In which our Henry rolls out the nukes and Killer of the IPA fears a fiscal nuking ...

Friday is the day, courtesy of our Henry, where the pond plunges back into ancient history for the edification of all.

Before heading there, the pond would like to celebrate the United States scoring its very own Trofim Denisovich Lysenko* to help in the science of health, celebrated in The Bulwark's RFK Jr.’s War on Vaccines Is Here.

Those who trawled through the comments on the vaccines piece might have come across this offering by Geoff G.:

Interestingly, crawling over broken glass is a proven, foolproof way to maintain your health. Now, the very best way is to swim in sewage. You can do that literally by swimming in a creek in an urban area. Rock Creek in DC has excellent, healing bacteria from sewage runoff. Most urban creeks do, so check with a local official to find out which ones are particularly redolent and fecund on the day of your swim. (Skinny-dipping is the best way to take the healing waters, but Bobby Jr. discourages "fatties" from exposing themselves to public view. He and Donald T are on the same page with this advice.)
If you don't have a creek running with sewage near you, you can swim in sewage metaphorically by volunteering at a MAGA/MAHA office in the area. You'll make wonderful new friends, and come out smelling like roses. (Well, not exactly roses, but you get used to it, and may even come to enjoy it.)

It's compelling timing, what with a statue of Stalin returning to a Moscow underground train station.

While at The Bulwark, enjoy a celebration of futurism by Jonathan V. Last in A Song of “Full Self-Driving”: Elon Isn’t Tony Stark. He’s Michael Scott, The fallacy of the tech genius.

So much delicious, too much to quote:

Under its Waymo brand, Google has driverless taxi fleets operating in eight cities (so far). They use a custom Jaguar, fitted with cameras, sensors, and a fairly high-powered onboard computer. While Elon has been making FSD promises, Waymo vehicles have driven 40 million real-world miles.
What happened?
Elon Musk was stupid. That’s what happened

No spoilers, but devoted Musk haters might also enjoy The New York Times celebration of his retreat, A Disillusioned Musk, Distanced From Trump, Says He’s Exiting Washington, The billionaire has made clear he is frustrated with the obstacles he encountered as he tried to upend the federal bureaucracy. (*archive link)

As always, such pleasures must be put aside for the daily grind of herpetology studies, and what a grind - way worse than ten hours of grindhouse movies straight - was on offer this day ...

For anyone wondering about nattering "Ned", there he was at the bottom of the page, in the guise of a journalist, in reality pandering to the Zionist wing of the hive mind.

EXCLUSIVE
Invitation and exhortation: ‘go to Israel and see for yourself, PM’
Senior Australian Jewish leader Mark Leibler has urged Anthony Albanese to agree to the Israeli President’s request that he visit the country, saying it would give the PM a fresh perspective on the Gaza conflict.
By Ben Packham and Paul Kelly

No need to go. You just have to look at the headlines to see the latest step in ethnic cleansing ...

The intent was open and visible.

Per the Graudian version:

...In May 2023, Smotrich, who said his “life’s mission is to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state”, instructed Israeli government ministries to prepare for a further 500,000 Israeli settlers to move into the occupied West Bank.
On 20 June, the Guardian revealed how the Israeli military had quietly handed over significant legal powers in the West Bank to pro-settler civil servants working for Smotrich.
An order posted by the Israel Defense Forces on its website on May 2024 transfers responsibility for dozens of bylaws at the Civil Administration – the Israeli body governing in the West Bank – from the military to officials led by Smotrich at the defence ministry.
In March, a statement issued by Peace Now said that between 1 January and 19 March, 10,503 housing units were promoted, surpassing the 9,971 units approved throughout the whole of 2024.
The approval of new settlements by Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government represents a further implementation of its longstanding goal to annex the occupied Palestinian territory – an objective bolstered by the Trump administration.
Mike Huckabee, nominated as Trump’s new ambassador to Israel, signalled his support for Israeli claims on the West Bank in an interview last year. He said: “When people use the term ‘occupied’, I say: ‘Yes, Israel is occupying the land, but it’s the occupation of a land that God gave them 3,500 years ago. It is their land.’”
Rightwing settlers have described top officials in Trump’s new administration, which rescinded sanctions imposed on violent Israeli settler groups, as a “dream team” that would offer a “special opportunity” to permanently end any prospect of a Palestinian state.

And so forth and so on and on, and anyway, to celebrate mass starvation as a strategy of war, there's no need to go to Gaza.

All the pond had to do was check out our Henry, almost top of the world ma on the extreme far right ...

The pond will fit in Killer of the IPA, but first to our Henry's history lesson ...

Our Heny was in full bloodthirsty war monger mode: History tells us wars can be harsh and cruel but worth fighting, Providing aid to authoritarian regimes will, unless it is very tightly controlled, largely enrich those regimes.

The reptiles helped out with a splendid visual suggestion: A Hiroshima city official takes out the list of atomic bomb victims, which is kept in the stone chamber of the cenotaph for the A-bomb victims. Picture: Getty

This put our Henry in splendid company, including a Florida 'gator type recorded in The Times of Israel:

And there was the usual injunction to travel, This article contains features which are only available in the web version, Take me there, but we're already there, so let's get on with the most excellent reasons to indulge in mass starvation and perhaps even a dinkum nuking:

Its name left the campaign’s purpose in no doubt: Operation Starvation. The US Navy would destroy Japan’s capacity to import the food it required, while the air force shattered what remained of its capacity to harvest, transport and process crops within Japan itself.
Launched with the unqualified support of the Curtin Labor government, the goal was to accelerate the disintegration of Japanese society and help trigger the Imperial regime’s collapse – thus averting an invasion that would cost more than 200,000 allied lives.
The campaign certainly met its objectives. As food imports declined by two-thirds, the standard daily ration of staple food was cut from 800 to 290 grams – less than starvation level. Meanwhile, the average black market price for food soared from five to almost 50 times the official price, making rice and other basics utterly unaffordable for most Japanese families.
With desperation setting in, Japanese leaders, meeting in June 1945, agreed that food shortages would become unsustainable in three months’ time. It was against that backdrop that the destruction, a few weeks later, of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the atomic bomb finally brought the Pacific War to an end.
President Harry Truman never expressed any regrets about the operation, nor did his military commanders. After all, the Pacific War was not a tea party: it was an existential battle for survival. The goal was victory, the only basis on which a durable peace could be built. What had to be done to achieve that goal would be, and ultimately was, done.
None of that should have been unexpected. As early as October 1937, Franklin Delano Roosevelt had warned – prefacing his statement with an emphatic “mark this well” – that threats to the US would be met by crippling “quarantines”.
Asked what that meant, Senator Key Pittman of Nevada, the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a crucial ally of the president, was characteristically blunt: “Why shoot a man,” risking your own life and that of your comrades, “when you can starve him to death?”.

Indeed, indeed, and the reptiles helped out some more by showing the splendid effects of mass starvation, A United Nations warehouse in war-torn Gaza was broken into by "hordes of hungry people" on Wednesday as aid trickles into the Palestinian enclave on the brink of famine and the United States readies new terms for a possible truce between Israel and Hamas. Gabe Singer reports.

It turns out that the simple enterprise of mass starvation, ethnic cleansing and the turning of Gaza into a new Riviera is just like World War 2:

Nor were the grim realities of war any different in Europe. Winston Churchill had vowed that no means would be spared to ensure “every trace of Hitler’s footsteps, every stain of his infected, corroding fingers would be sponged and purged from the surface of the Earth”. There too, what had to be done would be, and ultimately was, done.
The end of the war didn’t end the starvation – indeed, in Germany, food shortages became more acute. By 1946, hunger was rife across the four occupation zones, spreading death and disease: infant mortality in the British zone stood at 10.7 per cent, while the incidence of tuberculosis in the British and American zones rose to three times its 1938 level.
Meanwhile, in the French zone, basic rations were fixed at 900 calories a day, which was less than two slices of bread with margarine, two small potatoes and a spoonful of broth with milk. For the next two years, precious little food was available in all the occupation zones, even on the black market.
Those were the wages of aggression. But the post-war period brought new beliefs: the conviction that Aries, the god of war, could somehow be tamed, and wars somehow fought humanely.
The West – as it turned out, only the West – took those new beliefs seriously. The horrors of war were to be avoided. Where they could not be avoided, it was the West’s responsibility to alleviate them. Wars were no longer to have innocent victims.
The world’s brutes and aggressors must have cheered. They understood the opportunities that created. And until Hamas came along, no one grasped them more vigorously than Saddam Hussein.

Avoid the horrors of war? Mount a Marshall plan?

Persuade Japan it might have been better off making cars and TVs and such like?

None of that claptrap for our Henry, who is invengeful Old Testament god mode, with the reptiles turning to a banal stock image to incite him more, US marines pull down the statue of Saddam Hussein in the centre of Baghdad in 2003. Picture: Getty Images

Tear it all down, fuck it all up, it's all good in our Henry's world ... 

In August 1990, in the wake of the first Gulf War, the United Nations imposed comprehensive sanctions on Iraq. Almost immediately, Saddam’s regime began claiming that the sanctions were causing a horrifying increase in childhood deaths. Relying on data the regime provided, a slew of NGOs piped in, with John Pilger likening the sanctions to a “medieval siege”.
The propaganda culminated in a UNICEF report that blamed the sanctions for the death of 550,000 children. Widely publicised, including on the ABC, those estimates underpinned the rapid expansion of the UN’s Oil for Food program, which allowed Iraq to sell oil and use the proceeds to purchase food and medicine.
In reality, the estimates were, as Tim Dyson, professor of population studies at the London School of Economics, and colleague Valeria Cetorelli showed, “a remarkable fiction” and “a major deception”. But the story worked like a charm. The regime got a program, which it helped design, that allowed it, as well as the program’s chief administrator in the UN, to extract corrupt payments totalling billions of dollars.
One incident exemplifies the theft’s scale. Shortly after US-led forces attacked Iraq in March 2003, Qusay Hussein – one of Saddam’s sons – arrived at the Central Bank with a note signed by Saddam ordering the withdrawal from the program’s funds of almost $US1bn in cash. The officials promptly complied; Qusay died in the fighting but most of the cash was never recovered. Meanwhile, barely half the humanitarian purchases got to their intended beneficiaries.
Yes, part of the fault lies with the UN. As Paul Volcker concluded in his official report on the Oil for Food scandal: “The difficulties (the program) encountered – the managerial weaknesses, the failures to accept responsibility, the ethical lapses – are symptomatic of systemic problems running through the UN Organisation.”

At this point the reptiles - in a totally irresponsible and reprehensible way - interrupted our Henry with an AV distraction:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has denied that his government is using starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza and said that Palestinian prisoners were “quite the opposite” of emaciated. Footage here shows part of Netanyahu’s address at the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance Conference in Jerusalem on Tuesday evening, May 27. (Full text here.) Netanyahu said that “from day one” he decided Israel wasn’t “going after the civilian population” in Gaza, but after Hamas. “So we supplied them with 1.8 million tons, 1.8 million tons of food and aid. That’s an enormous amount. And that’s why people didn’t…you didn’t have mass starvation at all,” he said. He added that an indication of this was that when Palestinian prisoners are made to take their shirts off to check for explosives when arrested, they don’t look malnourished. “Thousands and thousands of prisoners taking their shirt off and you don’t see one, not one emaciated from the beginning of the war to the present,” Netanyahu said, adding that they looked “quite the opposite because you don’t get that much exercise, certainly not in tunnels.” According to an Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) snapshot released earlier this month, the entire population of Gaza is expected to face acute food insecurity from May to the end of September. Around 470,000 people in Gaza are expected to face catastrophic hunger, according to the IPC. After a blockade, limited aid has been allowed back into Gaza over the past few days. Credit: Israeli Prime Minister via Storyful

Only 470,000 facing catastrophic hunger?

Not enough, not nearly enough, it's all about ethnic cleansing and extermination, and never mind those other echoes from WW2 (you know, the ghettoes and the killing fields):

The root cause, however, lay in the Western illusions on which Saddam had played. The naive acceptance of data readily manipulated by authoritarian regimes. The equally naive confidence in UN agencies and NGOs. The reluctance to recognise that providing humanitarian support to authoritarian regimes will, unless it is very tightly controlled, largely enrich those regimes – and that the regimes will do their utmost to undermine any relief program they don’t control, as Hamas has repeatedly done and is now doing.
But the illusion towering above them all was the refusal to accept that wars can be harsh and cruel yet worth fighting.
No one said it better than John Stuart Mill. “War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the degraded moral state which thinks that nothing is worth a war is far worse. A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.”
“As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever-renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind,” Mill concluded, “human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other.”
Fortunately for those who value freedom, Churchill, Roosevelt and Truman understood that. So should we.

Fortunately the pond can take a step away from our Henry in full-blown sociopath mode to check out Killer of the IPA.

There were a few strays who tried to get into Killer's turf, briefly noted:

Businesses must learn to ‘Trump-proof’ their operations
Against a deteriorating geopolitical backdrop, some of Australia’s companies and business leaders are tottering towards disaster.
By Simon Atkinson

This advice to Trump-proof was at odds with Saul, who distinguished himself by failing to note the deeds of King Donald in his piece.

Not one mention of the mango Mussolini from Saul, tottering towards climate science denialism:

An anti-investment ideology has taken hold of Australia
We have become the country of ‘no’ instead of ‘go’.
By Saul Kavonic

The pond can only spare a few moments for Saul, in full dig it up, rip it out and ship it off mode:

...The Albanese government’s approach to approvals reform for gas may prove how serious Labor is about recharging investment more broadly in Australia again. Early signs are not encouraging. The government has still refused to implement its own stated policy to reform the unworkable offshore consultation provisions. New impetus to toughen up the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act could make approvals harder still.
Activist lawfare against investment continues unabated. Rather than fixing this, Labor continues funding this lawfare against the government’s own approvals. It amounts to economic sabotage of major investments in Australia. Investors can’t trust our government’s own approvals – even once they have been obtained, they can be taken away. This is deterring investment more broadly.
The Environmental Defenders Office remains emboldened in its activist lawfare. Despite the court’s extraordinary admonishment of the EDO last year, which saw a round $9m in costs awarded against it, the EDO continue to lodge challenges against projects on spurious grounds. It may be a matter of time until the EDO brings a court case against the North West Shelf approval as well. The seven-year delay could be prolonged further. The Queensland government recently led the way by ceasing funding to the EDO, but federal Labor remains a major source of EDO funding.
Recent EDO accounts show there continue to be organisations with deep pockets willing to fund the EDO’s economic sabotage of Australia’s economy (and the EDO’s abuse of Indigenous culture). An undisclosed party recently loaned the EDO $6.5m to pay court-awarded costs to Santos and continue operating.
Until broader approvals reforms and activist lawfare are addressed, investors will remain hesitant. The North West Shelf approval risks being perceived as a positive exception to an otherwise discouraging rule. Investors need to see a lot more actions from the federal government to back up its words, before an appetite to prioritise investment in Australia will return again.
Saul Kavonic is Head of Energy Research at MST Marquee.

Cue the infallible Pope of the day, appealing to both Saul and our Henry with a damn fine nuking:

On the other hand, Killer of the IPA was in paranoid mode contemplating the Cantaloupe Caligula:

The header: Donald Trump faces humiliation in court over tariffs, The unanimous order by three judges not only repudiated a range of tariffs that might have generated tens of billions of dollars of revenue, but undermined trade negotiations with more than a dozen nations.

The caption for the snap provided to check out the mango make-up: Donald Trump has a somewhat cavalier attitude to the law so far as it constrains his own power. Picture: Getty

The magical injunction: This article contains features which are only available in the web version, Take me there

Killer seemed to be suggesting a little rollback might be in order:

And so to the Killer text, and how strange it was to see Killer of the IPA indulge in a little heresy:

Donald Trump has successfully lived the maxim that it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than seek permission. But forgiveness might not work this time, after the Court of International Trade in Manhattan struck down as illegal the centrepiece of his economic plan: the kaleidoscope of so-called Liberation Day tariffs imposed on almost every country in early April.
Liberation Day may turn out to have been Humiliation Day for the White House.
The unanimous order by three judges, two Republican-appointed and one Democrat, not only repudiated a range of tariffs that might have generated tens of billions of dollars of revenue, but undermined trade negotiations with more than a dozen nations.

Killer had barely got started with his heresy before the reptiles interrupted with an AV distraction, George Washington University Assistant Economics Professor Steven Hamilton says US President Donald Trump’s imposed tariffs are just “another ripple in the pond” for the US economy. A US federal court has said President Trump has no power to impose these tariffs, and that the power rests with Congress. “The President doesn’t … have the unilateral right to impose tariffs,” Mr Hamilton told Sky News host Andrew Bolt. “It’s not a power vested in him. “Eventually, it will make its way to the US Supreme Court, and they will decide whether the President indeed has the right to impose these tariffs. “It would be good news if these tariffs were turned down because they have the potential, frankly, to devastate the us economy and … the global economy. “This constant up and down is only going to serve to chill investment in the US further.”

That mention of the Bolter distracted the pond, what with the venerable Meade having put out certain figures in last week's Weekly Beast:

Hundreds and thousands
Buried in the documents filed by Sky News Australia in defence of a defamation claim brought by the lawyer Adam Houda is a rare full disclosure of how many people watch The Bolt Report across all Sky platforms.
Here is the rundown of Bolt’s audience.
For the 7pm broadcast on Foxtel on the night the allegedly defamatory comments were made (23 January 2024) there was an average audience of 57,000.
For a rough comparison, Bolt is up against ABC News and Nine’s A Current Affair in the 7pm time slot. Both free-to-air shows usually have up to 1 million viewers.
On Sky News Regional, Bolt picked up another 43,900 and Sky News Now had 10,100 streams.
On Foxtel’s streaming platform the program had an average audience of 4,600 with 250 video-on-demand streams.
On the Flash service there were 757 streams and an additional 48 on the Sky News website.
The content was also published on skynews.com.au, Facebook and YouTube.
After a complaint from Houda, the episode was removed from all platforms and an apology remains online, although it was not enough to stop the lawsuit.
Sky News and Bolt are defending the defamation claim on the grounds of truth.

Stunning figures, made all the more delightful when it's kept in mind that the ABS's population clock currently projects Australia's population at c. 27.675m.

Back to Killer indulging in heresy:

Investors may have ridden a multi-month financial roller coaster for absolutely no reason.
Presidents aren’t kings and Trump could only levy the arbitrary tariffs on his reading of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977, which allows presidents to levy tariffs in the case of “national emergencies”.
The judges argued that green-lighting Trump’s claimed emergency of choice, a chronic trade deficit, was tantamount to allowing the President to deem anything at all a national emergency, such as a shortage of peanut butter, one judge mused.
Indeed, very few professional economists would deem a trade deficit a national emergency – if anything, it’s a sign of strength.
In any case, “an unlimited delegation of tariff authority would constitute an improper abdication of legislative power to another branch of government”, the judges added in their verdict.
As a nation that thrives on free trade, Australia might thank the court, if the higher tariff world that seemed more likely yesterday has suddenly become a vaguer prospect. But the pall of uncertainty will, for months, gridlock investment decisions the world over, as the White House has already signalled an appeal that could make its way to the Supreme Court. Share prices jumped on the news but not by much.
It’s unlikely the White House will get its way.
As Phil Magness, senior fellow at the Independent Institute who has followed the case closely, points out, the Trump administration actively sought out this obscure court for a favourable verdict.

For reasons best known to the cheapskates in charge of lizard Oz finances, the reptiles rolled out one of those dire stock shots which prove nothing, and provide no insights, Tariff changes have sent markets into chaos. Picture: Getty Images via AFP

The pond felt the urgent need to indulge in a cartoon:

Clearly Killer has been reading too many WSJ editorial board editorials. The pond takes the view that if you break it you own it, and later regrets amount to a hill of beans...

“One of the Republican judges was Trump-appointed and recommended to him by Trump’s own arch protectionist tariff guru, Robert Lighthizer, and the court’s rationale drew on the non-delegation doctrine,” he says.
Indeed, American conservatives popped the champagne last year when the Supreme Court delivered the landmark Chevron decision, which shifted power back to the courts when it came to interpreting what laws meant.
“Good luck arguing that this court was stacked against them, or that these were ‘leftist judges’ who were out to thwart the will of the President,” Magness adds.
The supposedly conservative Supreme Court might not be much help either. Trump’s success rate with the nation’s highest court during his first term was the lowest of any president since World War II, according to a recent legal study by scholars Lee Epstein and Rebecca Brown.
The court has been a mixed bag in Trump’s second term, sometimes undermining his attempts to deport immigrants the White House has deemed unfit to remain in the US.

The reptiles rubbed it in Killer's face with a vivid memory of Liberation Day, Donald Trump unveiling his beloved tariffs. Picture: AFP

Things have gone splendidly ever since ...

You need a big drain to cope with the bigly power of the water pouring through the pipes, as Killer contemplates King Donald's fate ...

Nevertheless, ruling against Trump over his beloved tariffs would be a bold move, setting up the possibility the President will simply ignore the court entirely. That would damage both of them, not to mention the rule of law in the US.
Trump has a somewhat cavalier attitude to the law so far as it constrains his own power. Whatever one makes of his political and economic program, he’s hardly been an enthusiastic supporter of judicial independence.
The ability of courts to defy the government is a remarkable strength of the US, something that rarely happens in Westminster countries, where courts tend to defer to ministers.
Some Trump supporters might not like courts sticking their nose in the definition of a national emergency, but they did like it when some brave American judges struck down Covid restrictions as illegal or unconstitutional during the pandemic. Swings and roundabouts.
I’ll be forever grateful to Florida federal judge Kathryn Mizelle, who in April 2022 freed millions of Americans (and me) at the stroke of a pen from the abject nonsense of being forced to wear a mask on public transport.
It’s impossible to predict how the Supreme Court will decide, let alone how Trump will react, in this grand forthcoming clash over tariffs and the law. Never will Supreme Court justices have made a decision with such vast economic and financial consequences.

There then came an echo of the scent of Musk, forlornly realising that his pathetic and inept cuts were no match for the additions to the deficit proposed in the alleged big and beautiful bill, George Washington University Assistant Economics Professor Steven Hamilton discusses US President Donald Trump’s new ”terrible” bill to cut US debt through massive savings. Elon Musk, who was Mr Trump’s biggest donor and campaigner for him, has attacked the President for his cuts. “Trump is incredibly influential and it’s hard to imagine the Senate won’t simply roll over and wave it through,” Mr Hamilton told Sky News host Andrew Bolt. “We have a genuine looming US fiscal crisis. “I don’t know what it will take for the US government finally to reckon with this problem, but something's got to give.”

Ah, again with the Bolter, preaching to the multitudes.

Something's got to give?

But it's all going splendidly, if not in the US, then certainly on Mars or some other planet claimed by King Musk I ...

And so to a last gasp from Killer of the IPA:

Trump could put to bed Democrats’ relentless claims he’s a “dictator” by abiding by whatever the court decides. It would be better, however unlikely, for Trump to seek the support of congress for at least some of his tariff vision. There is a bipartisan constituency in the US to seek to revive manufacturing; a lot of Bernie Sanders supporters voted for Trump, after all.
As a disappointed Elon Musk noted this week, the US desperately needs to cut spending or raise revenue, and the President’s so-called “big, beautiful budget bill” does neither of these things.
Congress is not inclined to impose tariffs but a universal, low one in the interest of raising a decent stream of revenue and avoiding a fiscal disaster might offer some appeal. A consumption tax that foreigners partly pay.
Recent erratic behaviour in the US bond market should be a reminder that the US is not entirely insulated from financial market discipline. Washington gets the longest leash of any nation, but what the bond market did to the UK’s Liz Truss in late 2022 it could do to Trump in coming years.
The President might receive forgiveness for a misreading of trade law, but he’d never get it for causing global financial crisis.
Adam Creighton is chief economist at the Institute of Public Affairs.

Oh come on Killer, come on, he's just cooking with Faux Noise gas, the best way to fix the planet:

* For amusement, this is the report by Harrison E. Salisbury in The New York Times on 16th December 1949 under the header Soviet Agronomists Turn Wheat Into Rye In Harvest of Stalin Wisdom, Says Lysenko (possible paywall)

It shows that way back then the Times had already perfected its bland both siderist style:

So it goes, so it went ...