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, March 2, 2011

More Bombs:Success :: Fewer Bombs:Success

By Dave Anderson:


An interesting little tidbit from Danger Room:


In January 2011, there were 1,344 bombs discovered or detonated in Afghanistan. That�s essentially the same number of explosives as there were seven months earlier, in June of 2010. Yet wintertime is ordinarily when there�s a lull in Afghanistan�s fighting. (For perspective, in all of 2005, there were only 465 homemade insurgent bombs discovered country-wide.)


�When that volume [of bombs] starts dropping, then I think you can start making some assumptions about the effectiveness of the overall counterinsurgency,� Lt. Gen. Michael Oates tells a small group of reporters ahead of his departure on Friday from the Pentagon�s Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization, or JIEDDO. But the bomb volume isn�t dropping: November saw the highest monthly total of the entire war, with 1,508 explosions.


More bombs means the insurgents are "desperate" and fewer bombs means success.....


I need a drink at 6:13AM to understand this logic. 



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