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I read the article. It's great. I've been witnessing this transition toward integrating Church and state for years. Back in the day, I was willing to ignore it. I considered the evil of a leftist/socialist agenda to be the greater threat to American prosperity and stability. The left-wing agenda continues to be a monstrous threat. In 1980 and 84, I cast my votes to Ronald Reagan, believing that his support from the Moral Majority would not escalate to the threat to individualism and reason that it is today. The radical Christian conservative agenda now stands as large and menacing as a rival monster, eye to eye with the mystic monster of the Left. For this reason, I have abandoned my support for nearly all Republicans who exploits Christian value voters. My rejection of Trump doesn't mean that I support Biden. I vote with my conscience, and any third party candidate that presents no threat to individual liberty is fine by me. I show up at the polls, the respectable candidates have not. The American crisis of confidence has only radicalized the semi-literate electorate, playing on their fear and other emotions. Obama was a perfect example. I think very important issues were addressed in the past four years; some of Trump's policies were helpful. Some of his suggestions, (particularly his muted criticism against revisionist history in public schools), may yet have long term positive results. But overall, the recklessness of his language and management, his open displays of intimidation, his preference for authoritarian world leaders, I think the good does not outweigh the bad. It's quite unfortunate. Some good might come from all of this. I can only wait and see.

When I was able to get both planets in the same view with my telescopes, I drew proportional sketches of the conjunction. With a field-of-view, for example, of 2.42 degrees, I used circles of 2.4 and 4.8 cm. I developed a personal technique of being able to view with both eyes open so that I can hold a centimeter scale at a convenient distance to guage separations. I have used this for binary stars, also. ' Images are reversed right and left. Saturn was to the West (Left) of Jupiter. That is an artifact of the refracting telescopes. We correct that with prisms for binoculars ("field glasses"). With astronomical objects it is not that critical and we often just indicated N-W or whatever is convenient. On the night of closest conjunction, the sky was overcast. I could make out the planets because I knew what they were, but nothiing was distinct. I could not see the rings of Saturn or the moons of Jupiter that night. As for the annotations. Consider the notes added to the image directly above. 70mm is the diameter of the objective lens. F/10 means that the focal length is 700 mm. The viewing power is found from the focal length of the eyepiece (17 mm) divided into the focal length of the objective: 700/17 = 41+. In addition, I used a 2x Barlow lens, which effectlvely halves the focal length of the eyepiece, doubling the magnification to 82X. The field-of-view (FOV) is just under 1 degree: 52m 34s. That is based on the standard ("Ploessl") eyepiece field of view of 50 degrees at the higher power. (Georg Ploessl was a 19th century maker of optical instruments. His designs for eyepieces became popular in the late 20th century when the hobby of astronomy exploded in response to the US-USSR "space race.")

A good essay by Journo as far as an intro into the divide. BUT, neglects to mention a rising International Socialism which has been taking the place of National Conservatism. And as conservatism-religion has been pushed aside by the new Left, here was the cause of recent attempts by conservative thinkers to rediscover and reassert it and the nation state. The "divide" was created by the new Left, almost exclusively. So Journo doesn't get down to the deeper malaise, imo: Activist, secularist, anti-Christian authoritarianism. Which O-thinkers recognize as *the* false alternative but few others do. https://newideal.aynrand.org/meet-the-conservative-authoritarians/

Capitalism is as capitalism does. The concept is a product of epistemology but the practice is metaphysical. Maybe the 'modern' term should be quantum capitalism, as in trying to measure and identify in order to label misses and changes the target. Collapses the normative wave function. Adam Smith's invisible hand is the Newtonian apple viewing the economic strategies and interplays of nascent nation states. The Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution honed economic power and concentrated it in smaller and more compact entities , that could function by cooperation as in corporations or be guided by individuals. Perhaps Rand could be analogous to Einstein in that she provides the space time fabric of a moral justification as a lens. Newtonian principles are comfortable to everyday experiences and don't necessarily contradict a heretofore nonexistent theory of everything , but Einstein doesn't yet provide it either.

I suppose on the "speech has consequences" front, Glenn Greenwald has written a pretty good article citing a 1982 Supreme Court case which ruled that, if you speak, you can't automatically be held legally responsible for "inciting" the actions of people who commit violence, of their own will, as a result of your speech. The same legal reasoning would apply to Donald Trump. Even if some people were inspired to violence as a result of his speech, his speech is still protected under the First Amendment. The same reasoning applies to Stephen King, too, who has written (decades ago now) about how a very small number of his fans have turned out to be creepy serial killers and such. Even if such people find Stephen King inspiring, that is not Stephen King's fault. I'm sure he'd rather not have them as fans. But, importantly, he is not legally liable for their illegal actions, either. Luckily he wasn't dragged into court, the way the band Judas Priest was, when two of their fans committed suicide and it was alleged that their music "caused" the suicides. (The band won that case.) I'm sure that Donald Trump has had some fans that he'd rather not have.