Apple’s Steve Jobs Didn’t Let His Own Children Use iPads

This piece originally appeared at the New York Times

When Steve Jobs was running Apple, he was known to call journalists to either pat them on the back for a recent article or, more often than not, explain how they got it wrong. I was on the receiving end of a few of those calls. But nothing shocked me more than something Mr. Jobs said to me in late 2010 after he had finished chewing me out for something I had written about an iPad shortcoming.

“So, your kids must love the iPad?” I asked Mr. Jobs, trying to change the subject. The company’s first tablet was just hitting the shelves. “They haven’t used it,” he told me. “We limit how much technology our kids use at home.”

I’m sure I responded with a gasp and dumbfounded silence. I had imagined the Jobs’s household was like a nerd’s paradise: that the walls were giant touch screens, the dining table was made from tiles of iPads and that iPods were handed out to guests like chocolates on a pillow.

Nope, Mr. Jobs told me, not even close.

Since then, I’ve met a number of technology chief executives and venture capitalists who say similar things: they strictly limit their children’s screen time, often banning all gadgets on school nights, and allocating ascetic time limits on weekends.

I was perplexed by this parenting style. After all, most parents seem to take the opposite approach, letting their children bathe in the glow of tablets, smartphones and computers, day and night.

Yet these tech C.E.O.’s seem to know something that the rest of us don’t.

Chris Anderson, the former editor of Wired and now chief executive of 3D Robotics, a drone maker, has instituted time limits and parental controls on every device in his home. “My kids accuse me and my wife of being fascists and overly concerned about tech, and they say that none of their friends have the same rules,” he said of his five children, 6 to 17. “That’s because we have seen the dangers of technology firsthand. I’ve seen it in myself, I don’t want to see that happen to my kids.”

The dangers he is referring to include exposure to harmful content like pornography, bullying from other kids, and perhaps worse of all, becoming addicted to their devices, just like their parents.

Alex Constantinople, the chief executive of the OutCast Agency, a tech-focused communications and marketing firm, said her youngest son, who is 5, is never allowed to use gadgets during the week, and her older children, 10 to 13, are allowed only 30 minutes a day on school nights.

Evan Williams, a founder of Blogger, Twitter and Medium, and his wife, Sara Williams, said that in lieu of iPads, their two young boys have hundreds of books (yes, physical ones) that they can pick up and read anytime.

So how do tech moms and dads determine the proper boundary for their children? In general, it is set by age.

Children under 10 seem to be most susceptible to becoming addicted, so these parents draw the line at not allowing any gadgets during the week. On weekends, there are limits of 30 minutes to two hours on iPad and smartphone use. And 10- to 14-year-olds are allowed to use computers on school nights, but only for homework.

“We have a strict no screen time during the week rule for our kids,” said Lesley Gold, founder and chief executive of the SutherlandGold Group, a tech media relations and analytics company. “But you have to make allowances as they get older and need a computer for school.”

Some parents also forbid teenagers from using social networks, except for services like Snapchat, which deletes messages after they have been sent. This way they don’t have to worry about saying something online that will haunt them later in life, one executive told me.

Although some non-tech parents I know give smartphones to children as young as 8, many who work in tech wait until their child is 14. While these teenagers can make calls and text, they are not given a data plan until 16. But there is one rule that is universal among the tech parents I polled.While some tech parents assign limits based on time, others are much stricter about what their children are allowed to do with screens.

Ali Partovi, a founder of iLike and adviser to Facebook, Dropbox and Zappos, said there should be a strong distinction between time spent “consuming,” like watching YouTube or playing video games, and time spent “creating” on screens.

“Just as I wouldn’t dream of limiting how much time a kid can spend with her paintbrushes, or playing her piano, or writing, I think it’s absurd to limit her time spent creating computer art, editing video, or computer programming,” he said.

Others said that outright bans could backfire and create a digital monster.

Dick Costolo, chief executive of Twitter, told me he and his wife approved of unlimited gadget use as long as their two teenage children were in the living room. They believe that too many time limits could have adverse effects on their children.

“When I was at the University of Michigan, there was this guy who lived in the dorm next to me and he had cases and cases of Coca-Cola and other sodas in his room,” Mr. Costolo said. “I later found out that it was because his parents had never let him have soda when he was growing up. If you don’t let your kids have some exposure to this stuff, what problems does it cause later?”

I never asked Mr. Jobs what his children did instead of using the gadgets he built, so I reached out to Walter Isaacson, the author of “Steve Jobs,” who spent a lot of time at their home.

“Every evening Steve made a point of having dinner at the big long table in their kitchen, discussing books and history and a variety of things,” he said. “No one ever pulled out an iPad or computer. The kids did not seem addicted at all to devices.”

 

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U.S. Military Seeks To Brain Scan Troops For “Signs Of Potential Betrayal”

The Sleuth Journal

The massive investment in neuroscience undertaken by the U.S.BRAIN project and its sister initiative the Human Brain Project is increasingly taking a turn toward the examination of mental health

In fact, hundreds of European scientists working on the project arethreatening a boycott because of this direction. In their view, the initial directive was to be more focused on repairing organic injuries and disorders such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and physical brain damage sustained in accidents. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder would be one area that might involve the military.
However, there is a disturbing trend developing in law enforcement and medicine to use what has been learned about the human brain in order to adopt pre-crime systems and predictive behavior technology.
But could a brain scan become standard procedure to see which troops might be inclined to commit insider attacks?
Troops overseas have been working alongside Iraqi and Afghan troops for years, but a new interest is being taken in evaluating potential extremists who are infiltrating to kill from within.
The numbers of these incidents are statistically low as reported by Defense One, which cites the inside killing of “several troops in recent years.” But a former Army counterintelligence agent sees the opportunity to apply new technology that presumably can screen people for mal-intent. The system is called HandShake:

Here’s how the HandShake system works: A U.S. soldier would take, say, an Iraqi officer and outfit the subject with a special helmet that can pick up both electromagnetic signals (EEG) and perform functional near-infrared imaging (fNIRs) which images blood flow changes in the brain. The soldier would put the subject through a battery of tests including image recognition. Most of the pictures in the tests would be benign, but a few would contain scenes that a potential insider threat would remember, possibly including faces, locations or even bomb parts. The key is to select these images very, very carefully to cut down on the potential false positives.

[...]

When you recognize a picture that’s of emotional significanceto you, your brain experiences a 200 to 500 microsecond hiccup, during which the electromagnetic activity drops, measurable via EEG. The reaction, referred to as the P300 response, happens too fast for the test subject to control, so the subject can’t game the system.
The fNIR readings back up the EEG numbers. Together, they speak to not only whether or not a subject is a traitor but howlikely an individual is to act on potentially criminal or treasonous impulses. The system then runs all the data through what Veritas calls a Friend or Foe Algorithm. The output: the ability to pinpoint an insider’s threat potential with 80 to 90 percent accuracy, according to the company. (Source) [emphasis added]

The company, Veritas, has issued the following video promo for their system:
It’s obviously ironic that this system is intended to be used on people who never should have encountered the U.S. military in the first place, since the U.S. military arrived based on lies. Moreover, to those flagged by such a system, they are clearly open to being tortured under the policies that have been established in the War on Terror world in which we live.
This system comes at an expense in excess of $1 million dollars to deploy and $500,000 per month thereafter, per site, according to the company’s founder. Both the monetary cost and the ethical costs should ensure that this technology never sees the light of day. However, the military-industrial complex has a provable track record of caring very little about either.
Note: The article linked below demonstrates how the biometric identification system in Afghanistan already has trickled down to the streets of America. If brain scanning technology is successful overseas, it is guaranteed to show up inside the United States. It’s already been proposed for air travel and other applications under theFAST system (Future Attribute Screening Technology). Additionally, with the increased war on whistleblowers, this would be a wonderful tool for employers to weed out those whose desire is not to undermine, but simply to expose criminality.

Google’s next plan: Collect medical data to create a detailed map of a healthy human being

This piece originally appeared at Salon.

The project is known as Baseline Study stands at the junction of privacy and medical discovery

Google already has vast troves of data — from consumer habits, to Streetview maps, to music preferences, and of course an elaborate search engine — and proven adept at not only storing and sifting through it, but putting that data to work.
This week the tech giant announced that its next data collecting effort is in a different realm: human health. The Wall Street Journal initially broke the story, and described it as Google’s “most ambitious and difficult science project ever: a quest inside the human body.”
The project is part of Google X — the company’s longer-term projects — and is named Baseline Study. The study will anonymously collect molecular and genetic information from 175 people to paint a picture of a healthy human being — and hope to eventually collect data from thousands. The Wall Street Journal reports:

“The early-stage project is run by Andrew Conrad, a 50-year-old molecular biologist who pioneered cheap, high-volume tests for HIV in blood-plasma donations.
“Dr. Conrad joined Google X—the company’s research arm—in March 2013, and he has built a team of about 70-to-100 experts from fields including physiology, biochemistry, optics, imaging and molecular biology.
“Other mass medical and genomics studies exist. But Baseline will amass a much larger and broader set of new data. The hope is that this will help researchers detect killers such as heart disease and cancer far earlier, pushing medicine more toward prevention rather than the treatment of illness.”

The hope is that after sorting through enough data, Google’s computing network can detect “biomarkers” or patters in human health. These “biomarkers” could help doctors with early detection of diseases, or help study other body functions.
The obvious concern is privacy. Using Google services is already an acknowledged, if not uneasy, tradeoff of product in exchange for user data. And health information — arguably the most human of all data — is being turned over to a giant corporate machine. And what if the data ends up outside of Google’s hands? And into the hands of a future spouse? A future employer looking to discriminate based on health issues? An insurance company deciding not to cover you?
Picturing Big Pharma, with Big Insurance collaborating with Big Tech — it has the makings of a science fiction movie.

However, the Verge reports that “Google has clarified the medical data it receives will be anonymous by the time it gets its hands on it, and specified that such information would not be shared with insurance firms.”
The Wall Street Journal also spoke to a Stanford doctor Sam Gambhir, who has been working with Google on Baseline Study. Gambhir told the Wall Street Journal that privacy has been discussed. “Google will not be allowed free rein to do whatever it wants with this data,” he said.
The health applications, and potential life-saving discoveries are the possible and exciting outcomes of such a project — from detecting disease to understanding patterns of our bodies.
However, though the Wall Street Journal reports that project does not deliver a specific product, there are still many questions. Will health data in Baseline Study eventually be monetized? Will it be sold to pharmaceutical companies or hospitals? Do we care?

Mind Control Scientists Turn Off Emotional Link to Memories

Nicholas West
Activist Post

It is becoming increasingly clear that advancements in genetics and neuroscience are leading toward direct methods of mind control. An array of hi-tech methods have been announced - magnetic manipulation via "neural dust,"  high-powered lasers, and using light beamed from outside the skull. As a result, scientists are making bold claims that they can alter the brain even to the extent of turning off consciousness altogether.

But it is memory research that might be among the most troubling. As I've previously stated in other articles, our memories help us form our identity: who we are relative to where we have been. Positive or negative lessons from the past can be integrated into our present decisions, thus enabling us to form sound strategies and behaviors that can aid us in our quest for personal evolution. But what if we never knew what memories were real or false? What if our entire narrative was changed by having our life's events restructured? Or what if there were memories that were traumatic enough to be buried as a mechanism of sanity preservation, only to be brought back to us in a lab?

We've already witnessed research into the erasure of memories, the implantation of false memories, and triggering memories of fear when none previously existed. (Source) MIT researchers are now claiming to have found the specific brain switch that links emotions to memory. Once again, the temptation of helping those who have experienced trauma might open doors to very unethical applications.

I've highlighted and commented on some of the key areas in the MIT press release below which, to me, illustrate a clear potential for erasing many of the memories that we often associate with building strength of character, or could aid in our future development - morally, ethically, and spiritually. This research threatens to create a race of happy zombies devoid of natural emotion if a proper ethical framework is not established. In fact, much like the happy pills of Big Pharma, MIT admits that these findings could lead not only to direct intervention via manipulation of brain cells through light, but a new class of drugs to treat Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

However, notice the very first example: bullying. I'll admit that this can be stressful and perhaps traumatic for some, but where would one draw the line? Anyone who receives an insult or hurt feelings just takes a pill or laser blasts the memory away? It's also a path toward literally erasing history. How about victims of torture? Sure, who wants to remember that, but what if scientists could erase that memory, thus eliminating future testimony against those committing such atrocities?

Read this press release for yourself and please offer your own questions and concerns in the comment section below.

by Anne Trafton - MIT News Office

Most memories have some kind of emotion associated with them: Recalling the week you just spent at the beach probably makes you feel happy, while reflecting on being bullied provokes more negative feelings.

A new study from MIT neuroscientists reveals the brain circuit that controls how memories become linked with positive or negative emotions. Furthermore, the researchers found that they could reverse the emotional association of specific memories by manipulating brain cells with optogenetics — a technique that uses light to control neuron activity.

The findings, described in the Aug. 27 issue of Nature, demonstrated that a neuronal circuit connecting the hippocampus and the amygdala plays a critical role in associating emotion with memory. This circuit could offer a target for new drugs to help treat conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder, the researchers say.

“In the future, one may be able to develop methods that help people to remember positive memories more strongly than negative ones,” says Susumu Tonegawa, the Picower Professor of Biology and Neuroscience, director of the RIKEN-MIT Center for Neural Circuit Genetics at MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, and senior author of the paper.

The paper’s lead authors are Roger Redondo, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute postdoc at MIT, and Joshua Kim, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Biology.

Shifting memories

Memories are made of many elements, which are stored in different parts of the brain. A memory’s context, including information about the location where the event took place, is stored in cells of the hippocampus, while emotions linked to that memory are found in the amygdala.

Previous research has shown that many aspects of memory, including emotional associations, are malleable. Psychotherapists have taken advantage of this to help patients suffering from depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, but the neural circuitry underlying such malleability is not known.

In this study, the researchers set out to explore that malleability with an experimental technique they recently devised that allows them to tag neurons that encode a specific memory, or engram. To achieve this, they label hippocampal cells that are turned on during memory formation with a light-sensitive protein called channelrhodopsin. From that point on, any time those cells are activated with light, the mice recall the memory encoded by that group of cells.

Last year, Tonegawa’s lab used this technique to implant, or “incept,” false memories in mice by reactivating engrams while the mice were undergoing a different experience. In the new study, the researchers wanted to investigate how the context of a memory becomes linked to a particular emotion. First, they used their engram-labeling protocol to tag neurons associated with either a rewarding experience (for male mice, socializing with a female mouse) or an unpleasant experience (a mild electrical shock). In this first set of experiments, the researchers labeled memory cells in a part of the hippocampus called the dentate gyrus.

Two days later, the mice were placed into a large rectangular arena. For three minutes, the researchers recorded which half of the arena the mice naturally preferred. Then, for mice that had received the fear conditioning, the researchers stimulated the labeled cells in the dentate gyrus with light whenever the mice went into the preferred side. The mice soon began avoiding that area, showing that the reactivation of the fear memory had been successful.

The reward memory could also be reactivated (think social engineering - N.W.): For mice that were reward-conditioned, the researchers stimulated them with light whenever they went into the less-preferred side, and they soon began to spend more time there, recalling the pleasant memory.

A couple of days later, the researchers tried to reverse the mice’s emotional responses. For male mice that had originally received the fear conditioning, they activated the memory cells involved in the fear memory with light for 12 minutes while the mice spent time with female mice. For mice that had initially received the reward conditioning, memory cells were activated while they received mild electric shocks (trauma-based mind control - N.W.).

Next, the researchers again put the mice in the large two-zone arena. This time, the mice that had originally been conditioned with fear and had avoided the side of the chamber where their hippocampal cells were activated by the laser now began to spend more time in that side when their hippocampal cells were activated, showing that a pleasant association had replaced the fearful one. This reversal also took place in mice that went from reward to fear conditioning.

Altered connections

The researchers then performed the same set of experiments but labeled memory cells in the basolateral amygdala, a region involved in processing emotions. This time, they could not induce a switch by reactivating those cells — the mice continued to behave as they had been conditioned when the memory cells were first labeled.

This suggests that emotional associations, also called valences, are encoded somewhere in the neural circuitry that connects the dentate gyrus to the amygdala, the researchers say. A fearful experience strengthens the connections between the hippocampal engram and fear-encoding cells in the amygdala, but that connection can be weakened later on as new connections are formed between the hippocampus and amygdala cells that encode positive associations.

“That plasticity of the connection between the hippocampus and the amygdala plays a crucial role in the switching of the valence of the memory,” Tonegawa says.

These results indicate that while dentate gyrus cells are neutral with respect to emotion, individual amygdala cells are precommitted to encode fear or reward memory. The researchers are now trying to discover molecular signatures of these two types of amygdala cells. They are also investigating whether reactivating pleasant memories has any effect on depression, in hopes of identifying new targets for drugs to treat depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.

David Anderson, a professor of biology at the California Institute of Technology, says the study makes an important contribution to neuroscientists’ fundamental understanding of the brain and also has potential implications for treating mental illness. (What is mental illness? We've heard increasing discussion about how conspiracy theories and independent thinking - Oppositional Defiant Disorder - might need treatment.)

“This is a tour de force of modern molecular-biology-based methods for analyzing processes, such as learning and memory, at the neural-circuitry level. It’s one of the most sophisticated studies of this type that I’ve seen,” he says.

The research was funded by the RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the JPB Foundation.

The war inside the war in Afghanistan

Jon Rappoport
Activist Post

Well, there are several wars inside the war in Afghanistan. Ensuring the flow of opium to the world. Having US bases close to Russia. Protecting and gobbling up vast mineral reserves. Keeping alive the proposed oil pipeline.

Still another war is quite different. It’s a test program, through which the US Armed Forces is trying to obtain a biometric record of every human living in Afghanistan.

It doesn’t take a genius to connect the dots, to realize the program is applicable to other countries, including the US and its ubiquitous Surveillance State.

The US Army document that spells out the strategy is titled, “Commander’s Guide to Biometrics in Afghanistan: Observations, Insights, and Lessons.”

It is marked: “US Unclassified/For Official Use Only; Exempt From Mandatory Disclosure under FOIA Exemptions 2 and 5.” The document and an accompanying report are posted at publicintelligence.net, here.

Through the use of cameras, electronic devices, fingerprinting, DNA collection, and personal interviews, the Army is striving to achieve a mind-boggling goal: identify and profile every one of the 25 million people living in the cities, villages, rugged mountains, and crevices of Afghanistan. The profiles of individuals include an assessment of threat-risk.

Here are several key quotes from the publicintelligence.net report:

“The stated goal of the Afghan effort is no less than the collection of biometric data for every person living in Afghanistan.”


“All biometric data collected in Afghanistan is ultimately sent back to the DOD’s Automated Biometric Identification System (ABIS) located in West Virginia, where it is stored and also shared with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and FBI. Partnerships with other nations also allow the DOD to run data against biometrics collected by foreign governments and law enforcement.”

“[The Commander’s Guide] advises soldiers to ‘enroll everyone’ including the dead, from which DNA is often collected using buccal swabs to capture the cells that line the mouth…[The] ‘payoff to U.S. and coalition forces is so great in terms of securing the population and identification of bad actors in the country, that commanders must be creative and persistent in their efforts to enroll as many Afghans as possible.’”

“The U.S. military currently uses three devices for collecting the bulk of the biometric data harvested in Afghanistan: the Biometrics Automated Toolset (BAT), Handheld Interagency Identity Detection Equipment (HIIDE) and Secure Electronic Enrollment Kit (SEEK). The BAT is used primarily by the Army and Marine Corps and consists of a laptop computer and separate peripherals for collecting fingerprints, scanning irises, and taking photographs. The HIIDE is more mobile, providing a handheld device capable of collecting fingerprints, scanning irises and taking photographs. Like the BAT, the HIIDE can connect to a network of approximately 150 servers throughout Afghanistan to upload and download current biometric information and watchlists.”

Many lessons will be learned in this monumental effort, among them strategies for identifying, recording, and assessing the identity of humans living in all parts of world where populations are scattered and technology is primitive.

No doubt there are IT people and technocrats at the Pentagon and the NSA who consider the biometric identification project more important, in the long run, than the shooting war in Afghanistan.

Their lunatic goal is the tracking and control of every human on the planet.

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at www.nomorefakenews.com

Even through the 1950s Africans and Native Americans were actually kept in zoos as exhibits.

Counter Current News

Throughout the late 19th century, and well into the 1950′s, Africans and in some cases Native Americans, were kept as exhibits in zoos. Far from a relic from an unenlightened past, remnants of such exhibits have continued in Europe as late as the 2000′s.

Throughout the early 20th century, Germany held what was termed a, “Peoples Show,” or Völkerschau. Africans were brought in as carnival or zoo exhibits for passers-by to gawk at.

Only decades before, in the late 1800′s, Europe had been filled with, “human zoos,” in cities like Paris, Hamburg, Antwerp, Barcelona, London, Milan, and Warsaw. New York too saw these popular exhibits continue into the 20th century. There was an average of 200,000 to 300,000 visitors who attended each exhibition in each city.

Carl Hagenbeck of Germany ran exhibits of what he called, “purely natural,” populations, usually East Asian Islanders, but in 1876, he also sent a collaborator to the Sudan to bring back, “wild beasts and Nubians.” The traveling Nubian exhibit was a huge success in cities like Paris, London, and Berlin.

The World’s Fair, in 1889 was visited by 28 million people, who lined up to see 400 indigenous people as the major attraction. The 1900 World’s Fair followed suit, as did the Colonial Exhibitions in Marseilles (1906 and 1922) and in Paris (1907 and 1931) which displayed naked or semi-naked humans in cages. Paris saw 34 million people attend their exhibition in six months alone.

Just four years shy of the 20th century, the Cincinnati Zoo kept one hundred Sioux Native Americans in a mock village at the zoo for three months.

In 1906, the amateur anthropologist Madison Grant, who was the head of the New York Zoological Society, put a Congolese pygmy Ota Benga, on display at the Bronx Zoo in New York City. The display was in the primate exhibit, and Ota was often made to carry around chimpanzees and other apes. Eugenicist and zoo director William Hornaday labeled Ota, “The Missing Link.” The public flocked to see the display.

Ota Benga  at Bronx  Zoo

 

Benga shot targets with a bow and arrow, wove twine, and wrestled with an orangutan. Although, according to the New York Times, “few expressed audible objection to the sight of a human being in a cage with monkeys as companions,” controversy erupted as black clergymen in the city took great offense. “Our race, we think, is depressed enough, without exhibiting one of us with the apes,” said the Reverend James H. Gordon, superintendent of the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum in Brooklyn. “We think we are worthy of being considered human beings, with souls.”

In 1906, the Bronx Zoo kept Ota Benga on a human exhibit. The sign outside of her fenced in area of the primate exhibit read, “Age, 23 years. Height, 4 feet 11 inches. Weight, 103 pounds. Brought from the Kasai River, Congo Free State, South Central Africa, by Dr. Samuel P. Verner. Exhibited each afternoon during September.”

These sorts of, “human zoos,” continued even later. The Brussels 1958 World’s Fair kept a Congolese village on display. Even as late as April 1994, an Ivory Coast village was kept as part of an African safari in Port-Saint-Père (Planète Sauvage), near Nantes, France.

In Germany, as late as 2005, Augsburg’s zoo in Germany had similar exhibits. In August 2005, London Zoo also displayed humans wearing fig leaves, and in 2007, Adelaide Zoo housed people in a former ape enclosure by day. They were, of course, allowed to return home at night, unlike many of the earlier incarnations of these racist displays.

Many people console themselves with the belief that the racism of yesterday remains safely in the past. But the echoes of the, “human zoo,” into recent years show that this is far from the case. The racism of the past continues to bleed through into the present.

(Article by M.B. David)

Here's what Australia can learn from Uganda about handling refugees

This post originally appeared at GlobalPost.

The world is sitting by and watching in a state of disbelief at the “abhorrent” asylum policies of the Australian government, according to one of the world’s leading refugee and migration experts.
Alexander Betts, professor in refugee and forced migration studies at the UK's University of Oxford, says it’s time for the United Nations and Australia’s “silent majority” to speak out against human rights abuses under Prime Minister Tony Abbott.
“At the moment I think there’s almost a sense that because Australia is an otherwise liberal democratic state, somehow there’s a disbelief that its asylum policies can be quite as abhorrent as they are,” he says.
Betts contends that despite Tony Abbott’s anti-asylum seeker propaganda, refugees could actually be good for Australia, because their skills and entrepreneurial spirit could help create jobs and strengthen the economy.
Remarkably, he points to the refugee policy of Uganda — a country whose people on average earn less in a year than Australians do in a week — as a model for what Abbott should do.
The prime minister’s current strategy is one of rejecting and demonizing foreigners in need of shelter. His ongoing campaign to “stop the boats,” however, reached new lows this month with confirmation that Australia had handed asylum seekers back to Sri Lanka — the country from which they had sought refuge and one with a questionable human rights record of its own.
The UN described the move as “deeply disturbing,” while refugee advocacy groups issued a High Court challenge to try to prevent a second boatload from suffering the same fate.
Despite his own unpopularity, a recent poll suggests Abbott’s hardline stance on asylum remains popular among some Australians, with 36 percent approving of the government’s asylum policy.
The role model: Uganda
In contrast to Australia, Uganda gives refugees the right to work and freedom of movement. They have access to public services, including health centers and schools. And the government employs health workers and teachers to assist in settlement.
Betts is the lead author of a new report on Uganda that challenges the myth — perpetuated by Abbott and commonly accepted in Australia — that refugees are an economic burden.
The study, "Refugee Economics: Rethinking Popular Assumptions," found that refugees in Uganda are using economic freedom and social support to become self-sufficient. Rather than taking the jobs of locals, they are actually acting as job creators.
“Over 20 percent of the refugees we spoke to in Kampala were entrepreneurs employing other people, and of those that employed other people, 40 percent of their employees were Ugandan nationals,” says Betts.
“If we give them freedom and opportunities, refugees can make a positive contribution. If we restrict their ability to contribute, then we are likely to create a notion that they are a drain socially, politically, and economically.”
Uganda faces a far greater influx of refugees than Australia; in July 2013 alone, Uganda accepted more than 66,000 refugees fleeing civil unrest in the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo.
By comparison, UN figures show that throughout all of 2013, Australia received just 24,300 applications for asylum.

“We need to get things in perspective and recognize that the overwhelming majority of refugees — over 80 percent — are in the developing world,” says Betts. 
“It is often the countries with the least capacity that actually take on the greatest degree of responsibility to protect and assist refugees. The ability of the Ugandan government to contribute in terms of its economic situation is far lower than Australia’s, but they’ve taken pioneering steps with regard to refugee policy.”
Australian Asylum Seeker Resource Centre CEO Kon Karapanagiotidis agrees.
“We believe that asylum seekers and refugees are among the most resilient, entrepreneurial people on the planet,” he says.
Australia needs to create an infrastructure that allows refugees to overcome barriers to employment and self-reliance so they can thrive, he adds.

“The focus shouldn’t be on charity, but on supporting asylum seekers to use their skills, experiences, resilience and ingenuity,” says Karapanagiotidis.
He says the current Australian system is unfair and discriminates against so-called "boat people."
“While asylum seekers who arrive by plane are able to work while they await the outcome of their refugee application, many asylum seekers living in the community who have come to Australia by boat are not afforded work rights,” he says.
“Asylum seekers in general are not eligible to access Centrelink [employment benefits], and those who are permitted to work can’t access Job Services Australia support to help them find employment, nor can they access apprenticeship and traineeship schemes.”

Betts says the deprivation of the right to work is intended as a deterrent, “but it doesn’t work — it doesn’t stop people arriving.”
“Given how many of these people arriving by boat are refugees under the 1951 Refugee Convention definition, the sooner we can enable them to be self-reliant and make contributions through their work and their taxes, the earlier we can enable them to become part of the community.”
He says more research is needed to make an economic case for refugees.
“The kind of data we now have for Uganda just doesn’t exist in the Australian context,” he says. “It’s very rare that economists have done research on refugees and asylum seekers, but it’s very important [because] if we want to challenge the rhetoric of governments, we can show these assumptions and claims to be false with that data and evidence.”
Fixing Australia
Betts insists that Australians should reject Abbott’s policies. “Politics needs to give voice to the country’s silent majority, and that takes political courage and leadership by elected politicians to ... mobilize that set of people who recognize that it’s not acceptable to have refugees under international law in danger at sea and not having access to the territory of another state when they’re seeking international protection.
“Organizations like UNHCR [the UN’s refugee agency] and international NGOs [need to] make it clear that the policies being adopted by the Abbott government are a violation of human rights and international refugee law.”
He said it was also the responsibility of the country’s allies — including the United States and the United Kingdom — to quietly condemn via diplomatic channels Australia’s “clear violation of the minimum standards of human rights we expect of a civilized country.”