How to spot a baby conservative: new study says whiny kids more likely GOP

How to spot a baby conservative

Whiny children, claims a new study, tend to grow up rigid and traditional. Future liberals, on the other hand ...

KURT KLEINER
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Mar. 19, 2006. 10:45 AM

Remember the whiny, insecure kid in nursery school, the one who always thought everyone was out to get him, and was always running to the teacher with complaints? Chances are he grew up to be a conservative.

At least, he did if he was one of 95 kids from the Berkeley area that social scientists have been tracking for the last 20 years. The confident, resilient, self-reliant kids mostly grew up to be liberals.

The study from the Journal of Research Into Personality isn't going to make the UC Berkeley professor who published it any friends on the right. Similar conclusions a few years ago from another academic saw him excoriated on right-wing blogs, and even led to a Congressional investigation into his research funding.

But the new results are worth a look. In the 1960s Jack Block and his wife and fellow professor Jeanne Block (now deceased) began tracking more than 100 nursery school kids as part of a general study of personality. The kids' personalities were rated at the time by teachers and assistants who had known them for months. There's no reason to think political bias skewed the ratings — the investigators were not looking at political orientation back then. Even if they had been, it's unlikely that 3- and 4-year-olds would have had much idea about their political leanings.

A few decades later, Block followed up with more surveys, looking again at personality, and this time at politics, too. The whiny kids tended to grow up conservative, and turned into rigid young adults who hewed closely to traditional gender roles and were uncomfortable with ambiguity.

The confident kids turned out liberal and were still hanging loose, turning into bright, non-conforming adults with wide interests. The girls were still outgoing, but the young men tended to turn a little introspective.

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"I found it to be biased, shoddy work, poor science at best," he said of the Block study. He thinks insecure, defensive, rigid people can as easily gravitate to left-wing ideologies as right-wing ones. He suspects that in Communist China, those kinds of people would likely become fervid party members....Part of the answer is that personality is not the only factor that determines political leanings. For instance, there was a .27 correlation between being self-reliant in nursery school and being a liberal as an adult. Another way of saying it is that self-reliance predicts statistically about 7 per cent of the variance between kids who became liberal and those who became conservative. (If every self-reliant kid became a liberal and none became conservatives, it would predict 100 per cent of the variance). Seven per cent is fairly strong for social science, but it still leaves an awful lot of room for other influences, such as friends, family, education, personal experience and plain old intellect.

For conservatives whose feelings are still hurt, there is a more flattering way for them to look at the results. Even if they really did tend to be insecure complainers as kids, they might simply have recognized that the world is a scary, unfair place.

Their grown-up conclusion that the safest thing is to stick to tradition could well be the right one. As for their "rigidity," maybe that's just moral certainty.

ANNIVERSARY OF THE TIANANMEN CRACKDOWN (Senate - June 04, 1991)

Mr. KENNEDY. Mr. President, I want to commend our majority leader for, really, an excellent statement and a principled stand. This has been his position since the time of that terrible tragedy in Tiananmen Square some 2 years ago. I think this morning in the Senate he has, as on other occasions on our national television, I think, made the strongest possible case for insisting that any most-favored-nation provisions would be conditioned upon important progress in addressing these needs.

I just ask the majority leader if he is familiar with the statement of the Prime Minister, Premier Lee Pung, who only at the time of the anniversary, just recently, insisted that the military crackdown had been an appropriate response to the peaceful student protest, and the Chinese Government would do it again if they were faced with a similar demonstration? I think he has made the case so well in covering a wide variety of areas. But the attitude of the current Chinese Government regime would certainly appear they would be prepared to do it again today if he is not troubled by that attitude as well.

Mr. President, as has been pointed out, 2 years ago today the Government of the People's Republic of China initiated a brutal crackdown on the courageous prodemocracy students demonstrating in Tiananmen Square. By the end of the week, hundreds of peaceful demonstrators had been ruthlessly slaughtered and thousands more had been detained by government authorities.

Now, President Bush has formally announced his intention to renew most-favored-nation trading status with China. His decision, he claims, is the right thing to do with respect to China.
Unfortunately, the facts indicate otherwise. Since the Tiananmen Square massacre, the Chinese Government has intensified its repression of prodemocracy forces.

As this year's anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre approached, the Premier of China, Lee Pung, commented upon that great tragedy. He harshly insisted that the military crackdown had been an appropriate response to the peaceful student protest and that the Chinese Government would do it again if similar demonstrations were attempted in the future.

Today, Tiananmen Square is lined with armed guards to repress even the smallest demonstration of sympathy for the memory of those who died there 2 years ago.

To renew China's MFN status in the face of this brutality would make a mockery of the lives lost at Tiananmen Square and undermine whatever forces of democracy are still struggling for a new China.
President Bush's policy toward China makes no sense. Immediately following the Tiananmen crackdown, he promised to suspend all political-level exchanges with China. Yet within a month, he dispatched National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft to Beijing--a trip that was kept secret from the Congress and the American people and was only acknowledged after it was reported by the press in December.

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http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?r102:S04JN1-33 :

What America Exports: Paper, Waste and Jobs

Still No Jobs

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
November 8, 2005

EXCERPT…

Powerful lobbies that benefit from low cost foreign labor have invested heavily in public relations campaigns to create the impression that American jobs have to be outsourced and foreign workers brought into the US because there are shortages of US engineers, scientists, nurses and school teachers. It is amazing that the occupations in which shortages are alleged to exist are the very occupations in which qualified Americans cannot find jobs.

Many economists mistakenly claim that offshore outsourcing and work visas for foreigners benefit Americans by lowering costs. But no country benefits from the loss of high productivity, high value-added occupations. The US runs trade deficits in manufactured goods and advanced technology products. Last year the US trade deficit in advanced technology products was $36,857,000,000. As of August of this year, the US trade deficit in advanced technology products is running 26% higher than in 2004.

America's volume exports are paper, waste paper, agricultural products and chemicals.

The October 28 issue of Manufacturing & Technology News reports that Procter & Gamble, General Electric, Ford, Kimberly Clark, Caterpillar, Goodyear, General Motors, USG, Honeywell, Alcoa and Kodak combined exported 269,600 containers of goods in 2004. Wal-Mart alone imported 576,000 containers of goods.

The US allegedly is a superpower with a highly developed economy.

China is a newly developing country not far from third world status.

You might think that China would be running huge trade deficits with the US as China imports the goods and services necessary to continue its economic development and to serve consumer wants. The trade statistics, however, tell a different story. Last year the US imported $196,682,000,000 in goods and services from China and exported a mere $34,744,100,000 to China. The American "superpower's" trade deficit with China came to $161,938,000,000. To put this figure in perspective, America's trade deficit with China is 28% higher than American's total oil import bill.

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http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts11082005.html

The Bush family: Middle Kingdom rainmakers

By Zach Coleman

HONG KONG - George Herbert Walker Bush arrived in Beijing 30 years ago as the official United States representative to China with one goal above all else: expanding his buddy list.

"My hyper-adrenaline, political instincts tell me that the fun of this job is going to be to try to make more contacts," he wrote in his first diary entry. "And it is my hope that I will be able to meet the next generation of China's leaders - whomever they may be. Yet everyone tells me that that is impossible."

Bush Sr, already a champion networker, wasn't to be denied. In a final triumph at the end of his stay, Deng Xiaoping, then vice premier, threw a farewell lunch for Bush Sr and his wife.

"You are our old friends," said Deng, according to a Chinese government website. "You are welcome to come back anytime in the future."

Bush Sr and his relatives have turned that open invitation into a family franchise over the years, setting themselves up as gatekeepers between lucrative business opportunities created by the opening up of China's economy and the US corporate and political establishment. If Iraq is the place where the Bush men fight once they leave the oil fields of Texas, China is where they have made money.

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http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/FE21Ad01.html

Libby & Nuclear Secrets to China

By Robert Parry
November 4, 2005


Indicted ex-White House aide Lewis Libby played a key role in an earlier case of slanting U.S. intelligence for political gain – four years before the Iraq War when he was legal adviser to a House investigation into how communist China got U.S. nuclear secrets.

In 1999, Libby, a China expert, served on a special Republican-controlled House committee that laid the blame for the compromise of U.S. secrets almost exclusively on Democrats, despite evidence that the worst rupture of nuclear secrets actually occurred during the Reagan-Bush administration in the mid-1980s.

The committee’s findings served as an important backdrop for Election 2000 when George W. Bush’s backers juxtaposed images of Democrat Al Gore attending a political event at a Buddhist temple with references to the so-called “Chinagate” scandal.

The American public was led to believe that $30,000 in illegal “soft-money” donations from Chinese operatives to Democrats in 1996 were somehow linked to China’s access to U.S. nuclear secrets. Millions of Americans may have been influenced to vote against Gore and for Bush because they wanted to rid the U.S. government of people who had failed to protect national security secrets.

But the reality was that the principal exposure of U.S. nuclear secrets to China appears to have occurred when Beijing obtained U.S. blueprints for the W-88 miniaturized hydrogen bomb, a Chinese intelligence coup in the mid-1980s on the watch of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

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http://www.consortiumnews.com/2005/110305.html