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

Soiling Our Own Den

Commentary By Ron Beasley





Now I don't agree with everything in the above.  I have lived in several places where the tap water was not suited for anything but flushing the toilet and laundry.  We had those five gallon jugs of water delivered to the house.  I have spent most of my life in the Portland, Oregon area where the tap water is very good.  In fact sometimes it's too good.  Back when I was doing darkroom photography I had to add chemicals to the water to make it hard when I mixed photo-chemicals.  But the water is not really the issue, it's transportation and more importantly the bottles.


The world's rubbish dump: a garbage tip that stretches from Hawaii to Japan


05RubbishGraphic_15022s 



A "plastic soup" of waste floating in the Pacific Ocean is growing at an alarming rate and now covers an area twice the size of the continental United States, scientists have said.



The vast expanse of debris � in effect the world's largest rubbish dump � is held in place by swirling underwater currents. This drifting "soup" stretches from about 500 nautical miles off the Californian coast, across the northern Pacific, past Hawaii and almost as far as Japan.


Even a bear has the sense not to shit in it's own den.  The same cannot be said for man.  The earth is our den and we are soiling it with plastic bottles and the CO2 that results in their production and transportation.



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2 comments:

  1. sparkyAugust 7, 2009 at 1:50 AM

    Thanks for putting that up, but I would disagree with you on one point. No one is noticing that water is being commodified, except, I suppose, the screenwriters for the recent James Bond movie. Pollution is going to seem like a small problem when lobbyist-backed companies start raising prices for water. Healthcare ain't gonna be nothing compared to people dying from lack of water in the US.
    Ask yourself this: who supplies your water? Public or private? You may be surprised.

    ReplyDelete
  2. geoffAugust 7, 2009 at 4:34 AM

    The Independent article coincided with my re-reading of the chapter on polymers in Weisman's The World Without Us. I can't agree with you more "it's the bottles".
    A funny quote from marine biologist Richard Thompson in the chapter:
    "All he knew was that soon everything alive would be eating them [plastic pits aka garbage].
    �When they get as small as powder, even zooplankton will swallow them.�"
    If you don't have the book the chapter on plastics "Polymers are forever" was published in Orion mag:
    http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/270/
    Disconcerting, I'd say.

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