Here are the origins of the cocaine scandal:

Russia needs money to fund all the marginal, divisive parties in Europe and pay all the trolls and provocateurs that stoke passions there and in the US. But where is the money supposed to come from? The country’s economy is pathetically weak and oil-dependent.

So Russian diplomats reach out to drug cartels in Latin American countries and help them move enormous quantities of product. And that’s how they make the money to pay for their propaganda.

That’s all there is to it.

So the “Asian Eats” restaurant proved phenomenal. It was so tasty that I hope I won’t end up in the ER tonight. Nothing good can be so delicious.

I had cucumber salad and fish tacos. N had Mongolian portobello mushrooms and mashed potatoes.

We are like monsieur Jourdain who was stunned to find out he spoke prose. We’ve been eating this kind of stuff forever and had no idea it’s Asian.

The menu also featured burger sliders, onion rings, and cheeseburgers. It makes sense because there’s sesame in the sesame buns, I guess.

What’s annoying is that whenever anybody writes about Basques, there’s always a discussion of their noses. Supposedly, they all have “prominent noses.” As if everybody else in Spain were challenged in the nose department.

I’m not reading tourist guides, you understand. I’m reading scholarly literature.

I’m now wondering what it is that scholarly sources say about Ukrainians.

So I finally asked an actual accountant and she says our taxes will be lower next year thanks to the new tax bill. The refund will be $5,000 instead of almost $2,000 with everything else remaining identical.

“But this is just a few insignificant crumbs we get thrown while the big corporations are the ones that make out like bandits!” the accountant immediately reminds.

And I’m like, “Hey, you are the one who voted for Trump, what are you complaining about now?”

And she’s like, “All of the money this country makes goes to foreign aid to help complete strangers who hate us!”

And I’m like, “Finally, you are back to your normal self.”

I’m going on a long-awaited date with my husband (long-awaited not because we never go but because it’s long-awaited even if the last one was yesterday.) But I was warned at the hospital that until I get my gallbladder surgery, eating out is out. Everything served everywhere is high-fat (or not low-fat enough). A local restaurant everybody loves offers a weekend special on “paella with 5 different kinds of sausages from all over the world.” It’s like they are mocking me on purpose.

Of course, Japanese restaurants are always good but we can only go out at 3 pm, and they are closed at that time.

So I started browsing menus of restaurants and discovered that there is a place that I can go without ending up at the emergency room. It’s an Asian restaurant that serves soups and things like cucumber salad or steamed salmon on a pillow of butternut squash.

The date is to celebrate the filing of the taxes, which we will do for the last time as non-citizens today. Not that it changes anything for the tax-filing process, but becoming citizens will end our “taxation without representation” situation. We will finally be able to vote in exchange for our taxes. Hopefully, there’s somebody to vote for.

Somebody on FB made an extremely lucid suggestion to stop discussing politics on social media. Or since nobody really discusses anything, to stop posting slogans and links with political content. Because it kills politics and ends up giving us precisely the kind of clown politicians that we seem to be begging for.

Also, he says, why keep retweeting and reposting political articles when you know that most of them were produced in St Petersburg, Russia? Haven’t we made enough mistakes in the area of accepting and welcoming their propaganda?

The Russian troll factories don’t give a toss whether to promote pro-Trump or anti-Trump content. What they want is to disrupt, promote anger, frustration, anxiety, make you hate your neighbor. When Trump was an outsider, they promoted him. Now that he’s not, they’ll undermine him. Question is, why should we participate? The folks at the troll factories are paid little but at least they are paid. And we are doing their dirty work for free.