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, October 5, 2011

RIP, Steve Jobs

By BJ Bjornson


Dead at 56 from pancreatic cancer.  I can't think of much to say about his passing outside of "Damn!"  He was clearly one of the most iconic individuals in business and particulalry technology, and more than a few of the products Apple created under his leadership changed the landscape, or created their own like the iPad.  As John Cole says, not a bad legacy.  I'm quite certain he'll be missed.



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5 comments:

  1. geoffOctober 5, 2011 at 2:05 PM

    Agree with you BJ all Jobs strangeness aside likely the only American recently to have had a positive effect for us - all human beings - on the world.
    I'm now such a shit I await the politico's to frame his innovations into some left/right; liberal/conservative etc. framework.
    Me. I'm sorry he is dead. I just thought he was a need guy, eh.

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  2. Ron BeasleyOctober 5, 2011 at 4:00 PM

    I certainly can't deny that his genius changed the world and I am sorry to see him go. But he was a control freak not unlike his nemesis Bill Gates and as such may have hindered progress.

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  3. Bill H.October 5, 2011 at 5:58 PM

    He created the Apple computer and insisted on closed architecture so that he could control it. IBM created the PC and opted for open architecture, knowing that they would lose control of it but that the world would be changed and they would ultimately benefit, as would the rest of the world, from the change.
    Steve Jobs created some really neat toys. He did not change the world or, ulitimately, leave any legacy of benefit to society, science or mankind.

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  4. John BallardOctober 5, 2011 at 10:34 PM

    And so it was that a nameless Arab American baby was adopted by an Armenian American family. Clara Hagopian and her husband Paul Jobs had been married around seven years and had not been able to conceive. The little bundle that would be Steve, was very much wanted in the Jobs household.
    http://newamericamedia.org/2011/10/steve-jobs-was-an-arab-american.php

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  5. BJ BjornsonOctober 7, 2011 at 7:54 AM

    @Bill � I don�t recall IBM creating an open architecture knowing they would lose control of it. Their �opening up� was actually a decision to outsource their operating system to Microsoft and their microprocessors to Intel, who then used that technology to create their own monopolies and destroy IBM�s. Prior to that, IBM was just as vertically-integrated as Apple, with full control over the software and hardware.
    And when it comes to �open�, Microsoft Windows is among the most jealously guarded and closed proprietary systems there is, and that didn�t seem to have hurt it in the slightest, though, unlike Apple, who don�t have anything close to a monopoly, Microsoft certainly has used their dominant market position in the past to scuttle opposition.

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