Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Wednesday, August 26, 2009

400 years and counting...

by anderson

 

Reconstruction-of-Galileo-001

On August 25, 1609, Galilei Galileo demonstrated his new instrument, the telescope, to Venetian merchants.  Though the "spyglass" had already existed for sometime, Galileo refined the design and then would soon do something out of this world: he pointed the tiny telescope at the sky and began observing phenomenon that directly contradicted the dominant dogma of the time.

Though his initial observations of Jupiter and the "Galilean moons" would not directly support the Copernican heliocentric theory, they did amply demonstrate that the idea of universal geocentrism was dead.  Unpersuaded by physical evidence that the dominant world view was wrong -- hopelessly wrong -- The Catholic Church would fight reality for centuries, ultimately conceding an untenable position.  It took the Church almost 360 years to forgive Galileo for the unholy transgression of observing the world as it is, when Pope John Paul II issued Galileo's pardon on October 31, 1992.



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