Academics From The United States

"Be a light unto yourself."

"It helps to have a focus for your attention, an anchor line to tether you to the present moment and to guide you back when the mind wanders. The breath serves this purpose exceedingly well. It can be a true ally. Bringing awareness to our breathing, we remind ourselves that we are here now, so we might as well be fully awake for whatever is already happening."

"Mindfulness practice means that we commit fully in each moment to be present; inviting ourselves to interface with this moment in full awareness, with the intention to embody as best we can an orientation of calmness, mindfulness, and equanimity right here and right now."

"Such is the power of mindful, selfless generosity. At the deepest level, there is no giver, no gift, and no recipient…only the universe rearranging itself."

"Breathe and let be... Give yourself permission to allow this moment to be exactly as it is, and allow yourself to be exactly as you are."

"To let go means to give up coercing, resisting, or struggling, in exchange for something more powerful and wholesome which comes out of allowing things to be as they are without getting caught up in your attraction to or rejection of them, in the intrinsic stickiness of wanting, of liking and disliking."

"Human rights are only a particular modern version of the ancient commitment by Plato and Deuteronomy—and Cyrus—to the cause of justice. Even among modern schemes of freedom and equality, they are only one among others; they were far from the first to make humanity’s global aspirations the central focus. Nor are human rights the only imaginable rallying cry around which to build a grassroots popular movement."

"The true history of human rights matters most of all, then, in order to confront their prospects today and in the future. If they do capture many longstanding values, it is equally critical to understand more honestly how and when human rights took shape as a widespread and powerful set of aspirations for a better and more humane world. After all, they have done far more to transform the terrain of idealism than they have the world itself."

"The drama of human rights, then, is that they emerged in the 1970s seemingly from nowhere. If the Soviet Union had generally lost credibility (and America’s Vietnamese adventure invited so much international outrage), human rights were not the immediate beneficiaries."

"If you know anything about Buddhism, you will know that the most important point is to be yourself and not try to become anything that you are not already. Buddhism is fundamentally about being in touch with your own deepest nature and letting it flow out of you unimpeded."

"I bent over backwards to structure it and find ways to speak about it that avoided as much as possible the risk of its being seen as Buddhist, New Age, Eastern mysticism or just plain flaky."

"A good place to start is with yourself. See if you can give yourself gifts that may be true blessings, such as self-acceptance, or some time each day with no purpose. Practice feeling deserving enough to accept these gifts without obligation—to simply receive from yourself, and from the universe."

"There is even a how-to book, "Success With Science: The Winners' Guide to High School Research,""

"many contestants have immigrant parents"

"Professor Miriam Rafailovich... told me ...that the contestants "get massive coaching from the schools"

"New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman said that the Intel competition "identifies and honors the top math and science students in America, based on their solutions to scientific problems.""

"Project-oriented contests such as Intel aren't measures of scientific brilliance"

"A past winner ... told the STEM education newsletter Metroplex Math Circle about choosing among projects offered by her university mentor"

"In case after case, we see tech titans and entrepreneurs misbehaving or breaking the law. They push the boundary of acceptable or ethical behavior that most of us have to play by. Even if some of them provide the technologies of tomorrow, it doesn’t mean they can operate under different set of rule"

"Three of the president’s proposals target tech. This is especially true in that the foreign workers are overwhelmingly young, thus exacerbating the rampant age discrimination that we already have in the tech world"

"The contest doesn't rank talent in the same way we identify the fastest hurdlers or longest jumpers."

"most top science and math students don't participate in such national contests."

"The H-1B program authorizes non-immigrant visas under which skilled foreign workers may be employed in the U.S., typically in computer-related positions. Congress greatly expanded the program in 1998 and then again in 2000, in response to heavy pressure from industry, which claimed a desperate software labor shortage. After presenting an overview of the H-1B program in Parts II and III, the Article will show in Part IV that these shortage claims are not supported by the data. Part V will then show that the industry's motivation for hiring H-lBs is primarily a desire for cheap, compliant labor. The Article then discusses the adverse impacts of the H-1B program on various segments of the American computer-related labor force in Part VI, and presents proposals for reforms in Part VII."

"UPON the woven leaf, Upon the veined flower, I find my life portrayed in bief– My life from hour to hour. A frail leaf fit to die; The faithful air of heaven by, While no wind roughly blew. All day for my delight, From dark to dark my own; One butterfly delaying flight, That left me not alone. A humming-bird to float Upon a breath; a bee To blow a long complaining note, Invited were of me."

"The Indian, in the lack of help from any artificial educational processes, gathered his wood-craft and his skill from two sources. His main reliance was ever on his own individual observation, the training of his own senses, the increasing and improving of his own personal experience. Beyond this he was helped in anticipating such acquisitions, or in extending his knowledge, by the free communication from his elders of facts and phenomena beyond his immediate ken."

"The Bible, the Holy Scriptures, will never henceforward to any generation, in any part of the globe, be, or stand for, to individuals or groups of men and women, what is was to the early English Puritans."

"I can but repeat now the statement, even at the risk of shocking some readers, that the Puritans were beguiled into the worst of their errors of policy, bigotry, and intolerance, by their belief in and their attempt to follow the teacings which they found in the Bible."

"Many of the most profound truths come not in shouting and scandal but, rather, in a whisper. In our noisy world, they are easily missed or dismissed."

"People often have trouble finding lasting satisfaction from worldly rewards, because as soon as we acquire something, our desire resets and we are looking to the next reward."

"[C]onstitutional silences, like silences of other kinds, aren’t just occasional gaps or omissions in an otherwise-seamless design. They’re everywhere and come in as many flavors and varieties as sounds. Ambiguity and multiplicity of meanings are in a sense manifestations of silence."

"for work to be considered in the public interest, it ought to be, at least in part, on behalf of clients who are in some way underrepresented, or present views that would not be heard. This is true of some of Tribe's work; but in much of it he is empowering the powerful."

"What is the worst thing about living near an open sewer? It is not that you sicken at the stench of it every time you leave your front door. It is that the noisome vapors are so pervasive, and you have lived with them so long, you no longer notice it. What is the worst thing about living in the rubble of a civilization? It is not that you shed a tear for the noble churches and courts and town halls you once knew, as you recall years filled with religious services, parades, block parties, and all the bumptious folderol of an ordinary civic life. It is that you do not even suspect that such things existed."

"Tribe has taken a strong view of individual rights; his view of corporate rights is similar... It seems much harder to swallow the idea that Tribe’s paid work... is properly viewed as work in the public interest..."

"A subpoena was issued to Richard Nixon to turn over his tapes. He made the argument that you can't subpoena a sitting president... He lost... in the U.S. Supreme Court in the famous... Nixon tapes case. In ', Bill Clinton made the argument that you can't make me testify, and it looked like that was going to go nowhere, so he finally relented and testified "voluntarily." ...[T]he argument that is made in... a memo [to Robert Mueller]... It's basically written to a kind of gullible, nonlegal public. It doesn't make any genuine legal arguments. In fact, there's a rather frightening statement... that it doesn't matter how corrupt the president's motives are. He can do anything with the Department of Justice, as though it's his own private law firm. It says, "I can even use the pardon power." Well, of course he can use the pardon power as a way of showing mercy to people, but he's begun using it as what I have called a giant and loud elephant whistle, basically telling people, "If you have my back and don't cooperate with the investigations into what Russia did, and what I did, and what I knew and when I knew it, I'll have your back." ...[I]t almost sounds like he's saying that he can pardon himself, and thereby evade impeachment. Well, first of all, the impeachment clause itself says that the pardon power does not extend to cases of impeachment. But if all he means is that he can pardon himself so that when he is out of office he can't be convicted, I think he's confusing himself with vice president Pence. Pence can pardon him if he leaves office, the way Ford pardoned Nixon, but as I show in an article with and others, the self-pardon is ruled out by the structure of the Constitution. The President can say, "Pardon me" if he steps on your toes, but he can't say "Pardon me" as an exercise of official power. That would be the height of regal arrogance, and we don't have a king, we don't have an emperor. In fact, one of our complaints in the Declaration of Independence against King was that he was using his royal prerogative to obstruct justice. Well, if this president thinks that obstructing justice in order to corruptly avoid discovering the truth is within his absolute authority, I think he's got a lesson to learn, and I think the American people will teach it."

"I'm not comfortable with there being no restrictions. I'm a member with and and others of... the Real Facebook Oversight Board. I think the government should put some limits on them partly because they're so powerful. That does not mean that anybody who wants to has the right to use the platform. The limits are limits that have to be consistent with the first amendment restrictions on the government, but we can't simply transform these platforms into... places that anybody can use, when they are... privately owned, however powerful, however large."

"If you are a really serious student, you will be in science, or finance, or politics—you will be in the business of money or power. Everything is about ourselves. We don’t want to study other cultures. We want to make other people study about us, and from our preferred point of view. I say to students, “Here, let me teach you about Milton,” the author of the greatest poem in the English language. The students reply, “No, let us teach you about us.” Dear Narcissus, there is a great and beautiful world beyond that pool."

"[Social media companies] are private platforms. They have... as much right as Bloomberg or as The New York Times... to decide whom they will allow to use their platform. There is no first amendment right to use private property or a private platform to get your views out, and if your views are causing violence and death, the private platform itself ought to be held responsible for not taking you off."

"[T]he lesson from the Clinton impeachment is that purely partisan impeachments for offenses like lying under oath about a sexual affair, that don't really shake the Republic and threaten our ability to abide by the rule of law in general; that those kinds of impeachments are going to fail in the Senate and only embolden and empower the acquitted president. So Clinton's popularity just soared after the impeachment was rejected by the Senate. The Andrew Johnson impeachment is rather different. In that one, where he came within one vote of being convicted, most historians have concluded that the impeachment was terribly partisan, that it wasn't based on any real abuse. The basic charge on which he was impeached was his decision to fire the , , without the consent of the Senate, in violation of... the Tenure of Office Act. Now that was a technical basis that was cooked up, and it wasn't a very good one, because the... Act, not long afterward was struck down as unconstitutional. The president should not have to consult the Senate for firing a cabinet member. But there was a good reason that could have been used in his case. He was fundamentally trying to undo the Union victory in the Civil War. He was unwilling to pursue Lincoln's program of Reconstruction and he was going to be essentially open to all but re-enslaving African-Americans. His programs.. policies... practices showed that he was ripping the country apart, rather than helping to cement the Union that Lincoln had successfully preserved. That wasn't a crime, but it was what the constitution elegantly calls a high crime or misdemeanor and if he had been charged with that... a conviction in the Senate would have been more likely, and more appropriate. So the lesson... is that we should revisit our history, and not simply take the standard views of it as automatically right, and that we should be careful when we use the impeachment power to frame the right reasons for going after a president who has fundamentally broken his compact with the American people and his oath under the constitution."

"We... devote... Chapter five to the proposition that there is too much loose impeachment talk, and we think that impeachment... needs to be cautiously and carefully approached."

"[T]he framers were deliberately vague. They didn't want to limit it to treason and bribery because they knew that there were other things that could so violate the basic structure of our constitution, of checks and balances, that they couldn't even predict in advance. So they wanted a general term that would refer to profound abuses of power that threaten the rule of law. Those needn't be crimes. For example, if the president promises to pardon anybody who beats up one of his opponents, or beats up a non-white immigrant, and basically says, "All of you guys have a get out of jail free card." That would be a manifestly impeachable offense, but it wouldn't be a crime. At the same time there are some crimes that are not high crimes and misdemeanors in the sense that the framers used that language, like tax evasion. ...[I]f this president is evading his taxes, that's not an abuse of his official powers. But they resisted going even further and making it a complete free-for-all. That is, at one point they debated making maladministration... impeachable... Well, that could mean any disagreement with the president. There are some countries that say that misconduct is... impeachable... There are some states that, in application to their governor say that misbehavior is... impeachable... Well that would mean that any time the Congress disagrees profoundly with the president on policy... Suppose it passes a law, he vetoes it, they can't override the veto, but if they basically say... we were right and you were wrong, they could just impeach him. ...An effort of that kind was made with President John Tyler. They thought he vetoed too many bills, and that was the impeachable offense. So the framers of the constitution struck a balance and left the judgement to us. They didn't try to create a formula for what was an impeachable offense, but they didn't just say any time you disagree with president, the thing to do is impeach him and try to remove him. They struck a balance in between, and a pretty good one, although it's one that leaves a huge amount of judgement to... we the people."

"There have been impeachment talk... about Truman, Jackson... even about Jefferson, but the really serious efforts in our history have been efforts after the Civil War, beginning with Andrew Johnson and then continuing with Nixon and Clinton and now perhaps... Trump."

"If we eventually win in the Supreme Court, and Trump thumbs his nose at the court and defies it, ...and there is some reason to think he might just do that, because he seems to believe he's above the law, then the whole system will collapse unless he is impeached and removed. But I am... more confident... that even people on his side of the political aisle, who seem completely spineless when it comes to reigning him in now, might get religion at some point, and might conclude, enough is enough. We just can't hitch our wagon to this guy's falling star any longer."

"[A] governmental regime of guidelines which have to be followed, which do not involve private restraints because they would not enjoin any speech in advance. Those guidelines need to be in place so that we don't unfairly surprise the owners of Facebook, or other platforms, or Twitter, but... avoiding the ex-post facto effect of imposing rules after the fact is not the same as violating the doctrine, which basically says you can't muzzle people in advance."

"Like anything else that man makes, culture is nowhere pure, and is often shot through with dreadful evil. But it is in a way natural to man to cultivate a way of life that transcends the generations in time, and that in being reaches out to God himself. I suggest that the unnatural is to the natural as mass phenomena are to culture —especially the mass phenomena such as they are now."

"Impeachment is a political process, but it has a legal frame of reference... [O]ne of the things we try [very hard] to do in our book... is explain how law and politics interact in this process, and... if you forget the political side, you're going to make a terrible set of blunders. But if you ignore the legal side, you're going to risk destroying the Constitution and the country. I agree, from a strictly partisan, political point of view... that letting Trump basically do himself in and make all kinds of terrible blunders, (and there seems to be a new one every day with this crazy pardon or a completely weird imposition of a tariff that will lose American jobs) that he will make things worse and worse... for himself. But the Constitution we have is a fragile device and if in the course of doing that, he defies judicial orders... He says he might defy an order to submit to a , which would be a first in American history... basically presidents are subject to subpoena, but if he is subpoenaed and as his lawyers said in a memo... he says "No, the president is above the law, above the subpoena power." Then, even though it might be politically wise to just do nothing, we would be breaking faith with the constitution to essentially go back to a system where someone is king. ...Tyrants don't easily give up power, and if we simply let this guy get away with anything, and say, "Let's wait til 2020." It may be too late by 2020 to restore a constitutional democracy under the rule of law."

"[I]t would be strange to pretend we can discuss "high Crimes and Misdemeanors" today without any reference to Donald Trump..."

"Warring partisan tribes now define a dysfunctional system..."

"[H]igh Crimes and Misdemeanors... involve corruption, betrayal, or an abuse of power that subverts core tenets of the U.S. governmental system. They require proof of intentional, evil deeds that risk grave injury to the nation. Finally, they are so plainly wrong by current standards that no reasonable official could honestly profess surprise at being impeached."

"[W]e’re skeptical that so-called "impeachment precedent" commands deference apart from its power to persuade future generations. Congress isn’t bound by its own prior decisions."

"Americans have moved into ideological echo chambers... everything they read or hear reinforces their predispositions and makes them more intolerant of opposing views..."