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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Monday, August 6, 2012

And The Gold Goes To NASA

Commentary By Ron Beasley

It's appropriate that the MSL, Curiosity Rover, landed during the Olympics.  It was a gold medal for NASA.  I'm an engineer and I know that if anything can go wrong it will.  But nothing went wrong.  They were even able to to get a picture of the descent.


Is that cool or what?  It will be a couple of weeks before Curiosity  gets down to work and it will incease our knowledge of not only the Red Planet but the solar system.  But the real story is the engineering itself.  This is a real example of American exceptionalism.  It's not how many countries we can invade and occupy but ideas that make the United States exceptional.  I have been both a hardware and software engineer and I find this accomplishment  nothing less that amazing.


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1 comment:

  1. Bill HAugust 6, 2012 at 5:21 PM

    Yes, that picture utterly blew my mind. One space mission capturing a picture of a different space mission, in about a three minue window, on another planet. That simply defines awesome.

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