Ding dong the witch is dead.

So today Osama Binladen has been found and killed, it's been on every news bulletin on every channel almost exclusively all day.  Now I agree that this is an important day and that he has paid for the many things done in his name, but...  In the afformentioned news bulletins there is coverage of a giant party in New York where people are celebrating, saying how proud they are and that it's finally over and that's where my problem is.

Lets deal with these things in reverse order shall we.  Firstly it's most definitely not over, Osama was a figure head for a movement which is based on small autonomous cells.  This isn't a case of cut of the head and the body dies, it's more of a whack a mole kind of affair, yes he was a pretty big scalp to be taken down but there's still plenty of nut jobs left to fight and most of them are going to be pretty irrate about now.  So the British and American governments are expecting retaliatory strikes.

Next is the out pouring of pride.  Ok this one is a little more appropriate, after all, the soldiers were asked to go in to a hostile base and pacify it.  They did what had to be done and put themselves in harms way to achieve it, to give them anything less than our support and recognition for their bravery would be an insult.  However there was a long campaign using mountainous quantities of ordinance, intelligence agencies and basically the full might of the American army to find and kill one guy and his bodyguards.  This was rather like using a tactical nuke to crack a nut and taking a good few years to succeed.  Yes we can honour the soldiers but the result was fairly inevitable.

So now we come to the last one, the celebration itself.  Thousands upon thousands of people are currently rejoicing that a man has been hunted down and killed, we are revelling in the successful murder of a human being, I'm certainly not excusing his actions or those of his followers, they are terrible atrocities for which even his death isn't justice enough and there is a lot of high emotion to be released.  But aren't we supposed to be better than them?  What I saw on television was one step short of burning an Osama shaped effigy while waving guns around.  If it had included those two things it would have looked exactly like the sort of displays you often see coming from the middle east.

A bad man has been killed, this is a good thing, but this isn't over yet and I certainly don't believe we should be celebrating that we were required to stoop to his level to get what we want.

Horse health

So both of our horses have fallen ill in the last few months, Indy has apparently got Equine metabolic syndrome which is a kind of laminitis, at one stage the vet offered to put Indy down, while last month Swiftnick had a bout of colic.  The colic was a fairly short term thing and after an injection from the vet he was back to normal.  Indy meanwhile is always going to have his issue and we're constantly going to have to measure what he eats and how much exercise he has to try and keep a large fat deposit from building up on his neck and pumping toxins in to his body.  Not the best start to the year but it's not going to stop us doing the best we can for them.

Now as I've mentioned before I'm a fairly easy going kind of guy, I'll try and get along with pretty much anybody.  But there is one particular woman at the yard who always sticks her nose in whether you want her there or not, she also thinks quite highly of herself and constantly comes up with advice and comments which in itself is mildly annoying, but especially as they're almost always wrong.  She's renowned for turning up when someones horse is ill and thinking up even more unpleasant things that could be wrong than: a) you're thinking of and b) are actually the problem.  Any small symptom is the first sign of a major disaster on the horizon, every issue is life threatening and every one of her proclaimations is 100% wrong. 

The trouble is the last thing you really need when your upset is for someone to come along and suggest that the problem is actually worse than it is, even more annoying is that because she's dressing it up as sage advice, people don't tell her to bugger off for fear of upsetting her!  Then to top it all of when your horse is feeling better and you've weathered the worst of the storm she's no where to be seen, presumably off spreading more misery for someone else with an issue.

I'm a reasonable, peace loving, mild kind of guy, but I really do wish that she'd just FUCK OFF!