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, December 29, 2010

Swans' Predictions for 2011

By John Ballard



Alphonse Allais (1854-1905), the French writer and humorist...once wrote: " Il faut prendre l'argent l��se trouve, c'est-�ire chez les pauvres. Bon d'accord, ils n'ont pas beaucoup d'argent, mais il y a beaucoup de pauvres."
("One must take the money where it is to be found; that is, from the poor. Well, okay, they don't have much money, but there are lots of them.").
Plenty of blood to suck, indeed -- let's have it all, ALL.



Get ready. We're on the way. My own view is that unless something unforeseen happens this time next year the percentage of Americans not paying income tax will have risen from about forty percent (where it now stands) to over half the country. At some point it will become clear that nothing is left. Ninety cents out of every new dollar is accruing to the top few percent of the population and everyone else is forced to live on the remaining dime. Medicare will become a federalized super-Medicaid as lifetime savings representing meager nest eggs get spent down as more people join the ranks of the card-carrying poor.


Check out what the Swans Commentary imagination expects.



  • Having discovered the homosexual connotation of "Tea Party," the new movement changes its name to the "Pee Party." Alternative slogans such as "Don't Pee on Me" or "To Pee or Not To Pee" are fiercely discouraged.

  • With the crash of home values, unemployment, the loss of pensions, dire prospects for Social Security, and the rising cost of health care, 80 becomes the new 65. Given that 80-year-olds are better educated than 20-year-olds, the competition for jobs makes 20 the new 90.

  • The surviving victims of US torture squads form a choir. They are invited to the White House on the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks and agree to sing "God Bless America." Their band accompanies them on the xylophone and water board.

  • To avoid putting his foot in his mouth, the Democratic Party subsidizes an operation to seal Joe Biden's lips once and for all. That done, Biden becomes a master of sign language and continues to exasperate his fellow Democrats.

  • After Chernobyl opens to tourism, the US Gulf Coast follows suit by offering SCUBA diving excursions in the dead coral reefs, walking tours of the oil-rich marshes, and gourmet courses on cooking with contaminated cuisine. Investors flock to the emerging market in the disaster tourism industry, guaranteed to stimulate the global economy with its limitless opportunities.

  • A scientist, right out of his laboratory, admits (in April or May) that capitalism has failed as an economic system. He will declare all the same that it's worth going on with the experiment another decade or two because capitalism, being so destructive, could turn out to be a valid cure for itself, especially in the present situation in which the patient (the whole world) is so debilitated that he could take only homeopathic medicine. The scientist will be given the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2012, after having corrected the word "decade" to "century."

  • With growing food shortages in the USA, General Foods recycles human excrement and Americans eat shit.


And yes, lots more at the link.



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