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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Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Beware the Kayaking Terrorists!

By BJ Bjornson

I read this story a couple of days ago, and I must say, I haven�t seen an �expert� on a region so clueless of the actual realities of said region since the Bush administration.


Airport security may be tightening up across Canada, but people flying within the northern territories do not face any screening, worrying a security expert who warns terrorists could use the North as an entry point.

Currently, airline passengers flying from Iqaluit, Yellowknife and Whitehorse to cities in southern Canada must go through full security screening, including metal detectors and carry-on luggage scans.

But passengers travelling within northern communities � for example, between Iqaluit and Yellowknife � walk directly to their departure gates without undergoing any security screening.

Terrorists could take advantage of those lax security measures to get into North America, said Robert Huebert, a political science professor at the University of Calgary who specializes in Arctic studies.

"If you can get to the [Arctic] shore by some form of maritime transport, then you can get onto one of these aircrafts without being checked," Huebert told CBC News.

"Then you can get yourself to Yellowknife or to Whitehorse, and then basically have someone meeting you and then get onto the highway system."


It�s really hard to know where to start with this. I mean, does this idiot have any idea just how hard it would be to acquire marine transport into the high Arctic? Even in these days of a warming globe, there is a fair amount of ice floating around in the summer, and the region remains impassable through much of the winter. It would be far, far easier to land your marine infiltration craft along some of the far more southern thousands of miles of practically unguarded coastline.

Even more importantly, these communities are incredibly small and isolated, to the point that a significant fraction of the population treks out to the airport to check and see who might be coming to visit the community. There is generally no other possible means of transport into the communities, excepting the odd cruise and/or transport ship, and yet we�re supposed to believe that some terrorist, having managed to brave the icy waters for thousands of miles past where he could have landed close to some multi-cultural melting pot with easy blending in possibilities, is going to wander in off the land and stroll into the airport to fly south without raising any eyebrows? This scenario makes the proverbial sore thumb seem like an expert in camouflage.

And after all of this, the guy still needs to meet an already in-country friend to drive him the rest of the way to where there are actual terror targets. (It is probably worth noting at this point that said highway system doesn�t start in Yellowknife, it goes pretty much all the way to the Arctic Ocean.) This really seems like a whole lot of work for relatively little benefit. Further to all this, what exactly is the point of this massive detour? Is there anything this guy is bringing with him that can�t be made in Canada or the U.S. that requires such a dangerous sea voyage to transport?

Listen, if these terrorists you�re all so worried about have the kind of money and expertise to carry off such an implausible infiltration through the Arctic, we should be very, very concerned, given they can get into North America far easier, with far less hassle and expense, and without arriving in an area where they are almost certain to be noticed immediately as out of place. The only plausible reason I can think of for this �expert� to bringing up this kind of idiocy is that he owns shares in one of the security companies selling the expensive devices used for screening and sees all those tiny hamlets without such devices as an excellent growth opportunity.

As an aside, given this is the day devoted to annoying the TSA in the U.S. by opting out of the scanners, I should note that I just finished traveling to the U.S. (where I attended Skepticon 3, about which I hope to have a post up soon) and though I went through security checkpoints several times, I was apparently lucky in not having either the scanner or the pat-down used. The only real difference from going through the checkpoints in Canada was the rather ridiculous need to remove my shoes each and every time. The only other thing of note was that during one of my trips, I completely forgot to remove the liquids from my carry-on and place them in the little plastic bag. Didn�t even slow me down. Whoever was screening the bag either didn�t notice or didn�t care, I only realized it later when I got to my hotel. In honour of that, I give you Adam Savage and his far more troubling TSA screw-up.








Don�t you feel safer?



1 comment:

  1. Great post. There are two things going on within the US DHS these days. The first is the active imaginations of its "terrorist experts" as in this post. The second, and qualifier for action, is whether someone connected can make money "protecting" us from the implausible or impossible threat dreamed up by the first group.

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