Miranda the Devine, a Malibu conspiracy, and poison in the precious tap water and so in our even more precious bodily fluids ...

(Above: no relevance, just love the argument).

Guess which one is the paranoid ...

Write a rambling account of Charlie Sheen being a wife beater and a profanity deployer, and then scribble more notes about Mel Gibson copping it for his Passion of Christ flick, and his own way with profanity and personal abuse ... and then round it out thus:

Since then, Gibson has been the leper of Malibu. He was even blackballed last month from a cameo role in Hangover 2 after the cast and crew protested against his inclusion.

Fair enough. But Sheen is back at work on the Two And A Half Men set, feted by one and all. He even filmed a cameo in another movie, two days after the Plaza incident.

Like Gibson, he makes racist comments. Unlike Gibson, he has a domestic violence conviction. He seems to get away with anything, while Gibson is dead man walking in Hollywood. Guess which one is the conservative?

Yep, guess which one is the paranoid, and of course when writing at that level, it could only be Miranda the Devine, now settled comfortably in her tabloid home, writing incisive exposes of Malibu lifestyles ... this time in A tale of two meltdowns: Charlie v Mel.

Sadly the three punters that bothered to reply weren't buying it ... Gibson gets passed over for a cameo in a dodgy movie and suddenly it's a leftist conspiracy?

What to add? What can possibly said about a mind set that sees the dastardly liberal elite at work in a conspiracy to do Mel down? When are they going to get to work on scientologists like John Travolta? Is there a reason Qantas engines are failing ... one we haven't been told about ...?

But reading the scribble and having a good chortle reminded me how little attention we pay at the pond these days to the Devine, once a formidable giant strutting the liberal cardigan wearing Fairfax media like a conservative giant, a Colossus of Rhodes ... or of North head, whichever symbol moves you the most.

These days, the Devine is much reduced, forced to resort either to the Malibu stars or to a beat up about Sydney's desalination plant. Nothing like getting Sydney-siders agitated by telling them they're drinking shit ...

Why it reminds me of the good old days body surfing in Maroubra when I bobbed up in the water and wondered what all the brown bits bobbing in the water were doing there alongside me ...

These days Sydney pumps its sewage further out to sea so that's not a problem - well it might be for the fishies, but who cares about the little fishies.

Like other minions in the Murdoch press, the Devine seized on a Sydney Water report to do her beat up about the way desalination plant water allegedly has 390 times the amount of E coli organisms per 100 ml as compared to the numbers found in Warragamba dam water.

I say allegedly, because you can never trust the Devine when it comes to data, and it seems you can't trust Sydney Water either. Contrast her rant in Meek, stupid leaders will be damned with a hasty correction issued in various outlets, including the ABC, Sydney desal bacteria report wrong: MP.

A quarterly Sydney water report found that between July and September, seawater at the plant had up to 390 E. coli bacteria per 100 millilitres before treatment.

The treated water averaged one bacterium per 100 millilitres, according to the report, failing safe drinking guidelines.

But Water Minister Phil Costa says the data was wrong.

He has assured residents the processed water is safe to drink.

"There was human error that led to incorrect reporting on the levels of E. coli at the plant as being unsafe," he said.

"So we do apologise - there was a human error, and the water coming out of the desalination plant is very safe indeed."

He says Sydney Water is investigating the mistake.

Of course if the key Devine figure is wrong, then that rather deflates the entire point of the Devine column, which is that the Devine is a 'dams' sort of scribbler, and - after she's said damn you greens, damn you Labor party, damn you bureaucrats - what Sydney needs is more dams, not the desal plant.

Seeing as how dams provide impeccably safe drinking water, with Warragamba showing the way towards an extra fine virgin level of water purity.

Which somehow reminded me of the great cyptosporidium and giardia scare of 1998 ... when high levels of the bugs were found in the water, and 'boil water' alerts were issued, and the city was plunged into a week long boil water crisis ... for water coming from Warragamba Dam (why it even has its own wiki, 1998 Sydney water crisis).

Yep, in her usual Devine way, she doesn't begin to understand that whatever the source, there'll always be issues with filtration, storage and delivery, and doing a beat up over one source while ignoring issues with other sources is just ... woeful.

Naturally being the Devine, she has an alternative solution. Damn the Shoalhaven river. Sorry, that should be dam the Shoalhaven, though in the end the result will be the same ...

And naturally, being the Devine, she has to work global warming into the scenario:

The city’s great dam, Warragamba, was built in response to the 1940s drought by our practical forebears who believed in creating infrastructure for the future rather than in the dark voodoo of global warming.

Instead, today, the government steals water from the farmers of the Murray Darling Basin and then charges them for the rain that falls out of the sky into the dams they had the foresight to construct on their own land.

The reason water was so scarce in the recent drought was not because of climate change - it was because our dams simply aren’t big enough for a growing population. D’uh.

Of course our practical forebears had no way of knowing that rainfall patterns would shift away from the area in which they built the dam, with coastal regions these days tending to cop the rain. D'oh.

But don't take my word for it. Bizarrely, there's a site with more graphs about Sydney's rain and dam levels than even Dustin Hoffman in his Rain man days would have needed ... Sydney's Dam Levels - current statistics and graphs.

Reading the Devine however reminds me that there's one fate worse than being run by a flock of inept NSW state Labor types ... and that would be having the Devine's hand anywhere near any policy or government lever ...

Thank the lord she's just a Murdoch minion doing her bit for fish and chip wrapping ...

After moaning and groaning and whining and carrying on and on and on about how we need more damn dams, the Devine rounds out her column with this:

Taxpayers would be content if only governments would provide adequate water, energy, sewage treatment and roads as their core functions. Forget bank bashing, carbon trading schemes, free laptops and the $43 billion NBN broadband rollout. Just get the boring basics right.

Yep, you went looking for public transport in that list of boring basics, didn't you? Sorry, it's dams and roads, roads and dams, and never you mind if the world might be changing just a tad or a wee bit ...

There is of course an explanation for the decline and fall of the Devine, finding leftist conspiracies at work in Malibu and shit in the water in Sydney ... and yes it is surprising she didn't mention the really dangerous thing in our water, the fluoride that allows the aliens to access our brain cells directly via our teeth ...

It is of course the malignant effect of Twitter, as explained by the Devine's old chum Baroness - we just love the Baroness bit - Susan Greenfield:

My final issue is identity, and it does stun me, Twitter for example, where the banality of some of the things that people feel they need to transmit to other human beings. Now what does this say about how you see yourself? Does this say anything about how secure you feel about yourself? Is it not marginally reminiscent of a small child saying "Look at me, look at me mummy! Now I've put my sock on. Now I've got my other sock on," you know? And I'm just being neutral here, I'm just asking questions, right... What does this say about you as a person? (here).

Yep, head off to Miranda Devine on Twitter, here, and you get juicy tidbits like this:

Columns are up on the blog: Mel v Charlie: Hollywood Hypocrisy and Desal Insanity http://bit.ly/axmlB4
11 November 2010 8:26:03 AM AEDT via TweetDeck

Which is to say, look, look at me readers, now I've published one paranoid rant, and now I've published another paranoid rant - and you know, here at the pond, we're just being neutral, we're just asking questions right - what does this say about Miranda the Devine as a person?

Well it reminds me that it's been a while since we visited Dr Strangelove, and all this talk of water and purity is making me nervous:

Ripper (through his cigar): Mandrake ..

Mandrake: Yes, Jack?

Ripper: Have you ever seen a commie drink a glass of water?

Mandrake: Well, no I... I can't say I have, Jack.

Ripper: Vodka. That's what they drink, isn't it? Never water?

Mandrake: Well I... I believe that's what they drink, Jack. Yes.

Ripper: On no account will a commie ever drink Sydney water, and not without good reason.

Mandrake: Oh, ah, yes. I don't quite.. see what you're getting at, Jack.

Ripper: Water. That's what I'm getting at. Water. Mandrake, water is the source of all life. Seven tenths of this earth's surface is water. Why, you realize that.. seventy percent of you is water.

Mandrake: Uhhh God...

Ripper: And as human beings, you and I need fresh, pure water to replenish our precious bodily fluids.

Mandrake: Yes. (Chuckles nervously)

Ripper: You beginning to understand?

Mandrake: Yes. (Chuckles. begins laughing/crying quietly)

Ripper: Mandrake. Mandrake, have you never wondered why I drink only distilled water, or rain water, and only pure grain alcohol? And not that e coli muck served up by Sydney Water...

Mandrake: Well it did occur to me, Jack, yes.

Ripper: Have you ever heard of a thing called fluoridation? Fluoridation of water?

Mandrake: Ah, yes, I have heard of that, Jack. Yes.

Ripper: Well do you now what it is?

Mandrake: No. No, I don't know what it is. No.

Ripper: Do you realize that fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face?

Yes, and now we can add the Malibu conspiracy and the e. coli in desalination plants to the most dangerous commie plots we've ever had to face ...

There is of course a debate to be had about desal plants, but not with someone who's mind has been affected by their twittering ...

(Below: but before you get too paranoid about fluoridation, read the wiki here. Sorry I forgot to mention wiki is part of the liberal elite Hollywood conspiracy).