extreme

I was surprised when two classmates who speak very good english claimed to 'hate America".
"Why?" I asked.
"Because of Bush and what he's doing. Americans act like they own the world. Look at Iraq."
"That's just the government. Not all Americans agree. " I said. Feeling shocked at the denouncement over an entire people based on such a cause.
the two purposefully trained themselves to speak english only with a british accent because of their hatred. One wants to study in Britain for college, the other wants to go to Germany.
I am saddened and scared by their statement. Not because I support America, but because to say what they said is extreme, and I know not how to steer them towards more moderate waters. We have given up some very important things when we embraced science and gave up classic learning. Particularly the moral lessons our forefathers have accumulated.

a rose by another name would not smell as sweet

The loss of another innocence comes with fear. When fear induces us to start discrediting things at face value. Paricularly belief.
A professor at the National Taiwan University has made it his business to research 'psychic' abilities. Mainly the reading of 2D words by touch, not sight. According to my chemistry teacher, he has found that children are more adept at this than adults, and that there are actually viable results from these studies. Before you dismiss this as crack pot (as I would if I hadn't known my teacher to be a skeptic of the rigorous sort) I would like to tell you about this research my teacher supervised a few years ago.
The students conducting this research took two identical beakers and filled thme with the same amount of water. They then took pieces of paper, wrote 'beautiful' on one and 'ugly' on the other (in chinese, they have about the same number of strokes) and stuck the labels facing inwards towards the water and black papered the outside so that humans could not see what the words were. They then placed te beakers in a corner adjacent to each other so there wouldn't be the factor of them not being placed in the same area. Later they took the beakers out and froze the water so that it formed ice.
On every trial, the water from the beaker of 'beauty' consistently displayed ice particles that were large, complex, and to conventional human views - beautiful. On the other hand, the 'ugly' water could never seem to form large particles but instead always turned out as scattered, formless icy gravel.
The teacher said physic professors seemed very willing to buy into this project, while chemistry professors discredited it on sight. Unfortunately, the students entered this project in the chemistry category. They were verated and shamed out of the stadium. It was a disgrace.
I then asked the teacher if the results would be the same if the words were written in english or a foreign language that the participants did not understand would the results be the same? (for chinese has form, whilst english uses sound, and perhaps the experimentor's unconscious knowledge of the words embued some power over the results, and that would show it is human will rather than the word's 'magic' that had effected the results). She said she didn't know.
I would like to try this experiement, both with languages that are based in caricatures and languages that are made up by alphabets. Japanese is something I don't know. That may be a start. Arabic would work, too.
For it would show us taht the power of words go beyond our control, and perhaps we are not really the ones who control the creativity to things- because they already exist in the foundaments of the universe.
Philip Pullman would have had a hayday with this.
Another report I read today was how a placebo belief became reality. The researchers informed one group of maids that their daily work constituted as exercise according to FDA standards. They didn't inform the other group. An adequate amount of time later they returned and did a physical. The group that was informed had improved (healthier) BMIs while the other group stayed the same as before.
If I knew this, and told myself to believe that scurrying around the schoolyard running errands all day will keep me fit, and yet also knew that I am hynotizing myself, would the belief still be enough to work?