According to Suetonius, to prevent a famine after a crop failure, Augustus deported from Rome the foreigners with the exception for physicians, teachers, and slaves. Looks like H1 visas have a long history.

It would be much better for everybody if Thiel fled to Argentina earlier and did not spend years trying to make Uriburu's Argentina out of this country.

So, Bill Cassidy sold his soul, his professional dignity as a physician, betrayed kids to a hack sniffing coke from a toilet seat — and had not got even Wales?

Our paper in PLoS CompBio doi.org/10.1371/jour... I am so grateful to my great colleagues from three continents that made this paper possible.

A sob story about Trump voting farmers going to lose their farm. Joseph Heller was 100% right. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/03/u... www.goodreads.com/quotes/13757...

A very good analysis. Looks like Bibi's game might backfire. Unfortunately, it will backfire on all of us. What a bunch of nogoodniks. www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2026/05/prot...

Yitzhak Shamir, as a Lehi leader, organized the assassination of UN rep Bernadotte. Years later, as the Israel foreign minister, he met UN official Brian Urquhart. "This is the first time I deal with UN," said Shamir. "Did not you deal with Count Bernadotte?" asked Urquhart.

There is a classical joke. "Granny, did you know Pancho Villa?" "Once I drove my horse and met Pancho Villa on foot. He showed me his gun and said, 'Dismount.' I dismounted. 'Give me your horse.' I gave. He pointed to a heap of cow dung and said, 'Eat.' I started to eat" 1/3

bsky.app/profile/404m... youtu.be/SDuHXTG3uyY?...

What can a clown say about Samuel Beckett? Turns out, a lot. Both theater of absurd and clowning make us to look at the world as a strange new thing, and rethink our ideas about it. The one man show 'On Beckett' by Bill Irwin is a great illustration of this. 1/2

Harold Meyerson notes that when such opportunist as Gavin Newsom says the A-word about Istael, the mood of Americans definitely has changed. prospect.org/2026/03/04/g...

We are extremely lucky if in three years we are still having Washington monument and Lincoln memorial.

JD Vance chose very interesting words when talking about US economy, "You don't turn the Titanic around overnight". Sigmund Freud taught us that word slips often reveal deep desires. I suspect these guys want to crush US economy to build a fascist state on its ruins.

And again Eccl 1:10 turns out to be right. "In 1943, he [Knuth Hamsun] sent Germany's minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels his Nobel Prize medal as a gift." en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knut_Ha...

Article I Section 8 of the US Constitution enumerates declaring a war among the exclusive powers of Congress.

Dismantling www.nytimes.com/2025/12/31/c...

A prediction for 2026. Being offered the choice between Trump-Washington, District of Columbia and Washington, District of Trump-Columbia, the president will select Trump, District of Trump.

A major part of MAGA is the grievance of those imagined not being promoted because of DEI. The cases of 'unredacted' DoJ files or 'unsuppressed' CBS screening show the real reason for these missed promotions.

The recent news reminded me of an old Soviet joke. On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the poet Alexander Pushkin a competition for the best statue was announced. Then prizes were awarded. 3rd place. A statue of Pushkin reading Stalin's book. 1/2

Words of Type has an article published in the latest TUBGOAT issue! (Volume 46, No. 3, 2025) tug.org/TUGboat/ Thank you @borisveytsman.bsky.social for the invitation to publish an article about Words of Type in this institutional magazine!

I wonder if there is an organization more corrupt than FIFA, not being a drug cartel?

One of the words coming to mind about the current politics is "absurd". Two hundred years of American democracy going awry because some young idiots cannot get laid, and some old farts are anxious about their status—what can be more absurd than this? 1/4

Does Trump own a blue suit?

American exceptionalism. Under our fascists, the trains and the plains do not run on time.

Google translate is lowering barriers between people. Our car has been transported over the continent. When the Uzbek truck driver sent me the delivery report, I answered, "Rahmat." He replied, "Україна переможе безумовно."

Looks like the media is trying to use Zohran Mamdani's aunt in the same way they used Hillary's emails.

Ilya Ruderman from CSTM fonts told a funny story in his lecture about the history of Cyrillic. Bodoni made beautiful Cyrillic typefaces (you can see the samples in his Manuale Typograficum). They were gifted to Alexander I during the short thaw between Russia and France 1/2

An article in NYT (www.nytimes.com/2025/10/05/o...). A whiz kid who made millions in crypto has been kidnapped by his former friend, the de facto ruler of Georgia, beaten and forced to give away his crypto. The techbros supporting Trump do not understand that this is their future as well.

A talented font artist from India Rajeesh KV added math to the beautiful typeface Arsenal by a Ukrainian artist Andrij Shevchenko: ctan.org/pkg/arsenal-... A rare example of a sans serif font with the full math support. #TeXLaTeX #fonts

Ins Choi wrote Kim's Convenience and staged it in 2011 in Toronto Soulpepper Theater with himself playing the young Jung. Then he produced a 65-episode sitcom on Netflix, and when the sitcom closed, he revived the Soulpepper show with himself playing the older Appa. 1/5

There is a quality of certain books, movies, and shows that can be called timeliness. This is exactly what one needs at the moment. I feel that Noises Off by @sfplayhouse.org has been such a show for me. 1/4

I grew up in the USSR. I remember our leaders with dementia sending our money to prop up corrupt and incompetent regimes in Latin America and Africa because they have been "ideological allies. " Thus, there is nothing new for me when Trump is sending money to Xavier Milei.

One of the best essays I have read recently. www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/09/the-...

Some people claim that Korean engineers violated the terms of their visas. Thus, their treatment was somehow justified. First, we do not know whether they did. This is for the lawyers to find out. But let us for the argument sake stipulate they did. 1/2

I disagreed with the late Charlie Kirk on a lot of issues. However, I share his position on Epstein files. We must open them and punish the perpetrators. It is possible he died for this.

The only group clearly benefitting from Kirk's death is Trumpists. What happened to the old Cui Prodest principle?

"Thus the Tories in England long imagined that they were enthusiastic about monarchy, the church, and the beauties of the old English Constitution, until the day of danger wrung from them the confession that they are enthusiastic only about ground rent." Karl Marx

The cat got a prescription diet after a minor surgery. Now he refuses to eat anything else. The internet is full of advice how to make a cat to eat prescription diet. Nobody says how to make him to stop.

I have on my laptop a copy of John Bolton's memoir about Trump. I wonder, is it safe to cross the US border with this laptop? What about having with me it during a traffic stop? Time to refresh my skills of hiding forbidden books acquired during my Soviet youth.

There are some good news too www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/08/jame...

When I was a postdoc, I once left my workstation unlocked. The student sysadmin told me, "When I see an unlocked workstation for the second time, I type there 'rm -rf ~'". When I worked in industry, we got chewed if we left sensitive papers on the desks. www.npr.org/2025/08/16/n...

TIL the thought I have been promoting for quite some time is actually not mine. It belongs to Hanna Arendt. "Law, on its own, is incapable of restraining political action." Only a power can check power. See this great lecture hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/h...

Three decades ago, Margarita Rodnikova wrote a review of my PhD thesis (Nikolay Malomuzh was my advisor) authors.elsevier.com/a/1lb6wc8qpi...

Die Maske des Bösen Bertolt Brecht An meiner Wand hängt ein japanisches Holzwerk Maske eines bösen Dämons, bemalt mit Goldlack. Mitfühlend sehe ich Die geschwollenen Stirnadern, andeutend Wie anstrengend es ist, böse zu sein.

I have read a Gothic story by Conan Doyle. The character, among other things, was able to decipher cuneiform and read the ancient occult books. He would be disappointed to know that the vast majority of tablets are mundane bookkeeping entries. 1/2

My colleagues at @cziscience.bsky.social and I started to explore whether we can use AI to make scientific papers more accessible for blind and low vision scientists. While the preliminary results are not too optimistic, we see some prospects arxiv.org/abs/2508.00826

“We’re gonna get the drug prices down — not 30% or 40%, which would be great. Not 50% or 60%. No, we’re gonna get them down 1,000%, 600%, 500%, 1,500%.” www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddo... This reminds me of a story my late grandfather told me. 1/4

If you want to understand, why we are where we are, watch en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddingt...

I see too many people discussing Trump policies with respect to Russia and Ukraine, reading tea leaves about the possible changes etc. Here sharp Brad DeLong explains the folly of all this. Highly recommend open.substack.com/pub/braddelo...