The next post will mark the arbitrary milestone of 3000 posts. That number should be taken with a grain of salt because the first 200 or so editions of Horse, were multi-piece things that were stitched together into something which kind of resembled a four column newspaper. I abandoned that idea quite some time ago and by the time of the migration from GeoCities (which I'd coded myself) to Blogger, a Horse post was already just a single piece.
The entire archive on Blogger is still available (look on the right hand side of this website) but the GeoCities portion only exists on a single CD which exists somewhere in my study, collecting dust.
This being post 2999, I thought I'd rewind the clock to see what was happening back when the other 000th posts were uploaded.
Horse 2000 - October 2015
In the seemingly intractable Syrian Civil War, reports emerged that the Russian Air Force had made a series of air-strikes on positions held by United States backed Syrian rebels in rural areas of northern Syria. At the time, the town of Jisr al-Shughour was being held by a coalition of Islamist militant groups including the Al-Nusra Front which was a quasi proxy for Al-Qaeda. At the same time, both Iran and Hezbollah were deploying their own troops in an effort to drive back and destroy the Syrian rebel groups.
The then Iraqi prime minister Haider al-Abadi, made a public endorsement of the Russian air-strikes against ISIS forces in Iraq while expressing disappointment with the efforts made by the United States.
The Syrian Civil War was/is one of those cases where even trying to establish who was on anyone's side at any given point in time was a difficult exercise and it makes/made following the conflict really difficult.
Also that month in the equally intractable Palestine–Israel conflict, in retaliation for rockets fired on the Israeli city of Ashdod, the Israeli Air Force carried out its own airstrikes on suspected Hamas positions in Gaza. I do of course realise that this could have been posted from any point in time from about 1967 onwards and seven years' on from this, it still could have equally have happened yesterday.
In October 2015, the World Health Organization made another recommendation to everyone diagnosed with HIV, and pleaded that they receive antiretroviral therapy. At the time, the WHO was hopeful that a future mNRA would become available within 5 years, as there had never been any kind of effectively treatment against the whole class of coronaviruses; of which HIV ias just one.
In the 2015 Rugby World Cup, England fell 33-13 to Australia and became the first host nation and first former finalist to be to be knocked out of a Rugby World Cup during the group stages. To say that the England side found new and exciting ways to be rubbish in that World Cup, is an understatement.
Horse 1000 - June 2009
The Supreme Court Of The United States (SCOTUS) was asked to refuse the purchase of Chrysler Corporation by the Italian car maker, FIAT. General Motors had recently restructured itself under Chapter XI Bankruptcy proceedings in the wake of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis and Chrysler wanting to find any buy so that it wouldn't suffer a similar fate, looked equally sad.
The World Health Organisation Director-General Margaret Chan, made the announcement that the 2009 swine flu outbreak had probably reached the point that it had been confirmed in enough countries to be classified as a pandemic. In addition to the fallout from the Global Financial Crisis, governments now had to deal with this problem as the Ethiopian Government announced that swine flu was uncontrollable in that country and Slovenia became the first country in Europe to confirm that it had cases.
Fighting continued in Pakistan in Kashmir concerning a border dispute with India and the Pakistani government feared that they would be fighting a war on two fronts as the Taliban unilaterally rejected a ceasefire in the north of the country, by starting a skirmish which killed 30 Pakistani soldiers.
Also that month in the equally intractable Palestine–Israel conflict, in retaliation for rockets fired across the border into Israel, they the Israeli navy intercepted and detained a ship carrying humanitarian supplies headed for Gaza, which was at the time under a blockade.
Horse 0000 - February 1997
The government of Papua New Guinea in trying to deal with an armed insurgency, brought paid mercenaries onto Bougainville Island to try and crush the uprising. The Australian Government when asked officially for help in the matter, did its level best to do nothing in the crisis and maintained that this was a local problem.
The Howard Government in Australia was beginning its project of stealing everything from the people of Australia and selling it out to the lowest bidder. The talk of the day was the discussion re the privatisation and sale of Telstra. Telstra had just recorded an Australian corporate record profit and there was no way that that kind of money could be allowed to remain in public hands. Private Telstra abandoned plans for the then National Fibre Optic Network and it was to be sold for the pitiful sum of $8bn; which was just two years of ongoing profit.
1997 still had the throes of the breakup of Yugoslavia which would lead to yet another war in Bosnia, Russia was experiencing a kind of economic freefall as the former leaders of the Soviet Union now bought all the ex-state owned enterprises for a song, the United Kingdom had John Major's Conservative Government with no idea what it was doing anymore and facing electoral wipeout.
I had been recently released from high school into a world which was quite frankly kinder, precisely because it didn't care.
Back to today...
Horse 3000 - April 2022.
What if anything can we learn from the past 25 years?
Firstly that the intractable wars in the world such as is the case between Palestine and Israel are that way because the two sides simply refuse to accept the humanity of the other and therefore refuse to do anything to recognise that humanity. Whatever your position is, it is wrong.
Secondly that there are diseases which pop up from time to time which due to the nature of the world being complex, means that there is always going to be some kind novel disease for which we will always be chasing the cure or a treatment for.
The big problems of poverty, pollution, climate change, racial and gender equality still exist; not because we can not find answers to them but because those people with money and power don't see any profitable reasons to address those problems, so they don't get solved.
I think that people are mostly selfish; which is caused by the fact that everyone is at the centre of the universe as they observe it and can not view the universe from any other perspective ever. To some degree we are slaves to the electro-biomechanical meatbags which we live in and our minds constantly yell out about what those electro-biomechanical meatbags desire (food, drink, sleep, sex, money, power, pride, etc). Likewise, I reject the notion that truth is relative. You will not find it within in you. It does not reside in you. You can not learn it from inside of you because truth is external to you.
I think that we can also take it as fact that when it comes to any of the big intractable problems of the kosmos, there are no final defeats and no final victories. Progress does not automatically trend upwards to a kinder and better future. It must be fought for and boy, do we like fighting.
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