The only remedy for Strzok’s disgraceful actions was just summarily levied— firing. And he ironically has met the same fate as his mentor, former deputy director, Andrew McCabe, who was fired for lying under oath, by the attorney general, after a recommendation from the inspector general’s office. In fact, the only true “collusion” that may ever be determined could well have been perpetrated by McCabe, Strzok, and FBI attorney Lisa Page, as evidenced by those infamous text message exchanges.

If we’d been caught in an extramarital affair with a co-worker while using company texts and emails to trash our clients or customers — we’d be fired on the spot. And yes, that’s what Donald Trump was when the still-inexplicable investigation into his campaign’s foreign connections began in the spring of 2016 — a customer of the justice system. An odd turn of phrase, yes. We usually just call them “citizens.” Citizens, even despicable ones like marathon bomber and dirtbag punk Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, are entitled to fair treatment.

At the very least, it needs to explain the basis of the decision to dismiss Strzok, pointing out which internal rules he violated, and why these violations amounted to a firing offense. As things stand, it looks like the Bureau’s leaders buckled to Trump and his political and media outriders, dispensing with departmental norms and setting a highly disturbing precedent.

It isn’t on Rolling Stone’s list of 2018’s biggest farewell tours, but it’s time. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Minority Whip Steny Hoyer and Assistant Minority Leader Jim Clyburn should announce that for the next three months, they are going to travel the country and campaign like heck, raise lots of money and make sure Democrats win a majority of House seats in November — and that after the election, all of them will step down from their positions to make room for a new generation of Democratic leaders.

Pelosi can fairly be criticized for not grooming young leadership to succeed her, but, you’ll have to forgive her, she was busy trying to keep the Republicans from selling off the Grand Canyon to Exxon, and from turning Social Security into a Keno parlor. I would point out, however, that the problem of new leadership is solving itself, both in elections to the House and in the election of state legislators around the country.

You can make an argument for a new face despite her extraordinary record. But her achievements really have been remarkable. It’s a sad commentary on Republicans that they have nothing to run on except demonizing a politician whose track record makes them look pathetic. And it’s a sad commentary on the news media that so much reporting echoes these baseless attacks.

For the Druze to demand a constitutional provision singling them out would create a hierarchy by which they are the “good” minority and others are less. This is not something the government should do. All citizens of Israel should be treated equally with equal rights and benefits. And the Nation-State Law is remiss not to include the value of equality.

What the bill is not is the death of Israel’s democracy — it was enacted democratically and can be overturned the same way. It is not the death of Israeli civil liberties — still guaranteed under the 1992 Basic Law on Human Dignity and Liberty and visibly reaffirmed by the large public protests following the bill’s enactment. And it is not apartheid — a cheap slur from people whose grasp of the sinister mechanics of apartheid is as thin as their understanding of the complexities of Israeli politics.

Though Israel is predominantly Jewish, it makes room for people from all the nations of the world. But my experiences with Israel as both a Jewish and a multi-cultural nation have been decidedly mixed… That’s why I believe the tearing apart of Israeli society around Israel’s new Basic Law could have been prevented — if any of the proposals for adding a few words stressing equality for all citizens had been added to the bill before it passed.

Finally, I asked him why a democracy should object if people peacefully protest. He responded that if he came to the United States to protest America’s occupation of native lands, the United States government would put him on the first plane back. That’s not true, I began to insist. Then I realized that with Donald Trump as President, I couldn’t be entirely sure… My detention is one more, not particularly significant, example of how Trump has emboldened Netanyahu.

Did Netanyahu mean that this time, in Beinart’s case, it was a mistake because he’s a well-known Jewish journalist and a regular commentator on CNN whose detention is more damaging to Israeli public relations? Is this why the unusual statement was made in English? Why did the prime minister not ask the Shin Bet to explain the detaining and questioning of Israeli citizens with leftist views? Is their status beneath that of a famous foreign journalist?

1. It was disturbing to hear that Beinart was detained, and somewhat reassuring to hear that this was a mistake.
2. Israel’s security forces do not detain people because of their politics. That is, unless they believe a security dimension is involved.
3. Israel is under no obligation to let people in if they are likely to encourage disorder and disruption. Those who come as guests should behave as guests.
4. The growing number of high-profile detentions needs to be addressed by a discreet investigation by the Knesset. A subcommittee can ask questions, get answers, and refrain from using these procedures to propagate political worldviews.

All of the IDF’s recent attempts to make it clear to Hamas—using painful aerial responses—that this equation does not pay off (it mostly harms Hamas’s military wing’s ability to deal with the IDF in the next big campaign, and to the Hamas regime in general) did not change Hamas’s behavior. On the contrary, Hamas takes it and keeps going. And if the Israeli retaliation is particularly painful, it always has the Egyptian intelligence head and UN envoy Mladenov to mediate a ceasefire before the damage becomes unbearable.

Everyone knows that the continued deterioration of the humanitarian situation in Gaza will eventually lead to a blowup, but so far no one has found a formula to funnel money and resources into Gaza while circumventing Hamas… as long as Netanyahu and Liberman stick to their strategic objective of leaving Hamas in power in the Gaza Strip, any genuine strategic move to instigate real change does not stand a chance, regardless of whether such a move is designed to lead to peace or to war.

As public pressure mounts on Israeli leaders to crush rocket barrages from the Gaza Strip, they’re opting to try the diplomatic route while a greater threat looms: Iran’s presence in postwar Syria. To keep his military focused on the northern front, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is pursuing a long-term truce with Hamas, the militant group that rules the Gaza Strip.

Wheeler was espousing the view that elementary quantum phenomena are not real until observed, a philosophical position called anti-realism. He even designed an experiment to show that if you hold on to realism—in which quantum objects such as photons always have definite, intrinsic properties, a position that encapsulates a more classical view of reality—then one is forced to concede that the future can influence the past. Given the absurdity of backward time-travel, Wheeler’s experiment became an argument for anti-realism at the level of the quantum.

The theory permits some 10,500 different solutions: a vast, varied “landscape” of possible universes. String theorists like Wrase and Vafa have strived for years to place our particular universe somewhere in this landscape of possibilities… But now, Vafa and his colleagues were conjecturing that in the string landscape, universes like ours—or what ours is thought to be like—don’t exist. If the conjecture is correct, Wrase and other string theorists immediately realized, the cosmos must either be profoundly different than previously supposed or string theory must be wrong.

The feedback from experimental data is essential. At its foundation, physics is a dialogue with nature, not a monologue as some theorists would prefer to believe… The risk for physics stems primarily from mathematically beautiful “truths,” such as string theory, accepted prematurely for decades as a description of reality just because of their elegance.