My hump, my hump, my hump, my fake-plump camel lump. “Camel pageant thrown into chaos after 20 competitors disqualified for using hump-plumping injectables“ reports The Independent:
Last month, veterinary inspectors at the 2026 Camel Beauty Show Festival in Al Musanaa, Oman, discovered that the camels had undergone several cosmetic procedures to enlarge the size of their humps using a mix of injectables similar to dermal fillers used on humans.
Judging had barely resumed when the contest was further roiled by the discovery that one of the remaining camels was in fact Ben Shapiro, and another was Free Press reporter Olivia Reingold. “Are there even any real camels in this pageant?” asked JD Vance, who was in third place. More on this story in the fullness of time.
But it’s incredibly obvious, isn’t it Mandrake? Foreign substances introduced into our precious camels? That’s the way your hardcore commie works. In fact Rose Maura Lorre at Wirecutter bought some makeup online and discovered…
…that all 12 of the beauty products I’d purchased from third-party sellers on Amazon, eBay, Shein, and Walmart were either not what they claimed to be or questionable for reasons beyond their authenticity. [Cosmetic research chemist Rachel] Johnson went farther, explicitly stating that they were all “definitively identified as counterfeits.”
The illicit hump-plumping injectables may very well themselves have been contaminated—impure. I do not avoid camels Mandrake, but I do deny them my essence.
Also denying camels their essence are hundreds of thousands of users of the viral “porn addiction app” Quittr, created by two pasty teen influencers who were just profiled by Rebecca Jennings for New York Magazine. The app allegedly “brings in more than $500,000 per month, despite having taken only ten days to build“ according to Jennings according to its founders. But a misconfigured database hasn’t been denying anyone on the internet the essence of Quittr users private information, including their confessions about how porn makes them feel. 404’s Emanuel Maiberg revealed today that Quittr was the “app for quitting porn” that he first reported was leaking user data back in January, but didn’t name at the time because the data exposed was so private and potentially compromising, and because many of the users affected are minors. Vibe coding is going great.
Also today in purity, Washington Post contributor Leana Wen strenuously denies that you gotta hand it to our never nude horseman of pestilence Robert F. Kennedy Jr., buuUUUUUUUuut…
….but he might get credit for one thing: He has spawned a real movement away from ultra-processed foods.
…Here’s the problem: There’s never been an agreed-upon definition for what counts as ultra-processed.
That’s because “ultra-processed” is not a nutritional category but an ideological one. Wen’s brilliant idea is that instead of defining what foods or ingredients are “ultra-processed,” we should simply define which ones aren’t. “The missile knows where it is at all times. It knows this because it knows where it isn’t.” Of course even Wen has to admit that any reasonable list of “not ultra-processed” foods would include potatoes, oil, and salt, but potato chips “tend to be high in sodium and saturated fat, and offer little nutritional value,” so we still want to exclude them from the Pure Foods for Healthy People Club (no fatties allowed!). No worries, though, “those additional characteristics… could be regulated separately, layered on top of the ultra-processed definition.” Sure, why not.
What all of this stuff is gesturing toward, ultimately, is what eponymous law of headlines creator Ian Betteridge calls “purity culture.” In his blog post “Zen fascists will control you...” Betteridge traces the roots of the fascist ideology embedded in this obsession with being clean and returning to an imaginary prelapsarian garden along a straight line from Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock” to the Californian Ideology and eventually to RFK Jr. and Quittr.
This is the thing about the politics of purity that makes it so durable, and so dangerous: it doesn't require malice. It requires only the conviction that you know what clean looks like, and the will to impose it on others, for their own good.
Both the counterculture and the authoritarian right are obsessed with purity. The targets differ wildly — the body, the race, the culture, the blood, the food, the mind. But the cognitive shape is identical. And that shared shape is the on-ramp. It's how you can get from granola to fascism without ever feeling like you've made a wrong turn.
…The encounter group became the est weekend became the biohacking protocol became the cognitive elite became the reaction. The Whole Earth became the platform became the firehose became the feed, and somewhere in the feed, the purity logic is still running, clean and patient, waiting for the next person to decide that they have woken up. That they are clean.
The title of this newsletter—Purity Supreme—was my childhood grocery store, a Massachusetts-based chain. The name was just two arbitrary words that meant “the supermarket” to me as a kid but now seem almost comically ominous, like “hey let’s go down to the old Blood & Soil and pick up a rotisserie chicken for dinner.” I looked up what happened to Purity Supreme and it turns out it was bought by Stop & Shop which was bought by Dutch grocery conglomerate Ahold which merged with Belgian holding company Delhaize to form Ahold Delhaize which currently owns, among other chains, my current grocery store Hannaford. The Purity Supreme logic is still running, clean and patient.
New Vision of Hell Dropped:
Scott Smitelli: “You don’t have to if you don’t want to.” Very long post about the role of AI in work and life, but more interestingly about the role of craft, the nature of tools, the clash of values that can confuse any conversation about what the purpose of work even is, and a bunch of other things.
Paulina Rowińska in Quanta: New Strides Made on Deceptively Simple ‘Lonely Runner’ Problem. RIP Alan Sillitoe, you would have gone crazy for this one. FISH COP. Kevin Roose is at it again. Important follow-up quiz. The only good AI is us: youraislopbores.me. “A GitHub Issue Title Compromised 4,000 Developer Machines.” Lol, lmao. Rename the world. Daddy is giving all the good boys special good boy shoes, but it looks like Lil Marco lied about his size. These guys are all so goddamn weird.
And Finally: I… “enjoyed” is probably not the right word here, but I thought this post by Jude Doyle was one of the best things I’ve read about pacifism.
This is an old story, and often repeated, but I haven’t told it to you before: The one about how my great-great-(great?)-grandfather ate the rats.
Today’s Song: “Comfort Eagle,” by Cake
This song is for Kevin, the biggest Cake fan I know. He is building a religion.
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