In which the pond ventures forth into the world of the onion-eaters ...

Okay, while the squares might head off to Fairfax, to read Tony Abbott shocks as he eats a raw onion whole - yes folks that's skin and all - the pond is hip and cool, mummy-o, and knows where to head for the right emphasis:

And if you head off there, you get a gif of the thing repeating over and over.

What a pity they got the punch line wrong. The country hasn't broken him, he's broken the country. What has he done, why has he done it? 

This is as mysterious as the peeling of an onion, layer by layer to reveal at its centre ... a banana skin:

Meanwhile, how goes it in that dangerous, subversive nest of Marxist socialist leftie greenie reptiles, the ones so recently denounced by the Tyrannoboltersaurus's readers for their perverted, ABC, Fairfaxian biased ways?

Oh dear. Why even that stuffed settee, Paul Kelly's agenda and purpose seems to be hovering at the edge of the cliff, while that dangerous leftie Van Oscillate - as he's known to the Tyrannoboltersaurus readership - drags in zinger Bill Shorten as a sign he's balanced, when indulging in an assault on the infamous back flipping onion eater without tears ...

Why it's left - if anything can get left in the world of prattling Polonius - for Hendo to get bolshie about the usual sort of student aggro in university land, which excited the Australian Jewish News, but which mainly reminded the pond of all those splendid columns written by Hendo denouncing the boofhead onion eater's violent behaviour during his student days, with stirring headlines like Radical tolerance for the ratbag rightwing onion eaters ...

What an excellent exclusive by prattling Polonius.

Oh wait, the pond sees that piece belongs to Deborah Snow and James Robertson at Fairfax here, and there's a punchline:

When the case came on Mr Woof represented himself. 
Across the room was the young Mr Abbott accompanied by a team of half a dozen middle-aged men in suits, whom Mr Woof took to be his opponent's legal team. 
''Perhaps he could have got his friends to wear wigs and gowns, but they were dressed like practising barristers and solicitors,'' he says. 
After giving evidence to the magistrate and being asked to call witnesses, Mr Woof decided his cause was doomed in the face of this firepower, and withdrew. ''One way or another, I could see I would be outmanoeuvred.''

There's more details of student violence in the piece, and the pond looks forward to yet another denunciation of onion eater violence from our very own prattling Polonius ...

Thank heavens for Islamics to kick around, but frankly these days, the pond is dissatisfied at reading the mamby pamby kind of soft core leftie nonsense that bedevils the reptiles in the lizard Oz.

You see, these days the Tyrannoboltersaurus has rediscovered his faith, and it's a faith that extends to many areas:

If only Bilardi had found Christianity, not Islam.

Because being a barking mad true believer in one set of fairy tales is so much more useful than being a barking mad believer in another set ... why, before you know it, Bilardi could have ended up a bible carrying American sniper killing hundreds ... as a contribution to a most successful colonial adventure ...

And he's shocked, shocked, that the onion haters are going about their stealthy business:

Oh dear, life can be hard for lovers of onion eaters ...

Eventually the pond gave up on the vacillating reptiles and turned to the Daily Terror for some reading to the right of Genghis Khan ...

Sure enough, there was Akker Dakker maintaining the Islamic rage ...

Indeed, indeed. Because Piers Akerman personally must accept responsibility for the behaviour of crazed far right Norwegian Christian Anders Behring Breivik ... just as he accepted responsibility for the behaviour of the Oklahoma City bombers ...

But leaving the pompously posed and preening Akker Dakker aside, the pond was beguiled by this splash:

This has been a story that has gathered pace very slowly, but the storm will come, and Oakes is yet another harbinger, as you can read in Sources must be protected: Government's bid to allay fears about surveillance legislation fails:

The data retention bill will be debated in the house of representatives this week. 
Then, on Friday, CEOs from the nation’s leading media organisations will appear before the parliamentary committee to air their concerns before the legislation goes to the senate. 
 Those CEOs should make it clear they are as angry about this as they were about Stephen Conroy’s attempt to impinge on press freedom through media regulation in the last Labor government. Memories of the grief Conroy brought down on his head would undoubtedly make Abbott sit up and take notice.

The reptiles have amazingly been like a frog in water slowly coming to the boil. 

Now in the real world, the frog hops out before it boils and the myth is busted, but in reptile la la land, it's only now dawning that metadata abuse will blow the whistle on them and their sources.

Another inquiry would be a waste of time. The committee has already considered dozens of submissions on the subject. 
The bottom line is the government does not deny the legislation is flawed, but is demanding it be passed anyway with the possibility left open of a repair job down the track. That is a ridiculous approach.

Sorry Mr Oakes, that's the approach the onion eater has routinely taken to all kinds of legislation. Why not just bite into the onion and see what's at the core? What's that you say?

A high-powered federal government team has been doing the rounds of media organisations in the last few days in an attempt to allay concerns about the impact of new surveillance legislation on press freedom. They failed. 
The roadshow featured the Prime Minister’s national ­security adviser Andrew Shearer, Justin Bassi, who ­advises Attorney-General ­George Brandis on crime and security matters, and Australian Federal Police Commissioner Andrew Colvin. Staffers from the office of communications minister Malcolm Turnbull also took part. 
They held meetings with executives from News Corp and Fairfax, representatives of the television networks, the ABC top brass, the media union and the Walkley journalism foundation. I was involved as a member of the Walkley board. 
The initiative, which came from Tony Abbott’s office, is evidence the government has been alarmed by the strength of criticism from media organisations of the data retention bill it wants passed before parliament rises in a fortnight. 
Bosses, journalists, even the Press Council, are up in arms not only over this measure but also over aspects of two earlier pieces of national security legislation that interfere with the ability of the media to hold government to account.

It's no surprise of course that around the same time, the quisling Tim Wilson was busy penning The Australian government's data retention scheme is not 1984 come to life.

Wilson, the alleged government freedom man, routinely manages to sound stupid, but this was a quintessentially stupid piece, which displayed not the first clue about the way governments might use metadata to track down leaks and sources.

And you'd have to be barking mad to think that politicians wouldn't do it. Both sides of the aisle have routinely tried to ferret out whistle blowers and punish them ...

The reality is that the media is fractured and fractious. It sits badly with the reptiles to co-operate with the ABC and Fairfax, and vice versa.

This was the way the reptiles tackled the subject a few days ago:

The pond will forgive the opening line's reference to the Stalinist era, because in fact metadata can be used in a Stasi-like way to track people, who they talk to, what they're up to, and whether they've attempted to dob in their masters:

Yep, it's a slow-building story, as Bernard Keane noted in Crikey the other day, and at the centre of the fuss is that prime doofus, George "the books and the bookcases man" Brandis ...

Are we building to yet another epic backflip? Will the reptiles get it together and stay united?

Why even the quisling Wilson had a few qualms:

The government’s data retention plans are not bringing the pages of George Orwell’s 1984 to modern Australian life. 
The concern is that compulsory data retention takes us a not-insignificant step down that road of possibility. 
The potential of technology presents us with new frontiers. That’s why laws and regulation have to recognise the very serious risks that compulsory data retention can pose. 
Additional checks and balances are needed to ensure data is secure, it is accessed rarely and there are heavy penalties if access is abused.

What's the bet that a future crazed Chairman Rudd or a barking mad onion-eater wants to find out who's been leaking against him (or perhaps even a her)?

All will be answered next week, and the pond thinks that the 'anything to stay in power' man will fold like an onion-eating Alice in wonderland confronted by a pack of flapping cards ...

Of course in all this, the reptiles are only arguing for self-interest and their own protection.

The protection of the right to privacy of ordinary Australians is already gone,  tramped on by government and the data collecting ways of the private sector online, and the official use of metadata will merely confirm it ...

In a way, it would be poetic justice for the reptiles to be hung themselves considering their epic indifference, herded as they have been by alarums about a couple of hundred ratbag fundie Islamics ...

Time for a Pope cartoon, and since we've been talking of Tyrannoboltersauri, how sweet to see that there are other sorts of reptiles in the world (and more Pope here):