.

And, just for the record, Bernie Sanders “socialism” is Marxism without the Pillar of Fire and Column of Smoke, nor the Keynsian cascade structures of the pre-Reagan Affirmative Action precursor to the Green New Deal. Bernie is also an example of the love affair Marxists have with Marxism.

And the Nixon-Moynihan-Carter “Affirmative Action” Reagan inherited was designed to complete the transformation of the Military Industrial Complex with the 100 year trajectory of the Aerospace-Entrepreneurial Matrix by catching the global synergies wave set into motion by Apollo 11 that create Silicon Valley and is aimed at putting man on Mars by way of a NASA-Soyuz lab on the moon in 2001.

The cost of Reaganomics (i.e. Ray Dalio’s Transaction Theory) hs missed making the first step to Mars by 19 years and counting. I mean, if you are a Joe McCarthy Conservative, the future looks like Puerto Rico.

Both Maxism and Reaganomic are bullshit.