Dense networks

Guido Georgio Lombardi and friend, from his North Atlantic League website.

A truly bizarre profile in Saturday's Times by Jason Horowitz of a Trump friend, fellow resident of Trump Tower and Palm Beach, George Guido Lombardi, aka Guido George Lombardi, aka Count of Canevaro (he's got that one wrong—the Canevaro nobility was awarded to Giuseppe Canevaro, a 19th-century guano king, I'm not making this up, who was ennobled by King Victor Emmanuel II—conte di Zoagli e duca dei Castelvari—for his part in transporting Napoleon III's army to Genoa helping the Risorgimentisti conquer Lombardy from Austria), interviewed at Mar-a-Lago

as he sat next to a whirring Boca Freeze soft ice cream machine in the Mar-a-Lago beach house as Secret Service agents lounged outside, looking out over the Atlantic.

That's poetry!

Somebody's going to have to stop me from quoting the entire thing, which treats this guy as a sort of ambassador to all the rightwing nativist mobs of Europe, the Lega Nord and the Beppe Grillo movement, Viktor Orbán, Geert Wilders and Marine Le Pen (“I told her right away, ‘Marine, dump your dad. He is just a dead weight. And anyway you have to make a choice. You are either with the Jews or you are with the Muslims. You can’t be with both.’” He's fond of Jews, “‘our curly friends,’ he said referring to the orthodox party that had rented Mar-a-Lago out that afternoon”). And the husband of the former Gianna Lahainer, who when her first husband died in 1993 at the outset of the Palm Beach social season had his body put into cold storage at the local funeral home instead of shipping it back to Italy so she wouldn't be compelled to miss any of the parties.

Got paranoia? Update

Toilet in Tobermory, Ontario, via Dima's Corner.

I haven't wanted to dive into this toilet for quite a long time, because it's really not my subject, but I happened to notice a silly falsehood from Mark Rumold for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, at Professor Cole's place:

Reports today in the New York Times and ProPublica confirm what EFF’s Jewel v. NSA lawsuit has claimed since 2008—that the NSA and AT&T have collaborated to build a domestic surveillance infrastructure, resulting in unconstitutional seizure and search of of millions, if not hundreds of millions, of Americans’ Internet communications.

Well, no, they don't confirm that at all. Yes, the tight relationship between NSA and AT&T seems to be demonstrated, but as the Times introduction to the documents makes clear,