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.


----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thursday, January 14, 2010

Haitian Refugees

By Dave Anderson:

One of the things that I mentioned yesterday in my Haiti earthquake post was a reference to making Haiti the world's largest refugee camp:

Haiti will soon turn into the largest refugee camp in the world.  The
Dominican Republic will seek to control its border and the US Coast
Guard will interdict any mass refugee afloat.


That comment came from talking to an individual who is extremely well connected to the US disaster management community.  We spun out a scenario where a mass of people would attempt to make a run for the sea as soon as the initial shock wore off and some resources could be assembled.  And once we got to second order impacts, the scenario starts to hit destabilizing non-linear situations.  If we start seeing mass migration, it is time to invest in plastic and micro-fabrication plants. 

Gahlran at Information Dissemination provides a little more information and context to our speculation:

The annual immigration season from Haiti to Florida by sea usually
begins in February every year. If it has historically been easy for
Haitians to choose the risks of sea immigration when they have a home
and family, how much easier is it for a Haitian to risk the dangerous
journey when their home is destroyed or family is dead? This is a critical point,
because the US is in big trouble if 100,000 people, or potentially a
lot more, attempt a massive migration at sea following this
catastrophe. The Obama administration is going to have to spend money -
potentially many billion dollars - to keep three million homeless
people in Haiti....

Do the math. How many soldiers does your COIN manual say it takes to control a population of 3 million homeless, hungry people...

Even if we count the 2nd Brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division and 2
Marine battalions, we come up well short of what will be necessary
based on the doctrine for population security adopted by our lessons
learned in Iraq and Afghanistan....



Posted by at
Labels: , , , , , ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)