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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Thursday, August 6, 2009

Quote of the week

By Dave Anderson:


Quote of the Week on statistical geekery from Instaputz:



In the five months since he decided that the DJIA was a reliable indicator of Presidential and/or policy performance the benchmark index has risen by 37%. 37%! So tomorrow Glenn is going to write about how the Market God has bestowed upon our President the most confident of votes.


Noting that two things happen at the same time and assuming that causality exists between them is called spurious correlation. It is what stupid people do when they are getting ready to make really bad predictions - not just the bad " top to which


To wit: let's say I shaved my balls on Friday. Note that the market responded positively, only to once again decline as a vote of no confidence when the team of international observers (led by Jimmy Carter, former Canadian PM Brian Mulrooney, and the Dalai Lama) detected the growth of stubble.


The evidence is beyond dispute. My balls move markets....


The market is not rational regardless of how many business school professors pitched tents over its majesty as an arbiter of every political, social, and economic process. Remember, the market once told us that DrKoop.com was worth $45/share. It decided that theGlobe.com was worth $97/share (3 months later: a dime). It is not a parliament which issues meaningful votes of confidence and no confidence. Only a long view of market trends can provide useful (and retrospective, mind you) insights. Trying to use its day-to-day and week-to-week fluctuations as evidence of one's preferred version of current events is logical to the same extent that cavemen banging on drums to make the sun rise (and it worked - every day!!!) made sense.




The last paragraph is a decent defense of the Kinda-Sorta-Mostly-Eventually Efficient Markets Hypothesis that six days a week I believe in (the other day, I figure most things are rigged), but the bulk of this is an excellent exergis on stupidity near statistics.



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