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It’s well-known that harsh climate conditions can mess with your mind – from cabin fever to heat delirium. But America is now experiencing an even more dangerous disease called Climaticus Non-vocalism Extremism.
CNE Syndrome almost exclusively afflicts a narrow segment of our population: Republican political officials and candidates. It might stem from a genetic defect, but scientists say more study is needed on that.
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Symptoms include an obsessive impulse by GOP politicos to deny that human-caused climate change is happening, often accompanied by a feverish insistence that government employees be banned from discussing it. Hard to believe? For an example of Climaticus Non-vocalism Extremism, look at Gov. Scott Walker’s Wisconsin administration. The Koch-funded governor and Republican presidential wannabe is an ardent climate-change denier – but the state’s public lands board has escalated his denial to Orwellian censorship. The two GOP commissioners on the three-member board, which oversees the ecological health of thousands of acres of Wisconsin forest lands, have banned agency employees from even considering damage caused by climate change. Worse, they have such severe cases of CNE Syndrome that they’ve imposed a gag order on freedom of speech by public lands employees, prohibiting them from talking about climate change while on the job.
The heartbreak of CNE is that its victims deny that they’re in denial about the disease. Thus, the Wisconsin duo say that their no-speech rule is not censorship, because employees are still free to talk about climate change at home – or even chit-chat about it “by the water cooler,” just as they might talk about sports.
Gov. Walker – who wants to be your president – says that he finds that censorship perfectly reasonable.
“Agency Bans Activism on Climate,” New York Times, April 10, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/10/us/wisconsin-agency-bans-activism-on-climate.html?_r=0