The price of precaution

There's a fundamental idea in ecology called the precautionary principle.  Put simply, the precautionary principle says that it's always easier and cheaper to prevent environmental damage than it is to clean up the mess afterwards.

Note that this is not saying we can predict and prevent every disaster.  Mother Nature has a mean curve ball.  But there are all too many instances of the powers-that-be hearing, acknowledging, and then ignoring the advice of the scientists and other experts, with devastating results.

Let's look at a quick example before I tell you what this post is really about.

The Everglades were once a sawgrass, cypress, mangrove, and palmetto wetland encompassing most of the southern tip of Florida.  Through this wetland flowed a 100 kilometer wide sheet of water slowly making its way to the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean.  The wetland acted as a natural filter, and the water entering the sea was remarkably pure and sediment-free.  The area was home to hundreds of native species, some found nowhere else on Earth, and hundreds more used it as a stopover point on migration.

The Everglades [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The problem is, you can't raise cattle, grow oranges, or build houses in a wetland.  So in the first few decades of the 20th century, the Everglades were "improved" -- that is, turned into a patchwork of swamp with 2250 kilometers of canals, levees, and spillways designed to drain land for settlement.  The 160 kilometer long Kissimmee River was “straightened” by the Army Corps of Engineers for flood control; it’s now 84 kilometers long and has drained the wetlands north of Lake Okeechobee, which farmers turned into cow pastures.

In 1947, ecologists saw what was happening, and lobbied for protection.  In that year the founding of Everglades National Park attempted to conserve part of it, but you can't draw an arbitrary line around a piece of land and assume that what happens outside the line won't matter.  Continued development progressively cut off the water flow to the wetland, and in the following years between 75% and 90% of the park’s wildlife (depending on how you count the toll) disappeared.

Fast forward to 1990, when finally the Florida state government took notice -- prompted not by the recognition that Everglades National Park is one of the most damaged national parks in the United States, but because without the wetland, farmers and landowners were beginning to see problems.  The Everglades acted as a water catchment, and its reduced size caused a loss of fresh groundwater.  Not only did this compromise agriculture, it led to saline intrusion into wells, and the opening up of limestone sinkholes -- some big enough to swallow houses.  The sediment and fertilizer runoff that was once filtered by the marsh was now being ejected into the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean, killing fish, fouling coral reefs, and clouding the water.

The result was that in the late 1990s the government of Florida reluctantly agreed to the world’s largest ecological restoration project, to be carried out between 2000 and 2038.  It plans to restore the Kissimmee River to its original course, buying up farmland and creating new wetlands for both wildlife habitat and to filter agricultural runoff, and to create 18 large reservoirs to supply drinking water and slow down freshwater diversion.

At a cost to taxpayers of $7.8 billion.  To, if I haven't hammered in this point strongly enough, undo everything that we've done in the past eighty years, and return things back to where they would have been if we hadn't screwed them up royally in the first place.

This all comes up because two days ago, Crestwood Midstream, the company that is planning to expand natural gas storage in salt caverns underneath Seneca Lake, received a last-minute two year extension from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on their rights to use the site.  It had been hoped that FERC would come to their senses and deny the permit, but whether money talked or the officials at FERC simply shrugged and said, "Well, nothing bad has happened yet," they chose to allow the Texas-based company to continue in this reckless and irresponsible practice.

Seneca Lake [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Just how reckless and irresponsible are we talking about, here?  All it should take is one statistic to convince you: salt cavern storage accounts for only 7% of the total underground storage of natural gas in the United States, but was responsible for 100% of the catastrophic accidents from natural gas storage that resulted in loss of life.  

A major accident here in the form of a cavern breach wouldn't just endanger the workers at Crestwood Midstream's facility in the Town of Reading; it would result in the salinization of the south end of Seneca Lake, one of the largest freshwater lakes in the Northeast, and the source of drinking water and water for irrigation for tens of thousands.  It would imperil the Finger Lakes wine industry, one of the biggest sources of revenue and tourism in the area.

Worst still, it would be damn near impossible to clean up.  You think the bill for wrecking the Everglades was high?  That's nothing compared to what it would take to rectify a salt cavern collapse and the resulting explosion.  If it was remediable at all.

And how likely is this?  Is this simply a panicked overreaction?  Another fact might clarify: a mere fifty years ago, a 400,000 ton chunk of the roof of one of the very salt caverns Crestwood is proposing to use caved in.

Imagine what the result would have been had the cavern been filled with natural gas.

Put simply, the precautionary principle isn't alarmism.  Oddly enough, we have no problem with the idea with respect to our homes, health, and lives; why it's so hard for people to swallow with respect to the planet we live on is incomprehensible to me.

And for a government regulatory commission like FERC to give Crestwood carte blanche to proceed with this potentially devastating plan is the height of irresponsibility.

Stopping Marie Curie

I have a simple request.  Can we stop electing morons to public office?

As you might expect, this comment arises because of Louie Gohmert, the Texas representative who has been elected to five consecutive terms despite having only recently mastered the ability to walk without dragging his knuckles on the ground.

Gohmert, you might recall, is the one who said the military's function is to "kick rears, break things, and come home."  He's also the one who took a highly humiliating trip to Egypt (humiliating to the rest of America, although probably not to him, given that you have to have an IQ that exceeds your hat size in order to experience humiliation), in which he and Michele Bachmann made a highly condescending speech in which, amongst other things, they implied that the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt was responsible for 9/11.

Representative Louie Gohmert [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Now, Gohmert has beat all previous stupidity records by throwing sexism into the mix.  He was one of four representatives who voted against a bill authorizing the National Science Foundation to utilize funds to recruit women into scientific fields.  When asked why he had voted against the measure, here was his response:

This program is designed to discriminate against that young, poverty-stricken boy and to encourage the girl.  Forget the boy.  Encourage the girl. 

It just seems that, if we are ever going to get to the dream of Martin Luther King, Jr., that he spoke just down the Mall, he wanted people to be judged by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin.  I know after race has been an issue that needed attention, then gender appropriately got attention. 

But the point is that those things are not supposed to matter. 

It just seems like, when we come in and we say that it is important that for a while we discriminate, we end up getting behind.  And then probably 25 years from now boys are going to have fallen behind in numbers, and then we are going to need to come in and say: Actually, when we passed that bill forcing encouragement of girls and not encouraging of little boys, we were getting behind the eight ball.  We didn’t see that we were going to be leaving little boys in the ditch, and now we need to start doing programs to encourage little boys.

So here is a person who is so steeped in white male privilege that he honestly doesn't get the toll that has been taken on women and minorities by systematic institutional prejudice.  One and all, the people who cry "overreach of political correctness" are themselves privileged -- and don't know what it's like to deal with, every single hour of every single day, others denying you access based on your gender, ethnicity, or sexual orientation.  They do not understand what it's like to have doors closed to you because of factors that you can't change (and in a fair society, wouldn't want to).

Yes, I know, I'm a heterosexual privileged white male myself.  The difference is that I know I don't know these things.  I'm not blowing hot air pretending that I have any perspective at all.

Gohmert, on the other hand, doesn't seem to be smart enough to recognize his ignorance.  In fact, he went on to say that it's a good thing that such a program didn't exist in Marie Curie's time:

I thank God that there wasn’t a program like this that distracted her.  But according to the bill that we passed today, we are requiring the Science Foundation to encourage entrepreneurial programs to recruit and support women to extend their focus beyond the laboratory and into the commercial world.  Thank God that is not what Madame Curie did.

If you have any doubt about how the brilliant minds of women like Marie Curie, Hilde Mangold, Annie Jump Cannon, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, Barbara McClintock, and Rosalind Franklin would have benefited from a program like this, read about their lives, and the struggles that they faced simply having anyone in the field take them seriously.  Consider how much more they could have accomplished if the majority of their time hadn't been spent in proving that their credibility, competence, and intelligence had nothing to do with which sex organs they born with.

Gohmert's comments are a profound insult to women everywhere, and to their allies who at least partly understand how sexism still permeates our culture.  Unfortunately, though, I suspect that if such ugly willful ignorance hasn't caused him to lose the election the last five times, it probably won't make any difference in the next one.

Still, one can keep hoping.

Analyzing the backfire

One of the most frustrating phenomena for us skeptics is the backfire effect.

The backfire effect is the documented tendency that people, when confronted with logic or evidence against their beliefs, actually hold those beliefs more strongly afterwards.  Being presented with a good argument, apparently, often has exactly the opposite effect from what we'd want.

This is understandably difficult for people like me, whose writing centers around getting people to reconsider their understanding of the universe using the tools of rationality and critical thinking.  But some recently released research has given us at least some comprehension of why the backfire effect occurs.

Entitled "Identity and Epistemic Emotions during Knowledge Revision: A Potential Account for the Backfire Effect," by Gregory J. Trevors, Krista R. Muis, Reinhard Pekrun, Gale M. Sinatra, and Philip H. Winne, the research was published a couple of months ago in the journal Discourse Processes.  The researchers designed an intriguing test to demonstrate not only that the backfire effect occurs (something that has, after all, been known for years) but to give us some understanding of what causes it.

Prior research had suggested that the resistance we have to changing our understanding comes from the fact that being challenged brings up the whole network of why we had those beliefs in the first place.  In effect, it reminds us of why we think what we do instead of triggering us to reconsider.  The result is a mental arms race -- a contest between what we already believed and the new information.  Given that the new information is usually understood more weakly, the old framework usually wins, and the fact of its having been considered and retained gives it the sense of being even more strongly correct than it was before.

The new research by Trevors et al. focuses on a different facet of this frustrating tendency.  What their study shows is that it is the emotion elicited by being challenged that triggers the backfire effect.  When we feel that our beliefs, and therefore (on some level) our core identity, is being attacked, the negative emotions that arise cause us to shy away and cling to our prior understanding.

Specifically, what the team did was to look at people's attitudes toward GMOs, a subject rife with misinformation and sensationalistic appeals to fear.  They first assessed the participants' attitudes toward GMOs, then gave them an assessment to gauge how strongly they felt about the issue of dietary purity.  They then gave the participants a passage to read that argued against the anti-GMO position, and afterwards asked them questions designed to measure not only how (or if) their ideas had changed, but how they responded emotionally while reading the passage.

[image courtesy of photographer Rosalee Yagihara and the Wikimedia Commons]

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the anti-GMOers who ranked dietary purity as a strong motivator were the most angered by reading the passage -- and they experienced the backfire effect the most strongly.  The weaker the emotional response, even if the participant was anti-GMO to begin with, the smaller the backfire.

I'm not sure that this is heartening.  So many of the ideas that we skeptics fight are deeply ingrained in people's idea about how the world works -- and therefore, on some level, entangled with their core identity.  To quote the Research Digest of the British Psychological Society, which reviewed the study:

If persuasion is most at risk of backfire when identity is threatened, we may wish to frame arguments so they don’t strongly activate that identity concept, but rather others.  And if, as this research suggests, the identity threat causes problems through agitating emotion, we may want to put off this disruption until later: Rather than telling someone (to paraphrase the example in the study) "you are wrong to think that GMOs are only made in labs because…", arguments could firstly describe cross-pollination and other natural processes, giving time for this raw information to be assimilated, before drawing attention to how this is incompatible with the person's raw belief – a stealth bomber rather than a whizz-bang, so to speak.

Which is hard to do when the emotional charge on both sides is strong, as is so often the case.  The bottom line, though, is that we humans are fundamentally not particularly rational creatures -- something worth remembering when we are trying to change minds.

School board theocrats

I ran into two stories yesterday that were interesting primarily in juxtaposition.

In the first one, we hear that evangelical minister Franklin Graham thinks that all school boards need to be run by (surprise!) evangelical Christians.

In an interview with Fox News's Todd Starnes, Graham said:

I want Christians running the school boards.  I want the school boards of America in the hands of evangelical Christians within the next four to six years.  And it can happen and that will have a huge impact because so many school districts now are controlled by wicked, evil people, and the gays and lesbians, and I keep bringing their name up, but they are at the forefront of this attack against Christianity in America.

Implying, of course, that the "implosion of the morality in the United States" (Graham's words) comes, in part, from evil amoral secular people running the schools, and indoctrinating young people's minds in concepts like tolerance and keeping your damned nose out of what other people do in the privacy of their own bedrooms.

Franklin Graham [image courtesy of photographer Paul M. Walsh and the Wikimedia Commons]

But what places this into even starker relief is another story that appeared over at Patheos yesterday.  In this bit of news, we hear about an upcoming evangelical conference in Wichita, Kansas, sponsored by the Christian patriarchy movement Quiverfull, which is devoted to the topic of how parents can arrange marriages between their teenage children.

If this sounds too ridiculous to be real, here are direct quotes from Quiverfull's FAQ page:

Courtship denies the authority of the father over the marriage of their virgin children. While they often give a veto to the parents of the woman, they specifically deny the authority of the father of the groom or the bride to choose a spouse for their children. 

We believe that Scripture teaches quite clearly that the father does have the power to choose a spouse for their virgin child; and we see this in several Scriptural examples.

But isn't this a forced marriage?  Amazingly enough, in their minds apparently it isn't:

Emphatically, an “arranged marriage” (fathers binding their children in the covenant of betrothal) is NOT synonymous with “a forced marriage”, and sadly, secular sources are often more honest in this matter to recognize this clear distinction than other Christians are.  Unfortunately, this idea is far too common in our modern notions, and far too often we are accused of promoting this, either explicitly or implicitly.  When the “liberty” that moderns value (especially Americans) is contrasted with the type of authority and submissiveness that the Bible teaches and demonstrates, it is challenging to us, and this sharp contrast often leads people to jump to the idea of “forced” compliance.  It is difficult for the modern (again, especially Americanized cultures) to come to grips with the idea of willful, joyful submission.

So young ladies, submit to what we're ordering you to do joyfully, and it won't have to be "forced."

Anyway, how young are we talking about, here?

The ‘youth’ ready for marriage has breasts. A woman who is to be married is one who has breasts; breasts which signal her readiness for marriage, and breasts who promise enjoyment for her husband.  (We believe that ‘breasts’ here stand as a symbol for all forms of full secondary sexual characteristics.) 

Lest you think that these people aren't really doing the whole "biblical marriage" thing, here -- yes, they are even requiring that parents of boys pay a "bride price" to the parents of the girl:

A “bride price” is anything paid or given by the man or his representative at the time of his betrothal or receiving his bride. 

Scripture certainly teaches about it… The law concerning bride price (Exodus 22:16-17)
indicates that . . . the bride price was a normal part of the marriage process.  

The bride price plays a significant function: It shows the woman’s value, and the point isn’t that the father gets the money but that he keeps it for his daughter, if her husband should ever abandon her.

And if that's not twisted enough for you, they also go on and on about "The continuing authority of the father over the couple after marriage."

What struck me after reading all this (once I recovered from my nausea) is, "these are the sort of people Franklin Graham wants running our school boards."  In other words, the people he wants to be in charge of protecting the interest of America's youth.  The people into whose trust we should place the well-being of our children.

Who unfortunately are also the people who believe that Deuteronomy 21:18-21 should be followed to the letter:

If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother, and, though they discipline him, will not listen to them, then his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his city at the gate of the place where he lives, and they shall say to the elders of his city, ‘This our son is stubborn and rebellious; he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton and a drunkard.’  Then all the men of the city shall stone him to death with stones. So you shall purge the evil from your midst, and all Israel shall hear, and fear.

And, ironically, who the same people who are having a complete meltdown worrying about how children might be damaged by a transgendered person looking for a quiet place to pee.

So as far as agendas go, I'll take the LGBT agenda over this fuckery any day.  As far as I can tell, the LGBT agenda mostly is about making sure that people aren't discriminated against by bigots.  The evangelical agenda seems more to do with turning the United States into an Iranian-style bloodthirsty theocracy run on rules set down by a bunch of illiterate Bronze-Age sheepherders who thought god's first priority was making sure that damn near every natural human impulse was punishable by death.

And I know which one I'd want my own children living in.

Sheeple update

Sometimes I have to check in on the r/conspiracy subreddit just to see what new nutty conspiracy theories are out there.  I try to make sure that I've girded my loins and stiffened my spine beforehand, because the level of complete batshit insanity demonstrated by the regular contributors really has to be seen to be believed.  On my most recent visit, I was not disappointed -- there are not one, nor two, but three truly amazing new conspiracy theories, if by "amazing" you mean "ideas that you would only come up with if you have a single Cheeto where most of us have a brain."

First, we have astronomer Paul Cox inducing multiple orgasms in the Planet X crowd by making a joke while analyzing a video of the recent transit of Mercury across the Sun.  "See that mysterious bright glow on the right side?  What do you suppose that is?" Cox asks, pointing to what is clearly a lens flare.  "Do you think it's the mysterious planet Nibiru?"  He then goes on to say, "We don't cover things up like NASA does."

Well, you don't joke about such matters, not when people like YouTube contributor "EyesOpen37" are listening.  "EyesOpen37" doesn't believe in lens flares.  "EyesOpen37" thinks it's much more likely that a vague, diffuse glow is unequivocal evidence that a huge planet inhabited by our reptilian alien overlords is coming into the inner solar system for a visit, and NASA is desperately trying to make sure that no one finds out about it.

"I wonder if these guys are using this transit of Mercury to warn us about Nibiru?" muses "EyesOpen37," in a tone of voice that indicates that the answer is obviously "yes."  And the people who posted comments on his YouTube submission agree wholeheartedly.  Here's a sampling:

• Thank you so much for uploading this video!!  And I'm so glad a reputable person has finally spoke out!  Paul Cox is a good person and so are you to release this info!! :)
• I hope you have this video backed up so you can keep re-posting if it gets deleted!!  WOW!!
• Want to know how it'll end?  Read Revelation 8:8 on.  Repent and seek your Saviour.  God bless.
• It's controlled.  How many dead astronomers do we have to date?  Maybe a joke is the only way he can put it out there. Bottom line....he was deliberate.

Yes, there are lots of dead astronomers.  Aristarchus, Hypatia, Nicolaus Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, Edmund Halley... the list goes on and on.  There's only one possible answer -- they were all killed to keep them silent about the Planet Nibiru.

Speaking of dead people, our second conspiracy theory is about how Osama bin Laden is still "alive and well and living in the Bahamas."  And of course, there's nothing that lends credence to a wacko idea like saying "Edward Snowden says so."  (The only thing that's better would be saying "Nikola Tesla says so.")  According to the site Humans are Free, Snowden had the following to say about it:

I have documents showing that Bin Laden is still on the CIA’s payroll.  He is still receiving more than $100,000 a month, which are being transferred through some front businesses and organizations, directly to his Nassau bank account. I am not certain where he is now, but in 2013, he was living quietly in his villa with five of his wives and many children. 

Osama Bin Laden was one of the CIA’s most efficient operatives for a long time.  What kind of message would it send their other operatives if they were to let the SEALs kill him?  They organized his fake death with the collaboration of the Pakistani Secret services, and he simply abandoned his cover. 

Since everyone believes he is dead, nobody’s looking for him, so it was pretty easy to disappear.  Without the beard and the military jacket, nobody recognizes him.

Of course, at the bottom of the page, we read the following disclaimer:

Note: The original source of this information has not been validated nor confirmed by any other source.

In other words, even though we're not sure if it's true, you're clearly a KoolAid-Drinkin' Sheeple if you don't believe it.

And since bin Laden is still alive, it must therefore follow that lots of other Big Bad Guys are, too.  For our last dip in the deep end of the pool, we go to the site OrionStar 3000, wherein we learn that Josef  "The Angel of Death" Mengele is not only still alive, he is also the "Zodiac Killer"  who killed seven people in the late 1960s in California.

Now, you might be thinking, "How can Mengele be alive?  He was born in 1911.  He'd be 105 years old by now."  But this just shows that you're not thinking outside the box.  (And by "the box" I mean "anything that makes sense.")  Here's what he looked like in 2001, when he was a mere 90 years old, in a photograph taken at a "Brotherhood of Aryan Nations/KKK/ Bush Fundraiser in Hernando, Florida.":

Which, you have to admit, is pretty good for a 105-year-old.  Here's Mengele during World War II:

So I think we have a definitive match.

As far as how Mengele could still be so spry despite his age, we're told, "Mengele looks much younger than he really is due to years of face-lifts, anti-aging hormone injections & alleged cannibalism!"

And if that wasn't enough, we also find out the following alarming stuff:

• [SS Lieutenant Colonel] Otto Skorzeny faked Hitler's death!  Nazi Germany Really Won WWII!
• Hitler lived to be the oldest man in America until he died at the age of 114 years in 2/2004 in the Bethesda, MD Naval Hospital.
• The son of Tesla's illegal immigrant German Born accountant George H. Scherff Sr., SS Nazi spy George H. Scherff Jr. aka: US Navy Pilot: George H.W. Bush murdered his two TBF Avenger crew members by bailing out of his perfectly good airplane.  Bush became a heroin junkie to try to escape his guilty conscience.

Scarier still, this site doesn't have a disclaimer.  So it must all be true, right?

Of course right.

So that's our fun excursion through CrazyTown for today.  I hope you enjoyed it.  Myself, I'm wondering if I can get a hold of any of that anti-aging stuff.  I'm hoping I don't have to resort to cannibalism.

Mary's tears

A report is in from Fresno, California that there is a statue of the Virgin Mary in someone's house that is "weeping real tears."

The predictable result is that the devout are now flocking to the home of Maria Cardenas, and church officials are declaring that it's a miracle.  Devotees have spent hours kneeling and praying before the statue.  People are collecting the "tears" in vials, and claiming that they have magical powers of healing.  Cardenas states that the tears are "oily" and "smell like roses."

Such stories are not uncommon. There have been enough claims of this type that "Weeping Statues" has its own Wikipedia page.  Weeping statues, usually of Jesus or Mary, have been reported in hundreds of locations.  Sometimes these statues are weeping what appear to be tears.  Others weep scented oil, which is apparently what's happening in this case.  More rarely, the statues weep blood.

The problem is, of course, that when the church has allowed skeptics to investigate the phenomenon, all of them have turned out to be frauds.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

One of the easiest ways to fake a crying statue was explained, and later demonstrated, by Italian skeptic Luigi Garlaschelli.  If the statue is glazed hollow ceramic or plaster (which many of them are), all you have to do is to fill the internal cavity of the statue with water or oil, usually through a small hole drilled through the back of the head.  Then, you take a sharp knife and you nick the glaze at the corner of each eye.  The porous ceramic or plaster will absorb the liquid, which will then leak out at the only point it can -- the unglazed bit near the eyes.  When Garlaschelli demonstrated this, it created absolutely convincing tears.

What about the blood?  Well, in the cases where the statues have wept blood, most of them have been kept from the prying eyes of skeptics.  The church, however, is becoming a little more careful, ever since the case in 2008 in which a statue of Mary in Italy seemed to weep blood, and a bit of the blood was taken and DNA tested, and was found to match the blood of the church's custodian.  Public prosecutor Alessandro Mancini said the man was going to be tried for "high sacrilege" -- an interesting charge, and one which the custodian heatedly denies.  (I was unable to find out what the outcome of the trial was, if there was one.)

Besides the likelihood of fakery, there remains the simple question of why a deity (or saint) who is presumably capable of doing anything (s)he wants to do would choose this method to communicate with us.  It's the same objection I have to the people who claim that crop circles are Mother Earth attempting to talk to us; it's a mighty obscure communiqué.  Even if you buy that it's a message from heaven, what does the message mean?  If a statue of Mary cries, is she crying because we're sinful?  Because attendance at church is down?  Because we're destroying the environment?  (Pope Francis might actually subscribe to this view.)   Because the Saints didn't make it to the Superbowl this year?  Oh, for the days when god spoke to you, out loud, directly, and unequivocally, from a burning bush...

In any case, I'm skeptical, which I'm sure doesn't surprise anyone.  I suppose as religious experiences go, it's pretty harmless, and if it makes you happy to believe that Mary's tears will bring you good luck, then that's okay with me.  If you go to Fresno, however, take a close look and see if there's a tiny hole drilled in the back of the statue's head -- which still seems to me to be the likeliest explanation.

Dragon slaying

If you needed further evidence that being in an administrative role does not necessarily mean you have any idea what you're talking about, witness the pronouncement by Head Teacher Graeme Whiting of Acorn School, a private school in Nailsworth, Gloucester, England, to wit:  children should not read fantasy literature because it will damage their "sensitive subconscious brains."  Instead of Tolkein, Lewis, L'Engle, Rowling, and McCaffrey, he said, students are better off reading classics such as Shakespeare, Shelley, Wordsworth, et al.

Here's his complete quote:

I want children to read literature that is conducive to their age and leave those mystical and frightening texts for when they can discern reality, and when they have first learned to love beauty. 

Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, The Hunger Games, and Terry Pratchett, to mention only a few of the modern world's 'must-haves', contain deeply insensitive and addictive material which I am certain encourages difficult behaviour in children; yet they can be bought without a special licence, and can damage the sensitive subconscious brains of young children, many of whom may be added to the current statistics of mentally ill young children... 

Buying sensational books is like feeding your child with spoons of added sugar, heaps of it, and when the child becomes addicted it will seek more and more, which if related to books, fills the bank vaults of those who write un-sensitive books for young children! 

Children are innocent and pure at the same time, and don't need to be mistreated by cramming their imagination that lies deep within them, with inappropriate things.

Starting with the fact that this makes me want to shout "CITE YOUR SOURCES" in Mr. Whiting's face every other sentence, there are a few problems with this claim.

First, has he actually read any "classic literature?"

Let me give you an example.  My school is currently having a contest for both students and staff wherein if you read a hundred books in four years, you get your name painted on the library wall.  Of the hundred books, twenty of them have to be classics.  The result is that I am now in the middle of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights.  Consider the following "inappropriate things" that I have so far discovered therein:

The characters are, one and all, horrible people.  Heathcliff, who I think we're supposed to relate to or at least empathize with, is a sadistic sociopath.  His thwarted lover Catherine is a whining, petulant, narcissistic shrew who goes on a hunger strike every time she doesn't get her way.  Edgar Linton (perhaps the most sympathetic character in the story, which isn't saying much) is a weak-willed milquetoast.  His sister Isabella appears to have no brains whatsoever.  Catherine's brother Hindley Earnshaw is a violent drunk, his son Hareton a swearing, sneering brat.  The servants are no better; Nelly Dean, the narrator through most of the book, meddles continuously with the result of making the already bad situation truly awful, and Joseph is a sullen religious nutter who speaks in a garbled patois that appears to be some bizarre hybrid between Yorkshire dialect and Esperanto.

"A romantic classic," the back cover says.  Really?  This romance for the ages starts with Heathcliff and Catherine falling madly in love with one another.  As a result, and because this makes total sense, Catherine decides to marry Edgar, then torments him for years as if this was his fault.  Heathcliff, however, evidently learns from Catherine's example that marrying someone you dislike out of spite is a great move.  Because he then follows suit, marries Edgar's sister Isabella, and on their honeymoon he is so angry at Isabella for not being Catherine that he hangs her dog.

Yes.  Her dog.  Heathcliff hangs her dog.

On their HONEYMOON.

Of course, being a romantic classic, one after the other of them come to bad ends.  So the entire story is 325 pages about really nasty people who are dying, just not nearly fast enough.

And Shakespeare?  What about the lovely, sensitive, and appropriate stories of King Lear and A Winter's Tale and (heaven forfend) Titus Andronicus?  The sex and violence is certainly not confined to the Bard of Avon, either.  Consider, for example, the Greek classics.  I actually really like Sophocles, and his plays are mostly about the cheering themes of incest, parricide, and damnation.

The second problem is not only does Mr. Whiting evidently not know the classics, he doesn't know much about fantasy literature, either.  So reading fantasy novels encourages "difficult behaviour" and results in "mental illness?"  I think you would have to go far to find a character that embodies loyalty more than Sam Gamgee, one that demonstrates the power of love in redemption more than Severus Snape, one that is a better role model for steadfastness and courage than Hazel from Watership Down, one that twists together yearning and loss and grief and beauty more heart-wrenchingly than Taran (from the sadly little-known five-volume Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander).  Those characters resonate precisely because they appeal to our higher selves, give us a sense that we can rise above our challenges and meet life head-on.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Now understand: I'm not saying that all fantasy literature is appropriate for all ages.  Game of Thrones, for example, is clearly targeted toward adults.  But to tar all fantasy literature with the same brush is idiotic.  And the claim that children are somehow damaged from reading A Wrinkle in Time is absurd.

However, despite my generally negative impression of Wuthering Heights, I think kids should read the classics, too.  I didn't read Shakespeare until I was a freshman in college, which I think is pitiful.  (And when I reluctantly started reading Othello in my freshman lit class, I was transfixed -- and couldn't believe what I'd been missing.)

Children (and adults) should read all kinds of books, from light entertainment to deep and thought-provoking literature that will still be with them years later.  The point is to enter a different world on the first page -- and to have your mind come out different when you reach the last one.

Good fantasy literature is transformative.  Far from "cramming [children's] imagination... with inappropriate things," the best of fantasy reaches levels that I can only describe as spiritual.  As C. S. Lewis put it, "Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten."