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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Sunday, January 3, 2010

Romantic Idealism Is Alive and Well

By John Ballard



Bono's Ten for the Next Ten in yesterday's NY Times floats ten ideas for the next ten years that can change the world.



...this list looks forward, not backward. So here, then, are 10 ideas that might make the next 10 years more interesting, healthy or civil.





  • Intellectual Property Developers

  • Return of the Automobile as a Sexual Object

  • Festival of Abraham

  • An Equal Right to Pollute (and the Polluter-Pays Principle)

  • A Person (Dr. William Li) and a Word (Angiogenesis)

  • Taking the Fight to Rotavirus

  • Matter Doesn�t Matter

  • People Power and the Upside-Down Pyramid

  • Viva la (Nonviolent) Revoluci�/li>
  • The World Cup Kicks Off the African Decade




Rather than parsing these ideas, unzip your imagination and go read what he says about each of these evocative bullet points. In many ways I'm the last of a dreaming generation, but as I read his list, I sense trends that make the old ways of seeing the world obsolete.

I don't agree with all his dreams. For example I imagine automobiles becoming more like shopping carts than individually owned fashion statements. The advent of electric cars will correspond with feasible fleet management of subscription units that make transportation a privatized public utility. And as much as I want to see sports displace wars I have come to accept that mankind has an atavistic warrior gene which may in time become recessive but will always, like other genetic disorders, be part of our makeup.
And regardless of how you sell it, cap-and-trade as environmental salvation is a modern illusion no different from the sale of indulgences that Martin Luther detested.

Nevertheless, Bono's list is an optimistic read for a new year.



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