WINDOWS 10 HAS RUINED MY DESKTOP PC!

Windows 10 gives the option of uninstalling  so that you can return to - in my case - windows 8.1. When I tried this, the problems that windows 10 had caused with its installation would not go away on windows 8.1, so I thought I would have nothing to lose by reinstalling windows 10.

How wrong can one be??? Not only were the previous problems caused by windows 10 still there but there were now new ones added to the old.

The main lesson I have learnt from this exercise of microsoft and its upgrading to new operating systems is that if something is working and it is not broken, don't try and fix it. You will make it worse and disaster looms.

I am now doing my best to keep my laptops which still have windows xp and also my laptops which have linux.

The sooner I can rid myself of anything to do with microsoft, the better.


............and good luck to all those who think they will be better off with windows 10! I wish them well.

MANUS ISLAND - THE STORY OF ONE OF THE TRAGEDIES CAUSED BY ALL AUSTRALIAN POLITICIANS

This article by Arnold Zable was published in The Age on 22 SEPTEMBER 2015.

It is a story which could be told hundreds of times thanks to Australia's politicians.

The story of Australia's indigenous population writ large in the concentration camps - "WE STOPPED THE BOATS!"  

 Iranian journalist Behrouz Boochani tells of the horrors of Manus Island: out of sight, out of mind

September 22, 2015

Arnold Zable

Instead of being imprisoned and harassed, deserving detainees should be welcomed and granted asylum in Australia.

The Manus Regional Processing Centre on Los Negros Island, Manus Province, Papua New Guinea. Photo: Andrew Meares
 
His name is Behrouz Boochani. He was born in Ilam city in west Iran on July 23, 1983. He graduated from Tarbiat Madares University in Tehran with a masters degree in political geography and geopolitics. He worked as a freelance journalist and for several Iranian newspapers – Kasbokar Weekly, Qanoon, Etemaad – and the Iranian Sports Agency. He published articles on Middle East politics and interviews with the Kurdish elite in Tehran.

Boochani's passions are human rights and the survival of Kurdish culture. With several colleagues, he founded, edited, published and wrote for the Kurdish magazine Werya, documenting Kurdish aspirations for cultural freedom. He wrote a paper advocating a federal system for Iran, protecting minority rights. The paper was delivered at a conference in France on his behalf after he was denied a passport to attend.

On February 17, 2013, officials from the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps ransacked the Werya offices in Ilam and arrested 11 of Boochani's colleagues. Six were imprisoned. Boochani was in Tehran that day and avoided arrest. On hearing of the arrests he published the information on the website Iranian Reporters, and the report was widely circulated. Boochani feared for his safety and went into hiding.

During his three months in hiding, colleagues advised Boochani he was at risk of arrest and interrogation. As a member of the Kurdish minority in Iran, and of both the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the National Union of Kurdish Students, he had experienced threats and was under surveillance. Having been interrogated and warned previously about his work promoting Kurdish culture and having signed an undertaking he would not continue this activity, he was in grave danger.

Boochani fled Iran on May 23, 2013. In July of that year he was among 75 asylum seekers intercepted by the Australian Navy en route to Australia. It was his second attempt at the crossing from Indonesia. On the first, the boat sank. He was rescued by Indonesian fishermen, and jailed on his return.

He immediately asked for asylum in Australia. He was detained on Christmas Island where he developed a deep bond with Reza Barati, a Kurdish-Iranian, also from Ilam. He was transferred to the Manus Island Immigration Detention Centre in late August 2013.

Boochani's predicament is both unique and emblematic of the horrors facing the men detained on Manus Island. There are currently about 900. Behrouz is among a group of about 100 who are refusing to be processed by PNG immigration officials, claiming the right to be processed for asylum in Australia.

He maintains his sanity between descents into depression with his continuing work as a writer and journalist, and his lifeline via various channels with a few advocates in Australia, including Castlemaine resident and refugee advocate Janet Galbraith. She is in touch with him daily, and has arranged for his writings to be translated from Farsi to English. His accounts of his incarceration on Manus Island read like a Kafka nightmare.

He continues to write articles for Kurdish publications from detention. He remains active as a human rights defender, and is recognised as such by the UN. He collaborates with Australian journalists and human rights agencies, reporting on human rights abuses occurring in the centre. He was torn apart by the murder of Reza Barati, and has reported on the death, through medical neglect, of Manus island detainee Hamid Khazaie. Boochani was one of several asylum seekers arrested and jailed without charge in Lorangau prison during a hunger strike early this year. He remained peaceful during this action.

He says his communications are monitored by Transfield, the company that operates the detention centre, and that, as a result of his reportage and his human rights activity on behalf of fellow detainees, he has been threatened, regularly searched and is subject to surveillance.

The men detained on Manus Island have not been convicted of any crime. Yet they are imprisoned. Isolated. Kept out of sight and out of mind. Those who have been found to be refugees remain in the Lorangau transit centre. They have not been resettled. The men know they are the fall guys, punished as a means of deterring other would-be asylum seekers, as are the men, women and children detained on Nauru. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time. They have been palmed off, abandoned and all but forgotten. They are being driven mad.

The fate of Behrouz Boochani and his fellow detainees is Australia's responsibility. Instead of being imprisoned and harassed, he should be welcomed for his courageous stand for democracy and granted asylum in Australia. It is a profound irony that he is now experiencing levels of surveillance and harassment that have some parallels with his treatment by Iranian authorities.

In recent conversations with writer and trauma worker Janet Galbraith, he has said that when he sailed for Australia, he was happy because, "I knew Australia as a modern and democratic country. I thought that when I arrived in Australia they would accept me as a journalist. When I arrived at Christmas Island I said: 'I am a journalist', but I did not get any respectful response. I was wondering why it is not important for them that I am a writer. When they transferred me to Manus, I said to immigration: 'Don't exile me. Don't send me to Manus, I am a writer.' They did not care."

PEN International, a worldwide association of writers with members in more than 100 countries, has this week launched an international campaign on behalf of Boochani in collaboration with Reporters Without Borders and a range of human rights groups in Australia.

Arnold Zable is a Melbourne writer and immediate past president of PEN Melbourne.

 

JEREMY CORBYN'S SPEECH ON BEING ELECTED LABOUR PARTY LEADER IN THE UK

Jeremy Corbyn, Parliament Square, London
    September 12, 2015

I’ve never seen Parliament Square looking so filled, so beautiful and so 
happy as on this day. Thank you all for being here today.

When I was declared elected three and a half hours ago, I announced to 
our conference that my first action in this new position as leader of 
the Labour Party would be to come to a demonstration in support of 
refugees, the right to asylum and the human needs of people all over the 
world.

And I do that because we are all humans, we all have a sense of decency 
and humanity and reaching out to others. And I am shocked beyond 
appalled at the way so many and so much of our media over so long, 
endlessly describe desperate people in desperate situations as ‘the 
problem’; desperate people in desperate situations, as people who are 
trying to travel or move illegally.

Those desperate people in desperate situations are all over the world. 
There are more of them now than at any time ever in the recorded history 
of this planet.

They’re victims of war, they’re victims of environmental degradation, 
they’re victims of poverty, they’re victims of human rights abuses all 
over the world.

We have a responsibility as one of many countries that signed the 1951 
Geneva Convention on the Right to Asylum. We are a country that is a 
member, obviously, of the UN, but also of the Refugee Council and the 
Human Rights Council.

And we therefore have a responsibility to ensure those people are 
properly cared for and properly supported.

And so I think it’s quite incredible what has happened across Europe in 
the past few weeks. Suddenly a lot of politicians have rediscovered 
their principles of humanity. They’ve rediscovered that you don’t need 
to walk in fear of the far right and racists – there is actually a 
popular uprising in favour of decency and humanity in our society.

To those who managed to try to get into Hungary, to get through Austria, 
to get into Germany, I say to the ordinary people, the ordinary decent 
people in Hungary, who came out of their homes to offer food and water 
and clothing and health and sustenance and comfort to Syrian people 
going through the most terrible stress and distress in their lives, 
thank you very much for your demonstration of humanity.

I also say thank you to the people in Austria who did the same, and I 
say thank you to Germany, for being prepared to take the numbers of 
refugees they are, and showing the way that should be followed.

I also say that we need to have a thought as to why people end up in 
such desperate situations. I’ve been in parliament a long time and I’ve 
seen many decisions taken. And in moments of clamor and moments of 
fervor, decisions are made – go here, invade there, bomb there, do this, 
do that.

It’s the easy situation, the media build it up, there’s lots of military 
advice, there’s lots of apparently simple and easy solutions. Tragically 
wars don’t end when the last bullet is fired, or the last bomb is dropped.

The mourning and the loss of soldiers of all uniforms goes on. The 
mourning and the loss of families that lost loved ones because of 
bombardments and fighting – that goes on.

The refugees move on and on, and there are whole generations of refugees 
around the world that are victims of various wars. Those desperate 
people in camps in Lebanon, in Jordan, in Libya and so many other 
places, desperate people trying to cross into Turkey and other places – 
they are all, in a sense, victims of wars.

So surely, surely, surely, our objectives ought to be to find peaceful 
solutions to the problems of this world; to spend our resources on 
helping people not hindering people; and to try and bring about that 
world of decency, human rights and justice.

And so none of this is simple, and none of this is easy. But surely we 
have a principle between us all – that we are all human beings on the 
same planet. We’re all human beings who want to live. We’re all human 
beings who want the children who live in the next generation to 
hopefully be better off than we are.

And you think of those families eking out an existence in refugee camps 
all around the world – they too are ambitious. Their children too want 
to be artists, poets, writers, engineers, lawyers, journalists… doctors 
and everything else.

The waste of human resources by the lack of human rights is one of the 
great crimes of the last and this century.

So today, here in Parliament Square, we as ordinary, decent people, 
stand up and say to our government, recognise your obligations in law. 
That would be good. Recognise your obligations to help people, which 
you’re required to do by law. That would be good.

But above all, open your hearts and open your minds and open your 
attitudes, towards supporting people who are desperate, who need 
somewhere safe to live, want to contribute to our society and are human 
beings just like all of us.

Together in peace, together in justice, together in humanity - that 
surely must be our way forward.

DEAR LIFE (QUARTERLY ESSAY) COMMENTS ON CORRESPONDENCE

In Quarterly Essay No. 57, Karen Hitchcock, a doctor, wrote about aged care and many of the issues involved, financial and others, and what should be considered for the future with an ageing population.

As is usual practice with the Quarterly Essays, people are asked to respond to the essay just published and the responses are published in the following Quarterly Essay. in this case N0. 58, and the writer of the essay being responded to has a right of reply to the published letters and that right of reply is at the end of the rest of the correspondence.

There were 10 published responses and Karen Hitchcock's response was, in fact, number 11.

As stated previously, Hitchcock is a doctor. Of the 10 responses, 7 are by doctors, one is by a Fairfax journalist who writes on finance and economics, one is by an ex-senator who is currently Age and Disability Discrimination Commissioner, and one is a well-known writer who is herself in an aged care facility, and so writes from a position of practical experience of the aged care system.

There were no published responses from "the common herd" and people such as my partner and myself were not included in the correspondence.

It seems to me that this then begs the question as to who is writing for whom, and whether there were other letter-writers who are also not people in the public arena and whose voices remain unheard.

Our response was comprehensive and covered much ground of our day to day experiences, including living our lives as two openly gay very old geriatrics.

To me this means that much of what needed to be discussed has now been omitted and the exercise is therefore not successful in terms of outcomes.

Of course the Quarterly Essay allows only limited space and therefore there is a limit to what can be included, so it is somewhat of an exercise in futility, because it is such a vast subject and so much research still needs to be done.

My essay in response was published by me in this blog and can be found under GLTH Ageing and Quarterly Essay on 6 JUNE 2016.

CHELSEA MANNING AND BARACK OBAMA PART 2

Chelsea Manning has appeared in a rigged kangaroo court of the US military and charged with some of the most ridiculous nonsense that a military prison system and possible conjure up.

Chelsea has already endured years of military abuse and political abuse because the president of the United States of America has seen fit to prosecute a soldier for crimes committed by the US government and US army.

Is Chelsea going to be kept in the disgusting circumstances of the military prison system until the whole of her 35 years sentence is completed and suffering the indignities of those court cases such as the one recently trumped up - you know, the expired tube of empty toothpaste - what an absurdity - and what has the president done to stop this nonsense?

Obama finishes his term of office in 2016 and leaves that position as one of the worst presidents in US history, Considering how many criminal and other bad presidents there have been since the north fought the south and won and "united" the country as the United States of America, some 250 odd years ago, that is quite some achievement - of the wrong sort!

CHELSEA MANNING AND BARACK OBAMA PART 1

When Barack Obama became president of the United States of America he made some promises which he broke soon after the election and soon after he became the president in that election.

Obama promised to close Guanatanamo Bay Concentration camp in 2008. We are now in 2015 and Guantanamo is still open despite the current thaw between the US and Cuba.

Obama promised a fair deal and support for whistleblowers. Think of Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, Edward Snowden and many others. Their treatment at the hands of the US administration has been criminal and the current behaviour towards Chelsea Manning is not only criminal but human rights abuses of the worst kind.

It is not Chelsea Manning who should be behind bars but Barack Obama and those who have supported him through these travesties of justice in which this young person is being treated worse than some of the US mass murderers and the processes by which guns are more or less freely distributed in the US to anyone who wants them.

Chelsea Manning should not have been sent to Iraq in the first place. That in itself was an abuse of power, and it only got worse stage after stage in the process.

And what about the whole story with Julian Assange and many of those in the USA who have been locked up whistleblowers.

The so-called greatest democracy on earth which supports the greatest apartheid state on earth Israel and punishes in concentration camps growing smaller by the day as their lands are stolen in large chunks for Jewish religious fanatics who mostly come from the USA.

Barack Obama's legacy will not be one to be credited with any great achievements.

But the treatment of Chelsea Manning is one of the darkest episodes in modern USA history.

WINDOWS 10 - DISASTER ONCE MORE FROM MICROSOFT

When I bought a new PC a few years ago it came with windows 7 installed. The shop where I bought the computer advised that windows 6 was being released in a few months' time and would be able to be downloaded for a small amount of $15.

Who could refuse an offer like that! - although I know nothing about windows 8 at that stage.

However, ever a glutton for punishment I bought and installed windows 8.

Disaster of course hit immediately and I found windows 8 unworkable. My mini notebook had windows xp installed - thank goodness - and when I had trouble on the PC with windows 8 I did what I needed to do on the mini.

Looking on the web I discovered that I was not alone in having problems with windows 8 and some enterprising developers had developed a start button to install and life with windows 8 improved considerably.

Then came windows 8.1 which improved matters somewhat.

When windows 10 was announced as a free download if one had 7, 8 or 8.1 installed I thought that 10 could not possibly be worse than what I had been struggling with on my PC, but how wrong could one possibly be!!

To start with, two of the uppercase symbols seem to have been changed around so that the @ symbol is now where the " symbol is and vice versa!

Then the sidebar almost disappears when one uses it and it becomes impossible to find where it has disappeared to.

The next problem appeared in my ftp programme which I have been using for the last 10 years and more.

In order to upload pages to the web from one's local documents one has them loaded onto a notepad page which then gets uploaded with its contents to the web for everyone to have access to - except that windows 10 has made alterations to my ftp programme and I am now not able to access my notepad pages and so am unable to upload anything on my windows 10 PC.

Thank goodness for my old windows xp computers - and thank goodness I have now got a new laptop with linux installed.

Ultimately I will get rid of windows for ever and start having peace of mind. If windows continues going from one disaster to another, I don't want to be one of the guinea pigs! 

I have now just discovered that I am unable to save word documents in word as I have been doing for years! What is the next disaster I will be facing?

Thank goodness for my LINUX laptop!