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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Steve Hynd, a.k.a. Cernig, is a forty-something ex-pat Scotsman living in the USA with his redheaded wife and a "hers, mine and ours" family. His degree is in Philosophy but he ended up having a career in new business development, mostly within the fire and accident insurance industry. Go figure. He's been a correspondent at Lloyd's of London for over 15 years as well as a current stint as an independent management consultant where he concentrates on worker-management rather than process-management issues.

Cernig is from a "political" family with a coal mining background - three of his uncles were senior in the regional Labour party in Scotland and his father was treasurer for the area Scottish National party. With those kinds of antecedents, it's no surprise that his politics are very much of the democratic socialist variety - which means even folks the US Right thinks are very Left are to the Right of his own political stance. About the only US politician he could happily vote for is Bernie Saunders.

His abiding interest is foreign policy - or to be precise the domestic policy that America inflicts on foreigners - as a citizen of the wider world in which the U.S. isn't an object of patriotic passion, just the biggest kid on the block.

He loves cats, Terry Pratchett books, sunsets and blogging.

Steve is also the Editor in Chief of the Agonist.

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Dave Anderson (aka Fester) is a twenty something New Englander who has lived in Steelers country for the past decade.

My interests have always been towards the unusual and the unconventional as the edge solutions and questions tend to be far more interesting.  I was trained in urban economic analysis at Carnegie Mellon and I believe that the urban solution and problem set will be one of the major, systemic problem and solution sets of my lifetime as cities are amazingly confusing and complex beasts.  This urban interest has led me to 4th Generation and other non-conventional strategic approaches as I believe they have higher fidelity to reality and more explanatory and predictive power than conventional approaches of conflict analysis.

I am still trying to figure out how I've been here for a decade as I came to Pittsburgh initially for school, stayed for grad school, met my wife, and then we found out we liked it here, had decent jobs and could afford a house.  And then wow, six years later we have an amazing daughter.

So besides my amazing and understanding wife and our inquisitive daughter,  we live with Zoe the upstairs cat and Meela, the downstairs cat.   When I am not writing or working, I am running up and down soccer fields, reading and being a general nerd.

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Ron Beasley PixRon Beasley� is one of the old guys here having been born in 1946 I'm at the leading edge of the baby boomers. I graduated from college in 1968 and found myself in the Army shortly there after. My military career consisted of two and half years in Munich Germany as an editor/interrogator for the Defense Intelligence Agency. I spent most of my life working as a manufacturing engineer for several multinational corporations including two Japanese companies. About nine years ago my company and my job were shipped to Asia. Since then I having been working as a photographer and graphic artist. You can see some of my art at Just Pictures.

I also post at The Moderate Voice

I do book reviews for both Newshoggers and The Moderate Voice. You can contact me at the email address below if you are interested in having a book reviewed.



I am a registered Independent but very liberal/progressive on my political leanings.  I live in the beautiful Pacific Northwest.  Before joining Newshoggers I had my own blog, Middle Earth Journal, for four years.

I can be reached at ronbeas-AT-gmail-DOT-com



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John Ballard (b.1944) has been a Liberal for fifty years, starting in high school when city officials in Columbus, Georgia proposed adding fluoride to the water to help prevent tooth decay. I had seen enough toothpaste commercials to think it was a sensible idea but a few locals argued it was just another step in a Communist takeover of government. (Those were the days when "Impeach Earl Warren" billboards dressed the highways.) Before leaving high school I and two others passed out anti-John Birch Society pamphlets following an appearance of Robert Welch (it's founder), at a local theater. I matriculated with the anti-war and civil rights movements of the early Sixties and was drafted as a Conscientious Objector in 1965, assigned to Korea as an Army Medic.

With an undergraduate degree in history (which plus a dollar will buy a newspaper) I went into the food business where I earned a living until retirement in 2002. In order to have health insurance I worked five years in a health care system as a dining room supervisor for a senior retirement community. A continuing education course in gerontology at a local university and OJT learning has given me a close look at the medical-industrial disease management industry. My wife and I graduated to Medicare and Social Security in 2009 and my post-retirement job is through an agency as a non-medical caregiver for other old people. Hootsbuddy's Place was my blog home from 2004 until I carelessly lost my g-mail account to a phishing scam in 2009 but Newshoggers allowed me to join their group. They are a smart, great bunch and I've been happy as a hog in slop ever since.

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