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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Monday, April 26, 2010

Forced Simplification

Commentary By Ron Beasley


Look at this graph and be afraid. It does not come from Earth First. It does not come from the Sierra Club. It was not drawn by Socialists or Nazis or Osama Bin Laden or anyone from Goldman-Sachs. If you are a Republican Tea-Partier, rest assured it does not come from a progressive Democrat. And vice versa. It was drawn by the United States Department of Energy, and the United States military's Joint Forces Command concurs with the overall picture.






Oil Cliff 



The above is from The Imminent Crash Of Oil Supply: Be Afraid at Countercurrents.org.

What does it imply? The supply of the world's most essential energy
source is going off a cliff. Not in the distant future,but in a year and
a half. Production of all liquid fuels, including oil, will drop within
20 years to half what it is today. And the difference needs to be made
up with "unidentified projects," which one of the world's leading
petroleum geologists says is just a "euphemism for rank shortage," and
the world's foremost oil industry banker says is "faith based."





As I noted here we live in a complex society that owes that complexity to cheap oil.  The declining supply of oil will require simplification.  The question is:  will we try to direct that simplification or fight it?  Joseph Tainter:



When the value of complexity turns negative, a society plagued by an inability to react remains as complex as ever, right up to the moment where it becomes suddenly and dramatically simpler, which is to say right up to the moment of collapse. Collapse is simply the last remaining method of simplification.

Living things have a life cycle; they are born - live and at the end die.  History has shown us that societies/civilizations too have a life cycle; they are born, becoming increasingly complex and then collapse (sudden simplification). 



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