Paul Sheehan, and now he's learned his ABC, it's time for the 2 x 2 tables ... starting with 2 x 0 = 2 ...

(Above: geeks will now race off to intertubes discussions of the use of frak in Battlestar Galactica, here, but while they frak off, we have the usual Paul Sheehan clusterfrak to deal with below. Gather together motherfrakkers, for frak's serious, this is serious, we're dealing with a frakwit).

Last week in a bid to become Fairfax's new Miranda the Devine, Paul Sheehan demonstrated that he'd learned his ABC.

He only used this knowledge to abuse the Greens, Green by name, flaky by nature, and in the usual way of serial abusers of lists, he managed a wild-eyed wide range of charges, including V for Voodoo economics and X for X-rated content, seemingly unaware that X-rated content is actually legal in Australia - well it is in the ACT and the Northern Territory, and the states dance around the category like innocents discovering a horde of wasps at a picnic (see the NSW government's briefing paper "X" Rated Films and the Regulation of Sexually Explicit Material).

But that's always the way it is with Sheehan. He's always lazy and slipshod, and intent on glib evasive phrasing, and deploying the alphabet is a typical rhetorical device - which is how he deploys D for Decadal Oscillation as if a couple of poncy words are sufficient to defeat "climate alarmists". Look at the resulting English: "Their cycles have been measured for 1500 years". By whom and how and is this the latest sceptics' variation on urban heat sinks?

By the time you've finished reading the whole piece, it's time for a shower, or at least an awareness how this kind of befuddled, fudging thinking, deployed in the cause of a polemic, puts the writer one step away from a howler column celebrating the joys of magic water.

Because Sheehan is a gadfly, picking up things on whim, provided the whim serves his ideological fancy. If you read through his ABC, one thing becomes clear - if the Greens are for it, he's agin it, and so same sex marriage bites the dust. Somehow the Greens are even responsible for C for China being a big global emitter, and so there's nothing Australia should do, never mind that China is much more active in the area than Australia.

Laziness to the point of moral turpitude, that's Sheehan through and through, a blind, blinkered old humbug of a grumpy man, so thoroughly stupid that you can imagine him cracking up at the wit of O for Obama - Oppose Building Any Manufacturing Anywhere. Oh dear that's about as funny and intelligent as a T-shirt I saw on an American woman a couple of weeks ago - One Big Awful Mistake America.

Still, it sums up Sheehan's thinking. Lazy cracker barrel fortune cookie sloganeering that means instead of using S for same-sex marriage, a sensible alphabet would see it used for Sheehan, and stuffed up thinking.

It's not surprising then that this week in Get your fracking facts right, Sheehan should be at it again.

Naturally Sheehan sees hydraulic fracturing as a goldmine - we'll all be rich, richer than we ever dreamed - and also the solution to climate change:

The chief executive of the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association, Belinda Robinson, says: ''The Greens have described climate change as 'the greatest threat to our world in human history', yet their political response is to oppose, at every turn, the development of Australia's gas industry.''

But hang on Sheehan doesn't think much of climate alarmists and alarmism - so why carry on about greenhouse emissions and how the world will be saved from climate change by the gas industry while picking our pockets in our own back yards?

The logic is fuzzy and a non-sequitur. The notion that the gas industry is doing hydraulic fracturing to save the planet from global warming is about as bizarre as putting C for China in an alphabetical list attacking the Greens (and never mind D for decadal obfuscation).

Naturally, given that he's a superficial, supercilious scribbler, Sheehan settles on the documentary Gasland as his point of attack (the show is currently in limited release, but might well have been seen by those addicted to Channel BT).

It's when we get to lines like this that we realise we're back in standard Sheehan speak:

The scientists are important because the maker of Gasland, Josh Fox, is not a scientist. He is a good filmmaker, but he is also a polemicist, intent on revealing what he believes is a vast conspiracy of silence.

Uh huh. So how about we scribble a variation?

The scientists are important because the scribbler of columns for Fairfax, Paul Sheehan, is not a scientist. He is an average controversialist, most adept at writing nonsense about magic water, but he is also routinely a polemicist, always intent on denying any notion of a vast conspiracy of silence - even when confronted by the current attempt to turn Wikileaks into a vast international silence.

Well you get the drift. Anyhoo, Sheehan thinks that by shooting holes in Gasland, he's shot holes in the whole debate about hydraulic fracturing, which should proceed forthwith, and especially just down the road in St. Peters.

In other days, Sheehan would have been a splendid apologist for heavy industries needing to deploy a a few heavy metals and mercury and arsenic and suchlike in the name of manufacturing and progress. What's that you say? We still shouldn't eat the fish in Sydney harbour because of the heavy metals leached into the rivers and the harbour? Well I never ...

Yep, if you want a scary movie, how about this story from the Herald back in 2005, under the header Toxic secrets of the underground.

When tests on a borehole in his backyard revealed that his home was standing above a slow-moving plume of toxic chemicals, and that the water he had been using for 14 years was unfit for use, long-time Botany resident Derek Pitman felt like he'd stumbled onto the set of a movie. A scary movie.

Sheehan sends up Gasland as a horror movie in documentary form, berating the Greens in the process, but the alternative is to believe in the care and consideration of the NSW Labor Government in allowing hydraulic fracturing to take place within a large city. I'm so glad Sheehan is enraptured by NSW Labor, but forgive me if I feel a little tremor of fear ...

And it's not just the Greens or Gasland that have noticed a few things might be astray. The Herald, that notorious cardigan wearing leftie rag, reported last month on Toxins found at third site as fracking fears build.

It turns out that testing for coal seam gas using fracking can go ahead without approval being sought or required from the Environment Department, and that the government, along with Sheehan, doesn't have the first clue. And if you've got a taste for it, you can read more in Ben Cubby's Mine threatens city water.

One thing's certain - as soon as someone tells me that a process is completely safe, then I know they're taking me for an idiot. No process is ever completely safe - even crossing a road in Sydney is sometimes a completely dangerous activity, let alone deep drilling for oil in the Gulf.

All the pieties about safety usually end up in tears at some point down the track.

As for Sheehan thinking he's being funny about the vast conspiracy of silence, was it only last month that the Herald's Heath Aston scribbled Sydney's secret power grab.

Sydney's central business district will be powered by gas mined from below the city under an audacious plan being considered by the City of Sydney and lord mayor Clover Moore.

The NSW government has granted approval for gas miner Macquarie Energy to begin drilling a test well in the inner-west suburb of St Peters to explore for coal-seam methane gas.

According to government documents obtained by The Sun-Herald, Macquarie received permission in March to embark on drilling for the purpose of supplying gas to the City of Sydney's trigeneration scheme.

Cr Moore wants to take the city off the state's coal-fired electricity grid by 2030 by establishing a network of gas-fired engines in a system known as trigeneration.

The plan to extract ''indigenous'' gas from under Australia's most populated area of land is being kept a closely guarded secret, with inner-west residents completely unaware of the prospect of a gas mine in their neighbourhood. Not even the Greens-led Marrickville Council, covering parts of St Peters, was aware of the scheme.

Uh huh. So it's not just a conspiracy of silence, it's an actual active conspiracy to implement an activity before anyone could become aware of it, and do anything about it ...

Meanwhile, all Sheehan can do is rabbit on about Gaslands and the Greens, and use the flaws in the movie to subvert the notion that there might be some difficulties with hydraulic fracturing, and that its deployment within the city might raise a few issues.

Oh there's many a splendid Sheehan joke about inconvenient truth and natural contamination, and people blaming the mining rather than the natural contamination, and never mind that if there is natural contamination, then fracking it might actually result in a little more ...

Sheehan resorts to the usual kind of dissembling nonsense and guff typical of apologists for manufacturing. You know the line - why I've been wearing a clock with radium illumination for years and what harm has it done me, or mercury is perfectly safe in thermometers, and you stick them in your mouth without a jot of concern. So we get:

... nearly all the fluids used are a mixture of water and sand, along with a handful of chemicals - not 596 - most of which can also be found in household items, such as emulsifiers in ice cream.

You see, it's just like shovelling ice cream down a hole. A treat for everyone, even grumpy old men. You only have to turn to other parts of the Herald to see how that dissembling works:

US studies have shown that chemicals used during fracking can contaminate groundwater, and the US Environmental Protection Agency is investigating links between drinking water impurities in heavily mined districts and health problems. A full report is to be produced in 2012.

Maybe they made the ice cream out of milk that had gone off? Or maybe we just routinely eat ice cream made out of crap?

Back to Sheehan:

Numerous other bald claims made in Gasland are simply untrue. I downloaded eight pages of scientific material debunking the film.

Uh huh. But all I had to do was head off to the wiki on Hydraulic fracturing to see that more than a few problems and issues had been recorded:

In April 2010 the state of Pennsylvania banned Cabot Oil & Gas Corp. from further drilling in the entire state until it plugs wells believed to be the source of contamination of the drinking water of 14 homes in Dimock Township PA. The investigation was initiated after a water well exploded on New Year's Day in 2009. The state investigation revealed that Cabot Oil & Gas Company "had allowed combustible gas to escape into the region's groundwater supplies.

There's plenty more in the wiki about risks and industry precautions, and in the way of wikis, while not presenting the full picture, it's more balanced and insightful than Sheehan. After all, this is the man who swallowed magic water, and so tainted his reputation for life ...

Which is why when he delivers this splendid equivocation, it's time for paranoia:

No energy extraction process is without problems.

But, but, but ... didn't they say it was completely safe?

But the idea that fracking is run by secretive cowboys, largely beyond the bounds of environmental oversight, is wrong on every count. Gasland, in other words, is like the Greens: it spouts far more hot air than strictly necessary.

Um, actually, either Sheehan is right, or other reporters in the Herald are right ... now there's a choice for Sophie ... and fracking is currently being run in NSW by secretive cowboys largely beyond the bounds of environmental oversight ...

Sheehan, in other words, is very much like the Greens he routinely despises ... he spouts far more hot air than strictly necessary, but since he finds the word 'fracking' and its spelling a source of endless fun and amusement, why doesn't he just go and get fracked. Or perhaps go frack himself ... Or as my dear departed uncle used to love saying, frack me, frack me dead ...

Who knows the truth about hydraulic fracturing, and its safety, especially in dense urban areas. In its usual style, the NSW Labor government has been woefully inadequate and caught on the hop, residents uniformed and uninvolved until the news leaked out like gas in search of a water main ...

Why hasn't the subject and the science been led as a matter of immediate interest, especially to the actual residents of St Peters? In the United States, Halliburton has had its hand on the wheel, which inspires tremendous confidence ... after all any company inspired by Dick Cheney couldn't fuck up, could it?

Who knows, but you certainly won't find out if you read Sheehan. Just tug your forelock and head off to the mines for your daily duties, and say not a word, just take it as it comes ... After all everything's for the best in the best of all possible worlds, and if there's a little contamination, not to worry, a dose of magic water will surely fix what ails ya ...

(Below: and here's a graphic put together by the Herald to generate paranoia about the secretive work of cowboys supervised by NSW Labor).