The absolute truth is a wicked sort of rush. It’s far more amusing than any lie. Both have the potential to empower and to hurt, but the truth is emotionally superior. Few people could fault you for it, not when you’ve got ethics on your side. The truth is morally unassailable. But

There’s Ambien-in-alcohol weird and then there’s Ambien-mistaken-for-cocaine weird.

Fate would have it that the timing of your birth determines your measure of luck. You’re either born lucky or you’re not, though the only way to know for sure is to test it. The problem with that is most people find out they’re not lucky at the worst possible moment, usually in the throes of death or arrest.

There’s no English equivalent for silovik. It doesn’t translate succinctly because to create something as Machiavellian as a silovik requires both the KGB and the GRU, and then a shift from communism to capitalism followed by a gear-grinding reverse into despotism.

There are scores of people who have never recovered, or been recovered, from an FSB interrogation.

They’re a hard organization to describe because nothing like the FSB exists in the USA. To get even remotely close, you’d have to ask the CIA to birth a seven-headed hydra with the faces of the FBI, DEA, NSA, Immigration, Border Patrol, Coast Guard, and the Navy Seals with a hangover and a grudge.

When you nationalize the expenditures but privatize the revenue, everything is profit.