News bits: Israel's defense - waddabout US war casualties?; Fraud case update; Etc.

Israel points to civilian casualties in American wars in defense of the civilian casualties it is piling up. The NYT writes: 

Under Scrutiny Over Gaza, Israel Points to Civilian Toll of U.S. Wars

Israeli officials say it is impossible to defeat Hamas without killing innocents, a lesson they argue Americans and their allies should understand

Falluja. Mosul. Copenhagen. Hiroshima.

Facing global criticism over a bloody military campaign in Gaza that has killed thousands of civilians, Israeli officials have turned to history in their defense. And the names of several infamous sites of death and destruction have been on their lips. 

In public statements and private diplomatic conversations, the officials have cited past Western military actions in urban areas dating from World War II to the post-9/11 wars against terrorism.  

“In 1944, the Royal Air Force bombed the Gestapo headquarters in Copenhagen — a perfectly legitimate target,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said in an address to his nation on Oct. 30. “But the British pilots missed and instead of the Gestapo headquarters, they hit a children’s hospital nearby.

So, what about civilian casualties in US wars? Does that justify what Israel does now? Wabbadout all the civilians the US killed in Vietnam? Wikipedia writes:

Estimates for the number of North Vietnamese civilian deaths resulting from US bombing range from 30,000–65,000. Higher estimates place the number of civilian deaths caused by American bombing of North Vietnam in Operation Rolling Thunder at 182,000. American bombing in Cambodia is estimated to have killed between 30,000 and 150,000 civilians and combatants.

That is a lot of civilian deaths.

To me, the “defense” of civilian deaths because other nations do it reflects, among other things, (i) the mostly irrelevant status of morality in politics and war, and (ii) the lasting damage that unwarranted wars leave in their wake. War is extremely bad on multiple levels.

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DJT was forced to testify yesterday in his civil fraud case in New York. This case could bankrupt him, if he doesn’t have the cash to pay the penalty.  And, it could put him completely out of business in New York state. This fraud lawsuit is really important. DJT knows that. He is fighting poison tooth and claw to avoid what is starting to look (more likely than not) like a major court loss for him. Of course, he will appeal a loss. But for now, he’s in deep trouble. The NYT reported several instances of bad news for DJT yesterday. 

First, when he started blithering as usual, the judge kept telling DJT to shut up and answer the question. That’s refreshing. For example, as he was musing (trying to divert attention) about Scotland’s oil reserves, judge Engoron cut him off: “Irrelevant, irrelevant. Answer the question.” Scotland’s oil reserves?? Bloviation to avoid answering inconvenient questions is a hallmark of DJT's “style”, if that is what one can call the grifter’s tactic. 

Second, due to his lack of self-control, DJT in autoblither mode could not help himself. He admitted that he was involved in approving some financial statements submitted to banks in 2021 after he was out of office. His lawyers hoped he wouldn’t say something like that because the judge has already held that those statements were fraudulent. Maybe DJT didn’t realize it, but he admitted in open court under oath to committing fraud. In his defense, DJT claimed he was busy “keeping our country safe” as president. The prosecuting attorney cut that BS off real quick: “Just to clarify the record, you weren’t president in 2021, correct?” DJT reluctantly acknowledged that he was not.

Third, and this one is a total hoot, DJT’s lawyers were flummoxed because they could not help or manage DJT. He’s always in autoblither mode. One of his lawyers, Alina Habba, complained to the press “the only thing they want are facts that are bad for Trump.” Well duh, that’s what lawsuits are for. Yeah, they want bad facts. That’s their freaking job. The plaintiff or prosecution tries to prove its case using facts that are bad for the accused. The defense, like Ms. Habba Dabba Doo, is supposed to pokes holes in the attacks. My God, DJT has a goof-ball attorney.

At this point, a plea of insanity might be DJT’s best defense. 

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The European Space Agency's Euclid space telescope is starting to send back images of deep space. While the JWST looks in great detail at small areas of space, Euclid is designed to look at big areas of space in great, but different kinds of detail.

The image above shows one thousand galaxies in the Perseus Cluster, with more than 100,000 additional galaxies visible farther away. The small dots of light are galaxies that can contain up to hundreds of billions of stars each.

Globular cluster NGC 6397

Final checks and calibrations of Euclid’s instruments are now in progress. One instrument is a 600-megapixel camera for imaging visible light and a near-infrared spectrometer and photometer that will record the light from galaxies in non-visible wavelengths. The data will be used to get the distance of galaxies from Earth. The first formal scientific observations are scheduled to start in early 2024. Scientists plan to release Euclid’s first maps of the universe in 2025. That initial map of the universe will include more area than in all of the data collected so far by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Euclid will map the universe over the next six years. 

Between JWST and Euclid, human knowledge will soon come to have a much better grasp of the structure of our little universe. This is exciting, to say the least. Images not behind a paywall are at the ESA's website. Shockingly beautiful deep space images are coming out to the public. 

The ESA comments:

“Dark matter pulls galaxies together and causes them to spin more rapidly than visible matter alone can account for; dark energy is driving the accelerated expansion of the Universe. Euclid will for the first-time allow cosmologists to study these competing dark mysteries together,” explains ESA Director of Science, Professor Carole Mundell. “Euclid will make a leap in our understanding of the cosmos as a whole, and these exquisite Euclid images show that the mission is ready to help answer one of the greatest mysteries of modern physics.”

“We have never seen astronomical images like this before, containing so much detail. They are even more beautiful and sharp than we could have hoped for, showing us many previously unseen features in well-known areas of the nearby Universe. Now we are ready to observe billions of galaxies, and study their evolution over cosmic time,” says René Laureijs, ESA’s Euclid Project Scientist.