And lo! everything was as it was in the fabled days of yore….unemployment was low….the world was at peace….tech stocks were going like gangbusters….Byzantium’s Shores had the right template again….

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A note from the job search: one company here had an ad the other day for an “Epiphany Consultant”. I figured this was some kind of tech-position involving a program or computer system called “Epiphany”, and I was right. But the idea of an “Epiphany Consultant” kind of made me laugh, thusly….

Client: I think I had an epiphany.

Epiphany Consultant: Please describe it.

Client: Well, I suddenly realized that I’ve been working in sales for fifteen years, and that I’m not any good at it. Now I want to make shoes for a living.

Epiphany Consultant: Did you feel the Spirit moving in you?

Client: No.

Epiphany Consultant: Then what brought this realization on?

Client: My boss told me that I stink at sales, and I haven’t had a commission check in six years.

Epiphany Consultant: Oh, that’s not en epiphany. That would be a negative evaluation. You should update your resume. Thank you, but our time is up.

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My readers from the Midwest might enjoy Mike Finley’s tale of the Mountain that wished he was in Minnesota.

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Remember how, whenever anything broke on the USS Enterprise, no matter which ship in the line it was — from the original all the way up to the NCC-1701-E — some poor schlub (Scotty, Data, Geordi) had to climb into one of those tiny crawlspaces and shimmy along until they found the exact piece of circuitry or whatnot that had broken, thus keeping Captain Kirk from being beamed off the Constellation or something similar? Those crawlspaces were called “Jefferies Tubes”, presumably after the Starfleet engineer who designed them…but the name was really a tribute to the real-life Star Trek art director Walter “Matt” Jefferies, who designed the Big-E for the original series way back in 1964.

Jefferies, alas, has died.

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As you might have noticed, we’re in “Stripped Down Template” mode at Byzantium’s Shores for a bit. I hope to have the regular appearance restored no later than Friday, and maybe even tonight, if I get enough other stuff done between now and then. Bear with me. (I kind of dig the replacement colors. But they won’t be permanent.)

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A key rhetorical trick in political discussion, one of the oldest tricks in that particular book, is to find some of the farthest opposition from your own position as possible, and then to identify that position as the characteristic position of those who disagree with you. And if you can pull this off while also identifying yourself as a moderate or centrist, then you have managed to shift the entire discussion in your direction, without a whole lot of effort.

This is what SDB is up to right now, as he digs up some of the farthest-out quotes he can from some of the farthest-out left-wing discussion boards, and characterize this as representative of the loyal opposition‘s reaction to the deaths of Darryl Hussein and his-other-brother-Darryl. I know that Hesiod is a pretty popular left-wing blogger, but Democratic Underground and IndyMedia are not, in my experience, taken too seriously by the left side of Blogistan. More typical reactions, I think, can be found via these biggies of Left Blogistan:

Matthew Yglesias is glad they’re dead, but wishes they’d been taken alive, when presumably they might have been useful. (I’m assuming he’s talking in the “thumbscrews-and-hot-coals” sense of “useful”, at this point.)

Daily KOS speculates that the deaths of the Hussein boys (also here) may not prove as great a “turning point” in the war as some believe. I don’t know about this, and I’m sure SDB disagrees vehemently. But that doesn’t seem as bizarre a claim, on its face, as the weird “Bush is worse than Saddam” post from Way-Leftopia that SDB quotes.

Demosthenes is likewise unsure if this will really prove to be a turning point, or if Iraqi resistance has reached a point where it’s less pro-Saddam and more anti-American. Time will tell. He also speculates that this will yield a spike in the President’s polling numbers, and he may be right on that score. Noting that strikes me as a fairly innocuous observation, not some wild bit of leftist conspiracy-mongering.

Oliver Willis pretty much restricts his reaction to Treasury Secretary John Snow’s assertion that the deaths of Hussein II and Hussein III will somehow boost the economy (Oliver thinks that assertion is bizarre, and so do I). He does think that their deaths are good news, but he further states that the deaths aren’t particularly relevant to his reservations on the war in general. Another in the “Good news, not necessarily a turning point and certainly not an all-clear indicator” column. Agree or disagree, it’s not a whacko-leftist-pinko take on the situation.

Over at Eschaton, there are a couple of reactions, since Atrios has opened things up to a “group-blog” concept over the last month or two. Leah is first to comment, and she merely says that it’s good news. Commentator Lambert, on the other hand, says that killing the Hussein boys was “not the smartest thing this administration has ever done”. I’m not sure how “far-out” this is, but I don’t agree with Lambert, in any event. Not every dead villain becomes a martyr — aside from the Neo-Nazis in the world, Hitler’s never much been advanced as a martyr, frex — and from my (albeit limited) understanding of circumstances, I’m not sure these two will become martyrs, either. Second, Lambert is irritated that the killings don’t follow the standard model of American justice: Trial-by-jury, et cetera. In this case, I simply can’t agree: whether or not one agrees that we should have been fighting this war in the first place, the fact is, we are fighting this war, and these fellows were enemies of war. The idea in war isn’t to capture the other guy; it’s to kill the other guy if he won’t surrender. These fellows weren’t surrendering. I’m not going to fault the soldiers involved for eventually killing them, any more than I would fault a police officer who shoots to kill when the “perp” won’t put down his gun and put his hands up. (And besides, faulting “the Administration” for killing the Hussein boys, even if they could have been taken alive, doesn’t seem right except in the ultimate, cosmic sense that the Administration decided to fight the war in the first place. It’s not like they’re directly responsible, as if the President and his inner circle were holding guns outside the estate where this all happened.)

As of this writing, Kevin Drum only has one brief comment on the matter. He’s in the “We don’t yet know if this is good news, but maybe it is and I hope so” camp.

Tom Tomorrow is on vacation, apparently, and thus does not comment.

Greg at Planet Swank straightforwardly says that it’s good news, and he’s a solid, proud liberal. (For that matter, so am I, and my own reaction was the same: it’s good news. But then, I’m far from a “biggie” of anything.)

So I think that there is some more level-headed reaction to the deaths of the Hussein boys than SDB is letting on, even if you still don’t agree with the people I cite above.

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In cool science news, a possible key to identifying stars that are more likely to spawn planets has been found. The more heavy metals a star has, the more likely that star is to harbor a planetary system. Cool.

And in a shameless attempt to simply take up space with a nifty picture, here’s a satellite image of Mount Kilimanjaro, from this slideshow.

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With apologies to Rachel Lucas, I have to appropriate her method of punctuation for just a moment:

God. Do. I. Hate. Outlining. This. Novel.

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Via TBOGG, I see that Andrew Sullivan is striking a blow for journalistic standards everywhere:

“Here’s an extract from a letter from a soldier out there doing God’s work in putting back together a ravaged country. It was posted on Free Republic, but it seems genuine to me.”

In other words: “Here’s something I picked up off a right-wing message board that feels like something I wanna believe, so read the whole thing.”

I wonder what things would be like if our entire press corps operated under the “Gee, that seems genuine to me” standard of factual reporting?

On second thought, maybe I don’t wonder that….

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A heads-up to regulars here: my template may take on an odd appearance over the next day or two. We may be switching ISPs, and it’ll take some time for me to get everything moved and squared away if that happens.

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