"Nearby, a woman who asks me to call her Kim is selling T-shirts either depicting Mangione in religious garb or in a pink, babygirl-ified photo collage..."

"... that includes at least one shirtless photo. 'I’m making light of the situation. At the end of the day, I’m very passionate about class solidarity,' she says. 'I think we’re in really dark times right now.' Fellow cheeky-T-shirt wearer Nadine Seiler, the self-proclaimed 'Cougar for Luigi,' tells me she made her shirt with a group of friends on Valentine’s Day. They got together and ate red velvet cupcakes with gummy worms inside, which she says represent the parasitic ruling class. 'It’s good to get together, have a serious discussion, and have people understand what is going on in this country and that we need to be doing something different,' she says. 'I’m having fun while focusing on the serious issue at hand, which are these CEOs taking advantage of the masses and we’re still giving them our money.'"

From "At the Courthouse With Luigi Mangione’s 'Fangirls'" (The Cut).

We'll have to find a new way of living.

I'm reading "TikTok Loses Bid to Overturn Law Forcing a Ban or Sale/A federal court on Friday upheld a law that will ban the video app in the United States by Jan. 19 if its owner, ByteDance, does not sell it to a non-Chinese company" (NYT).

The decision [by a 3-judge panel of the D.C. Court of Appeals] could be a death blow for the app in [the U.S.]. More than 170 million Americans use TikTok.... The decision also raises new questions for President-elect Donald J. Trump, who has repeatedly signaled his support for the app, but who doesn’t have a clear path for rescuing it under the new law.... 

The company argued that the law unfairly singled out TikTok and that a ban would infringe on the First Amendment rights of American users....

ADDED: Will truth, beauty, and love save the world?

"Last August, a woman in Chicago opened her Too Good to Go bag and found seven pounds of smashed cake..."

"... (which she and her friend, the friend confessed, gobbled down). Someone who goes by Cassie Danger on Reddit reported receiving a 'corn sandwich' from a Choc O Pain in the Hoboken/Jersey City area, that is, a roll containing a handful of canned corn niblets topped with a couple of lettuce leaves."

Writes Patricia Marx in "Spoiler Alert: Leftovers for Dinner/How to host a dinner party for nine using a pre-trash haul from Too Good to Go and other food-waste apps. Carb-averse guests, beware" (The New Yorker).

Marx's 9 guests arrived and dumped out the "surprise bags" they'd ordered from the app Too Good to Go (which packages food left over from 6,987 NYC stores and restaurants):

"He awoke to the sound of water dripping into a rusted sink. The streets below were bathed in medieval moonlight, reverberating silence."

"He lay there grappling with the terror of beauty, as the night unfolded like a Chinese screen. He lay shuddering, riveted by flickering movements of aliens and angels as the words and melodies of 'Marquee Moon' were formed, drop by drop, note by note, from a state of calm yet sinister excitement. He was Tom Verlaine, and that was his process: exquisite torment. Born Thomas Joseph Miller, raised in Wilmington, Delaware, he left his parental home and shed his name, a discarded skin curled in the corner of a modest garage among stacks of used air-conditioners that required his father’s constant professional attention...."

 
Writes Patti Smith in "He Was Tom Verlaine/Patti Smith remembers her friend, who possessed the child’s gift of transforming a drop of water into a poem that somehow begat music" (The New Yorker).

"Yes, ban the office cakes. Obviously.... I have been campaigning [against obesity] for more than 20 years...."

"And all I have met is anger, abuse and accusations of 'fat-shaming.' From the right, because I seem to be after restricting people’s right to choose how they live; and from the left because, since obesity disproportionately affects the poor, I must be motivated by class hatred and snobbery.... I have moved on from any notion I might once have had about personal culpability and now hold the government and 'big sugar' (which pulled a nefarious con on the public by repositioning sugar as 'energy' when it is, in fact, sloth, weakness and depression) entirely responsible. Which is why I am with [ chairwoman of the Food Standards Agency, Professor Susan Jebb] all the way in calling on people to stop buying this poisonous shite in pretty packaging and forcing it into their ailing colleagues like corn down the diseased gullet of a Perigord goose. An unrelated story in The Times on Wednesday celebrated a new wonder-drug proven to prolong the lives of mice, inspiring the dream... that it might work on humans. But do you know what is also proven to prolong the life of mice? Severe calorie restriction. Cut their intake by a third and they live up to 40 per cent longer. Before we plough billions into yet more drugs, shouldn’t we at least give that a go?"

Writes Giles Coren in "Cake debate is no laughing matter — seriously/Snigger at comparisons with passive smoking if you must, but only if you’re blind to the scale of our obesity crisis" (London Times). 

"[Lorie] Smith... sat near a plaque that echoed a Bible verse: 'I am God’s masterpiece.' She said she was happy to create graphics and websites..."

"... for anyone, including L.G.B.T.Q. people. But her Christian faith, she said, did not allow her to create messages celebrating same-sex marriages. 'When I chose to start my own business as an artist to create custom expression,' she said, 'I did not surrender my First Amendment rights.' Phil Weiser, Colorado’s attorney general, countered that there is no constitutional right to discriminate. 'Once you open up your doors to the public, you have to serve everybody,' he said. 'You can’t turn people away based on who they are.'"

Writes Adam Liptak in "A New Clash Between Faith and Gay Rights Arrives at a Changed Supreme Court A Colorado graphic designer says she has a First Amendment right to refuse to create websites for same-sex weddings despite a state anti-discrimination law." (NYT).

The oral argument is today.

If you're trying to remember why this is still a live issue after the wedding-cake case:

I've got 5 TikToks to scare away the darkness on this first standard-time evening.

1. The nicest thing she's ever done for anyone is something she's going to do in the future.

2. You don't think — just because you're punk — I only want the cool people to like me.

3. Polar night is not depressing.

4. The kindergarten teacher tries to tell her class that she just got engaged.

5. A 1955 cake recipe calls for two 27-ounce cans of pinto beans.

I've got 6 TikToks to amuse you for 10 minutes this afternoon. Let me know what you like.

1. The baby emu shows you all its tricks.

2. Maybe I'd cook a potato like this.

3. A kid with amazing bike skills.

4. An actress with amazing cupcake-eating skills.

5. The hangry baby consumes mass quantities.

6. What it's like to go hiking with an L.A. man — the scintillating conversation will blow your mind.

"The Christian Baker Who Said ‘No’/Jack Phillips is again in court for refusing to bake a cake with a message he objects to."

Headline at the Wall Street Journal. 

Philips was in the news years ago after he refused to make a same-sex wedding cake. He's dealt with that problem by not making custom wedding cakes anymore (and, we're told, losing 40% of his business). 

Now, he's accusing of discrimination against transgenders:

In her original complaint to the [Colorado Civil Rights Commission, Autumn Scardina] wrote that she’d told the bakery the design was “intended for the celebration of my transition from male to female.”

Blue icing on a pink cake.

After Masterpiece turned down this cake, Ms. Scardina called to request another. This one would feature Satan smoking a joint. Mr. Phillips declined....

“Jack didn’t single Scardina out for being transgender,” [said Kristen Waggoner, general counsel for the Alliance Defending Freedom]. “He wouldn’t bake cakes with those messages for anyone.” This is a baker who won’t even make Halloween cakes, she adds, and serves everyone regardless of gender identity or sexual orientation....

Is Sandra Lee sending "peace and loving healing" to Andrew Cuomo?

I'm reading "Andrew Cuomo ex Sandra Lee wishes ‘peace, healing’ after 2nd accuser steps forward" (NY Post):

“Sending everyone peace and loving healing regards from Malibu! The best sunsets ever thank God for the Ocean!” Lee posted on Instagram Saturday night, alongside a photo of a beach. 

The post was made hours after The New York Times revealed [accusations from] Cuomo’s 25-year-old former aide, Charlotte Bennet, is accusing the 63-year-old governor of asking her inappropriate personal questions at work... days after another former aide, Lindsey Boylan, publicly accused the governor of attempting to kiss her on the mouth at his New York City office in 2018....

I'd say Sandra Lee is keeping her distance. This is a woman I had never paid any attention to until I was looking up Cuomo's Wikipedia page yesterday. I can't remember exactly why, but I suddenly needed to know where he went to law school. The answer is Albany Law School. Isn't that interesting? 

I got to reading the "Personal Life" section. There was that marriage to the 7th child of Robert F. Kennedy. And then there was an 8-year relationship with Food Network host Sandra Lee. I was curious enough to click through to Lee's Wikipedia page, and that led me to some of the biggest laughs I've had all year. Lee has an approach to cooking that she calls "semi-homemade." In practice, this involves using lots of processed foods and combining them in ways so ludicrous that it kind of has to be a spoof.

"The ability of companies such as Facebook, Twitter and Google to control what people see online is so potent, it is the subject of antitrust hearings...."

"But the decision by Amazon to push Parler off its dominant cloud-computing service illustrates just how powerful its content-moderation capabilities are as well.... [T]he companies that provide the technical infrastructure that powers websites and services where people express opinions have vast power as well, though they rarely use it. They include little-known companies that register website domains for customers; so-called content delivery networks, which can boost the speed at which webpages load; and Internet service providers, which connect homes and businesses to the Web.... [Amazon's] Amazon Web Services is the dominant provider of cloud infrastructure services, which let customers rent data storage and processing capabilities over the Web instead of running their own data centers.... [AWS's] Trust & Safety team, which has fewer than 100 workers, acts only on complaints received. In its reply to Parler’s suit, Amazon said it received reports in mid-November that the social network was 'hosting content threatening violence.'... It accused Amazon of conspiring with Twitter to take the smaller competitor offline just as it was significantly gaining users in the wake of Twitter permanently banning Trump.... 'Without AWS, Parler is finished as it has no way to get online.'" 

WaPo reports.

Here's the top-rated comment at WaPo: "If you support a baker choosing to not selling a wedding cake to a same-sex couple, then it follows you must support a company choosing not to do business with a customer that behaves in a manner contrary to the company's known parameters. As the same-sex couple was told, go find someone else to bake your cake. Parler should do the same. If they can't, perhaps it's the 'cake' they are trying to bake."

IN THE COMMENTS: MayBee takes on the cake analogy:

Parler was already on AWS. 

So the baker (aside from scale, monopoly considerations, and anti trust issues) situation would have to be more like: 

The gay couple hired the baker, paid the baker, and then on the day of the wedding the baker refused to deliver the cake. The baker, however, delivered a lot of cakes to your ex-boyfriends wedding on the same day. And then the baker announced you were dangerous.

Why I put AdSense ads back on the blog — self-defense.

Last October, after years of taking offense at Google for sending me email telling me I had offensive material on this blog, I discontinued my participation in Google Adsense. That is, I opted out of using advertising to monetize this blog. At the time, I wrote: 

I'm tired of checking to see what's supposedly a violation. I get so many of these and they're often posts that are nothing but a quote from a commentator in the NYT. But to see that the review didn't okay these pages... it's just mind-bending. I can't waste my energy dealing with this bullshit. In every case, I'm told that I've violated their policy with "Dangerous or derogatory content," which I find insulting. Here are recent posts that have been found in violation of that policy — even after review... 

Click through to see what I'd written, but suffice it to say that there was nothing that could possibly be considered "dangerous" or "derogatory." I said:

How did these articles get flagged? By robots or by opponents of this blog? What kind of review does Google have that would reinforce the idea that this is "Dangerous or derogatory content"?! Review by robots or by opponents of this blog? I can't imagine an unbiased human being finding all — or any — of these posts to have "Dangerous or derogatory content." It could be that I'm getting flagged for crap in the comments.... 

I'm not dealing with it any more. So enjoy ad-free Althouse.

Well, I am going to deal with it now and in the future.  I just turned AdSense ads back on. At least, Google was nice enough to offer me cake....

... yeah, Google, your AI did a nice job of knowing what I like. Cake. I like cake. But it's not yummy cake that has me coming back. And it's not the income from the ads. I realized I can use AdSense in self-defense. Google has the power to delete this blog. Whatever force caused those exasperating notifications is still out there, exerting pressure, whether I'm getting notifications or not.

As I noted in that October post, "It could be that I'm getting flagged for crap in the comments." In the comments there, Yancey Ward said: 

It isn't your content that is getting flagged, Ms. Althouse, it is what we commenters are saying - they are flagging the separate blog post which contains all of the comments at the end. You just have too many of us deplorables.

I'm pretty sure that's what happened, and I gave up ads because it seemed like too much work to go searching for what might be the problem in the comments. But the mechanism for reporting abuse to Google remains. This presents a risk to me, and I think the risk has increased in the past week. So I want those notifications. I'm worried not only that Google will overdo its censorship but also that haters of this blog — of the comments section of this blog — will come in here with pseudonyms and write violent threats and racist crap for the purpose of drawing censorship down upon me. 

There are various ways to deal with the problem of commenters who are here to hurt me, and some of them are too labor intensive. Some of them would diminish (or destroy) the flow of the comments. The comments at their best are phenomenal, and I'm very happy with the good commenters and have greatly appreciated their company these last 17 years. (Bloggiversary #17 is tomorrow.) But one thing I can do is to put the ads back up and then use the notifications to identify the comment threads that have something Google sees as a problem. Then it's a limited task to look for what needs to be deleted.

I delete comments without prodding from Google when I see threats of violence. I delete comments with the "n-word." I probably have a standard that's close to what Google is identifying, so I'm going to accept the help from Google now. I can't read every comment on every post — there are close to 4 million comments on this blog — but I can comb through the comments sections on posts where I get a Google notification. Google is getting vigilant about material that I don't want either — and, of course, I don't want a festering problem that I cannot see and that is undermining the existence of this blog. 

And that's why there are ads on this blog.

Jill Biden at the Daisy Cupcake Cafe!

Dr. Jill Biden will be arriving soon at the Daisy Cupcake Cafe in Madison. Supporters are gathering. pic.twitter.com/NLRfKAtFj5

— Jessica VanEgeren (@jvanegeren) September 28, 2020

ADDED:

Q: "Your husband has been known to make the occasional gaffe"

Jill Biden: "You can't even go there. After Donald Trump, you cannot even say the word gaffe."

Q: "I can't even say the word gaffe?"

JB: "Nope. Done. It's gone."

Q: "The gaffe issue is over?"

JB: "Over. So over." pic.twitter.com/NV8bAs7TP9

— The Hill (@thehill) September 27, 2020

Is the glass half full or half empty?

"When I was at the White House, there was a very deliberative process of the president absorbing information from people who had deep substantive knowledge of the countries and relationships with these leaders. Preparation for these calls was taken very seriously. It appears to be freestyle and ad-libbed now."

Said Joel Willett, "a former intelligence officer who worked at the National Security Council from 2014 to 2015," quoted in "Trump’s calls with foreign leaders have long worried aides, leaving some ‘genuinely horrified" (WaPo).

Trump has rejected much of the protocol and preparation associated with foreign calls, even as his national security team tried to establish goals for each conversation. Instead, Trump often sought to use calls as a way to befriend whoever he was talking to, one current senior administration official said, defending the president. “So he might say something that sounds terrible to the outside, but in his mind, he’s trying to build a relationship with that person and sees flattery as the way to do it.”...

[S]taff fretted that Trump came across ill-informed in some calls, and even oafish. In a conversation with China’s Xi, Trump repeated numerous times how much he liked a kind of chocolate cake, one former official said. The president publicly described the dessert the two had in April 2017 when Trump and Xi met at the president’s Mar-a-Lago resort as “the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake you have ever seen.”...

Though calls with foreign leaders are routinely planned in advance, Trump a few times called Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and French President Emmanuel Macron unannounced, as if they were friends, a former administration official said....

It sounds as though Trump is freakishly comfortable with being President of the United States and actually believes the leaders of other countries are fellow human beings with whom he can have a real relationship. Aides are flummoxed. To them, formality is crucial.

But what if — in the end — what really matters is the cake?

An hour and 30 minutes have passed since the first post of the day.

It was that thing about the vasectomy cake, which might make you think I have a low standard, but in fact the vasectomy cake met a very high standard, and I have been looking ever since to find something else that meets my standard.

I really mean it when I say better than nothing is a high standard. The vasectomy cake was in fact the only thing in an hour and a half of reading that was better than nothing. I considered and rejected:

1. "The U.S. must take Greenland by force!" by Dana Milbank (WaPo). Who cares how Milbank hits a softball?

2. "Trump is melting down. Again" by Eugene Robinson (WaPo). First line: "Uh-oh. President Trump is in such a state of panic about his dimming reelection prospects that he’s getting his lies mixed up and occasionally blurting out the truth." I considered a post title like "Uh-oh, WaPo is in such a state of panic about the Democrats' dimming reelection prospects that..." and then I just felt disgusted with the me who would write like that. A computer could be programmed to write a blog that just flips the partisanship of every headline.

3. "Conservative Scholar: The Real Racists Are People Who Call Trump Racist" by Jonathan Chait (NY Magazine). So the conservative scholar flipped a liberal meme to make it anti-liberal and liberal Chait will flip it back. Am I supposed to expend my cruel neutrality on such low-effort stuff? Chait has to write a column. He's paid to do it. I don't and I'm not.

4. "A Party Room and a Prison Cell Inside the Friends writers’ room," a book excerpt by Saul Austerlitz (at NY Magazine). I'm interested in "Friends," and the article is long. I read it. But that doesn't mean it has to become a blog post. It's less interesting than the vasectomy cake. And a vasectomy cake would be a great plotline for a "Friends" episode.

5. "Neil Young’s Lonely Quest to Save Music/He says low-quality streaming is hurting our songs and our brains. Is he right?" I love Neil Young. Nice black-and-white photograph of Neil Young. The first sentence is "Neil Young is crankier than a hermit being stung by bees" and we were just talking about bees, but the article is about digital audio, a topic he's been perseverating about for a quarter century. I make a mental note to pull out "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere" for the next time we get together to play records.

A cake to celebrate...

... vasectomy (at Reddit).

Who blows out birthday candles like that? Mitt Romney (with his cake made of Twinkies).

My team surprised me with a cake made out of my favorite snack—twinkies! Looking forward to all this year has in store. pic.twitter.com/lQfyIrQ9Qe

— Mitt Romney (@MittRomney) March 12, 2019

Andres Serrano — famous for the artwork "Piss Christ" — just bought what WaPo calls "Trump's wedding cake."

The headline is "An artist famed for using his own urine just bought Trump’s wedding cake. His plans are a mystery," but I can see in the first few sentences that all the wedding guests received a tiny cake as a gift, and Serrano just bought one of these non-unique items. It only cost him $1880, a minuscule price to pay for the publicity. "Piss Christ" itself was extremely effective publicity bait. Serrano submerged a crucifix in what he said was his urine and took a photograph of it, and people have talked about him ever since. With his own reputation for piss and that fake-news story about Trump and piss, there's immediate ideation about him pissing on the cake. He doesn't even have to do it. We've already got piss on Trump's wedding cake in our head. And it's not even Trump's wedding cake. It's just one of the cakes that were handed out at what was — you have to admit — Trump's huge publicity stunt, that wedding, with all the opulence and celebrities... and the $50,000, 7-tier, 200-pound cake, with 2,000 "sugar-spun" flowers.

Serrano isn't saying what he'll do with the tiny cake — what else he'll do, that is, other than conspicuously buying it and thereby setting off the piss-soaked performance art of our imagination:

"Artists work in mysterious ways. You never know what they’re up to! I don’t like to talk about things until I’m ready to talk."

"Brennan-Jobs is a deeply gifted writer. Before I read her book, I wondered if it had been ghostwritten..."

"... like many such books. But from the striking opening — in which Lisa is drifting around her father’s house when he is dying of cancer, snubbed by everyone and pinching trifles from different rooms to appease her sense of exclusion — it is clear that this is a work of uncanny intimacy. Her inner landscape is depicted in such exquisitely granular detail that it feels as if no one else could possibly have written it. Indeed, it has that defining aspect of a literary work: the stamp of a singular sensibility. In the fallen world of kiss-and-tell celebrity memoirs, this may be the most beautiful, literary and devastating one ever written.... When Lisa is in high school, she persuades Steve and Laurene to accompany her to her psychiatrist for a meeting, where she confesses: 'I’m feeling terribly alone.' Then she bursts into tears, which she hoped 'would soften them.' Laurene finally breaks the silence. 'We’re just cold people'..."

From "The Father of Personal Computing Who Was Also a Terrible Dad," Melanie Thernstrom's review of the Lisa Brennan-Jobs memoir "Small Fry."

I'm a little interested in "Small Fry," but I don't trust Thernstrom's opinion of the quality of the writing because when I read "Lisa is drifting around her father’s house when he is dying of cancer, snubbed by everyone and pinching trifles from different rooms to appease her sense of exclusion," I was drifting around wondering who was pinching trifles — Lisa or Steve? I assume it was Lisa and she was stealing inconsequential items, but I was distracted picturing Steve squeezing little sponge cakes. I have a feeling Thernstrom and Brennan-Jobs share a form of humorless poeticizing that leaves me, like Laurene, cold.