I am relieved that Pop’s surname was not Fracking.

Had I inherited it, by now I would have needed to move in with my therapist.

Given the tidal wave of scurrilous language that leftist Wishers use almost daily against fracking, my quaking mind would have required fulltime professional treatment.

Speaking of quakes:,

The lightweight left rides again. Hi ho, fracking, awaaaaay.

Wishers, sometimes known as environmentalists, squeak by with regularly impugning the oil drilling form known as fracking because their leftist overseers control the media. This means not having to show evidence. .A suspicion is quite good enough.

For years, thousands, if not millions, of sketchily employed Wishers desperately, furiously, have been combing the bucolic and the not-so-bucolic badlands of America.

One acre at a time, they are angrily in search of evidence, or at least suspicions, that fracking causes ill health, earthquakes, divorces, ill temper in lefthanders and toothaches in Millennials.

They have come up emptier than Grandma Pudge’s policy pouch in her run – or walk — for the Democrat presidential nomination.

Wishers rolled fracking back into the news today. More accurately, fracking limped onto the stage. Grunting like ailing squirrels, the idealistic Wishers are trying to connect fracking to ill effects, and darn, they fail every time.

But the boys and girls are persistent, even perspicacious.

After a U.S. Geological Survey report was released yesterday, hoping but unable to connect a series of earthquakes to fracking, one headline this morning read “New Studies Link Oil and Gas Drilling to Hundreds of Earthquakes Across U.S.”

“Link” was the only untrue term in the 13-word headline. Twelve-to-one is closer than Wishers usually draw.

Alicia Chang, the girl who wrote the Associated Press story from downtown, probably is a Wisher. Her wobbly report is crammed with “maybes” and “we thinks” and “could be’s,” and, well, the sky might fall this afternoon

Meanwhile, a few blocks away at the reliably left-wing and lopsidedly partisan Los Angeles Times, their awkwardly crafted, slyly worded front page story — carrying the bylines of three second- and third-tier reporters – assumed a Case Darned Near Closed stance.

Pulling hard for fracking to be smeared as a killer tactic by the oil and gas industry it hates, the Times said the Geological Survey study “comes as officials begin to acknowledge that wastewater disposal is causing quakes.”

This is more wishful thinking by the three Wisher reporters, merely an attempt to seduce its mostly liberal, sympathetic readers into believing fracking causes earthquakes.

Maybe – but no one has come close to proving it.

Since the opinion of a Cal Tech seismologist spoils the plot of the Times’s partially untrue story, his comments, typically, were treated dismissively in the eighth paragraph.

“In California, wastewater wells in the Los Angeles Basin are not believed to cause earthquakes, according to Caltech seismologist Egill Hauksson, who was not involved in the USGS report. Earthquakes aren’t observed to be clustered in oil fields in Southern California, he said.

…

“In California, scientists say different oil extraction practices may be why earthquakes aren’t occurring due to wastewater injection here.

“One factor is that the Los Angeles Basin’s petroleum deposits are thick with oil. But in Oklahoma, workers need to break up dense shale rock to get the oil out of it, Mr. Hauksson said, which results in more toxic wastewater.

“Another difference: In Southern California, wastewater is generally injected back into watertight traps where the oil came from. In Oklahoma, the wastewater is disposed of outside the oil fields and injected below the groundwater aquifer, where it can trickle down and trigger movement on a long-dormant fault, Mr. Hauksson said.

“Fracking has been conducted in the last few years in Southern California, including at the Inglewood and La Brea oil fields, Mr. Hauksson said, and wastewater has been injected back into the ground. But studies show that out of 1,400 disposal wells in the southern San Joaquin Valley, earthquakes were possibly related to activities at only four of them. And there’s no obvious connection between quakes and the 72 oil fields in the Los Angeles Basin.”