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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Saturday, April 9, 2011

Too Many Catastrophes

By John Ballard


Check out Crawford Killian's reflections on catastrophies.
Too long to tweet and too short for a long blogpost, this short essay is full of everyday wisdom. It's worth reading just for the following clever prose.



Now that we've ascended a nearly vertical learning curve in the past month,
people around the world are rediscovering the virtues of paranoia.



The rise of modern science included the work of James Hutton, the Scottish geologist who made a powerful case for a very old world in which today's processes had been going on for hundreds of thousands, even millions of years. Other geologists confirmed his findings, and the term "uniformitarianism" became a kind of shorthand for these processes. "Catastrophism," the belief that violent events recur through history, became shorthand for "Bible-thumping ignorance."


[...]    Mass amnesia could be convenient: Just as we forgot about the flu pandemic of 1918-19, we can forget about the Tohoku quake of 2011. We can revert to the uniformitarianism of the mid-20th century, assuming that peace and quiet today mean peace and quiet forever.


Or we could assume that Tohoku is the new normal, that we will face one damn catastrophe after another: quakes, tsunamis, monster typhoons and droughts�not to mention wars fought to gain or keep dwindling resources. In that case, like Dr. Strangelove we will need to make strategic purchases of mine shafts to hunker down in. (Please, no Chinese coal mines!)


Somewhere between amnesia and hysteria we will have to find the physical and psychological resources to deal with catastrophes. Like death and taxes, they're inevitable. We may be dumb to be living on floodplains or coastline or the Ring of Fire, but we may also be smart enough to survive the catastrophes that follow from our choices.


Do take a moment to read the whole thing.



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1 comment:

  1. Ron BeasleyApril 9, 2011 at 5:18 PM

    Yes, we now know that life on this planet consists of a series of "uniform" "catastrophes" but we still forget that when comfort or profit is involved. People will be opposed to nuclear power only until the electrons stop flowing through the power grid. The fear of darkness will win out over the fear of a radiation disaster. The darkness is real the radiation is only a possibility.

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