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By Capt. Fogg

In the winter, Florida sees countless twittering things with small brains, perching on power lines and trees, circling overhead and grazing my lawn looking for lizards and bugs. Of course, even a hundred years ago there were so many they would darken the sky, but we've hunted some to extinction, rendered many species endangered by draining the everglades to grow sugar and by poisoning the waters with pesticides, fertilizers, oil and heavy metals. All over the world, nature as we once knew it is in retreat, from the rain forests of the Amazon to the melting tundra and retreating glaciers. Even the birds know it and we all know who's to blame. It's not the birds.

Well, not all of us. Sarah Palin insults the intelligence of most twittering things by claiming that man can't influence or change "nature's ways" and is arrogant to think so. Yes, that's OK, speechlessness is a normal reaction to such idiocy. What can you call it but idiocy and what can you call it but arrogance to assert that the magical powers of God will steadily restore the countless square miles of ocean bottom scraped bare by drag nets, restore the countless miles of coral bleached by growing acidity and reanimate the countless species disappearing at an accelerating rate? When and how fast will God restore the atmosphere for us? And what is arrogance, after all, but making grand statements about nature without any knowledge whatever having to do with atmospheric and oceanographic sciences, geology, physics, chemistry or in fact, any damned thing but talking in tongues and burning witches?

"arrogant&naive2say man overpwers nature" tweets the idiot Palin.

The painful irony of course, is not that man is part of nature and man is changing the world in many, many obvious and quantifiable ways. It's not just that we've disassembled the building blocks of matter, decoded the blueprints for life, unravelled the history of the universe -- the irony is that it may be arrogant to say that we can ever overpower stupidity, cupidity, stone age superstition and the crackpot politics that eats away at America like a cancer.

(Cross posted from Human Voices)