November 30, 2020

You can't travel, but Cher can travel to Pakistan to help an elephant travel to Cambodia.

And Cher is celebrated for this: 

"Pop music icon Cher was in Pakistan over the weekend to join a lonely elephant on his long-awaited journey to salvation. Kaavan, dubbed the world's loneliest elephant, finally escaped the meager confines of a zoo in Islamabad and was well on his way to a wildlife sanctuary in Cambodia on Monday" (CBS News). 

What is the carbon footprint of Cher's showy elephantarianism? There isn't one word about global warming in this lengthy article (which reads like a PR release from Cher's team). 

And the only reference to the pandemic — which keeps you from galavanting around the globe — is to laud Cher for "Pulling it all off during a global pandemic." There were "unique challenges, but fortunately Kaavan's pre-flight COVID-19 test came back negative, and arrangements for a 30-day quarantine in Cambodia were in place."

84 comments:

Sebastian said...

"You can't travel, but Cher can travel to Pakistan to help an elephant travel to Cambodia.
And Cher is celebrated for this"

Lockdowns are for little people. Climate change is a prog tool. The point is to make deplorables submit.

The celebration is just the extra touch of arrogance, progs wallowing in their hegemony, flaunting their moral superiority, shoving it down our throats.

Deb said...

Cher has little to do. I want to laugh at the silliness of it.

Bob Boyd said...

Wasn't pulling it off during a global pandemic what got Jeffrey Toobin in trouble?

Fernandinande said...

Give her a feather, she's a Cherokee.

YoungHegelian said...

...(which reads like a PR release from Cher's team).

Probably because that's exactly what it is.

Darkisland said...

I'm traveling next week.

2 weeks in McPherson KS. I'll post a report. I will have to quarentine in my house for 14 days when I get back, tracked by GPS. I see this as a feature, not a bug.

"Gee honey, I'd love to take you Christmas shopping but I can't leave the house except to go to jail"

I have to say that I don't see the logic to that. If I fail to keep quarantine, They will lock me in with a bunch of other potential kung flu carriers.

Two nice things about McPherson, it's not Pakistan and it is cheap. I rented an entire house for $70/night via Airbnb.

John Henry

Fernandinande said...

Dr. Cher has a PhD in Elephantology.

Joe Biden, America's Putin said...

I don't know how much of this is PR and how much of it is real, given the state of our pathetic lie-filled press, but...
I say good for Cher.

Wealthy celebrities with mega-mansions scattered all over the globe should spend their money doing GOOD.

Darkisland said...

As plenty of others have said, just more proof that the pandemic is a massive hoax. Not the kung flu itself. That seems like a particularly nasty flu.

The panicdemic certainly is, though.

John Henry

Darkisland said...

What is it with these dropouts?

Cher is a high school dropout. Bill Gates a college dropout.

Stay in school, kids. Don't grow up like them.

John Henry

Temujin said...

I'd like to go visit my mom in a nursing home in Michigan. I'd have only a few minutes that I am allowed to greet her- through a window, from the outside. Maybe 10 minutes is all they are allowing. Because...you never know what the virus is capable of (going through windows, etc.). That is if Gov. Whitmer allows people from Florida to enter her state without quarantine. Or maybe I'll have to wear a bright yellow 'F' sewn onto my clothes.

Oh, if only I were a Hollywood person carousing around with elephants, Pakistanis and Cambodians. Flying around the globe, followed by CBS News.

rhhardin said...

Pandemic: of or pertaining to a non-ruminant mammal having hooves or nails and an unusally thick skin.

Joe Biden, America's Putin said...

Rich celebrities like to give to the charity known as Democrat party corruption mean grrl club.

More celebrities should do acts of good instead.

Joe Biden, America's Putin said...

Covid was only supposed to spread to the US and Britain - as punishment.

The global corrupt left are WAY into punishment.

stevew said...

Looking at the first three posts this morning, and considering the reporting on Joe Biden's "turned ankle" injury and the female grooming post from yesterday, I have to say the post Trump media have gone from hair on fire corruption/racism/fascism/destroying democracy/killing with Covid incompetence/etc reporting to vacuous puffery very, very quickly.

I've come to ignore the major media outlets over the past several years due to their obvious bias and lying. I'll continue ignoring them due to a lack of interest in this slobbering ass kissing and boot licking.

Mr Wibble said...

Disney's already planning a movie based on this story, Operation Dumb Bint Drop

MountainMan said...

stevew @8:59 - I'm with you.

Lloyd W. Robertson said...

Lots of great comments. Cher's elephantarianism isn't just showy, it's elephantine. It's the elephant in the room. It holds center stage. It's a combination of David Attenborough and P.T. Barnum.

I actually enjoy the story of P.T. Barnum and Jumbo. Jumbo didn't get quite the consideration that Kaavan is getting.

tcrosse said...

Keep your Sonny side up, Cher.

gilbar said...

people Need To Remember!
Our Elite Leaders ARE OUR GODS! they are Above such petty things as lockdowns
If Nancy P (or Gori Lightfoot) wants a haircut... They are ENTITLED TO IT
If Gov Pritzker tells people Not To Travel... HIS family can still go to Florida
If Cher wants to help some Elephant... It Is Our JOY! to Celebrate her Glory!!!

LONG LIVE BIG BROTHER!!! ALL HAIL THE DEEP STATE!!! ALL HAIL OUR GODS!!!!

gilbar said...

If you want a picture of the future, imagine The Elite shoving an elephant in your face; for ever

mezzrow said...

But, it's different when it's CHER. It's CHER!

Like a God, she reaches down and makes miracles happen for her chosen. Behold the virtue.

Worship it. To be Queen does not begin to encompass the need for validation.

Curious George said...

"Bill Gates a college dropout."

No, he's a college drop out. Steve Jobs too.

Maybe you're thinking of Richard Branson.

gilbar said...

hmmm, looks like Curious George should think about READING the things he Cuts&Pastes

mikee said...

It isn't often that I can recommend a surreal absurdist cartoon apropos to an Althouse post, but this is one time I am certain of the correctness of doing so. Start at this one one and just keep going forward.

Check out my sick elephant, Cher!

Bruce Hayden said...

“Cher is a high school dropout. Bill Gates a college dropout.”

At least Gates dropped out of Harvard, and was reputed to have had double 800s on his SATs. Cher? Reputed to be dumb as a box of rocks, as shown here.

College isn’t for everyone. I’ve known or known of maybe a half dozen guys who did very well for themselves, after dropping out of college. The common refrain was that college had no relevance to what they were going to do. These guys (like Gates) tend to be very entrepreneurial. The guy you discover at 15 has had the lawn mowing franchise sewn up since he was 12. One and his brother parlayed running thrift stores into almost cornering the used clothing market in this country (mostly to ship such overseas) before it crashed after 9/11. Another went from painting to carpentry, to building houses, to condos, to the biggest commercial buildings in the county in just a couple decades. Got himself on the school board, got the big new high school funded, got the contract, the overrun was about equal to his bid, got paid, and went on to bigger things. Another parlayed a love of cars into one of the largest luxury car service centers in the country, and after selling out, brought that innovation to industrial remediation and cleaning. Typically, they dropped out of college after only a semester or two. It wasn’t that they were too dumb or not driven enough, but rather that it was a waste of time for where they were going. Also, a bit of dyslexia with some of them, which made book learning harder than just watching someone.

I think that maybe you can maybe recognize these people. We have a grandson, newly graduated from high school, wandering through life, with no interest in college. We aren’t talking about people like him. But rather the people who are in too much of a hurry to start building their businesses.

In the Gates case, he was still young, but had built a successful small compiler company, when IBM came calling him, by mistake, looking for an operating system for their new PC. He ran everyone, including IBM, around in circles, ultimately supplying them DOS, which he hadn’t owned when first contacted, and even then was a semi legal clone of the OS he had been selling for a third party (DRI). Very likely, not dropping out of Harvard, and he wouldn’t have been positioned to jump on the deal of a lifetime, that ultimately made him the richest man in the country for a couple of decades. He was right to have been in a hurry, because the time that he would have spent in college instead was spent building his compiler business, that brought him to the attention of IBM.

mccullough said...

This is basically an updated version of the plot for Smokey and The Bandit II.

Todd said...

Don't you know, it is so much easier/safer for all the "right" people to travel when the riff-raff are properly locked down.

Curious George said...

"gilbar said...
hmmm, looks like Curious George should think about READING the things he Cuts&Pastes"

Ha that one caught me.

Curious George said...

Gate apparently did not drop out, he took leave. And never went back.

Owen said...

Mr. Wibble @ 9:01: threadwinner.

Bruce Hayden @ 9:26: great comment. Like so many of your comments, intelligent and full of relevant facts. I remember watching Microsoft go from absolutely nothing to the biggest thing ever thanks to IBM’s decision to hedge on its mainframe business by launching the PC. I was too close to the trees to see the forest, but with 20/20 hindsight it is quite a remarkable chapter in the history of information technology; and a Harvard dropout stands at the center of it. He had the itch; and the drive; and the guts (plus wealthy family) to go for it. And maybe back in the 80’s it was easier to walk away from a Harvard degree. Although personally, in light of the intellectual mediocrity and oppressive culture of current campus life, think it has gotten easier, not harder, to walk away. See also Glenn Reynolds’ “The New School.”

Your point about dyslexia also resonates. I have a very successful in-law who suffered from that —still does— and compensated by developing a photographic memory for whatever he did read, a talent for organizing and for making good quick decisions, and getting complementary talent to help him reach his goals.

gilbar said...

Curious George said...
Ha that one caught me.


it sure got me to read and reread (and re-reread!) those posts :)


Also, HUGE difference between going to Harvard (and dropping out) and NOT going to Harvard
It seems (to me), that; The WHOLE ADVANTAGE of Harvard is the networking connections you make
Once you've made them.... What's the point of staying?

Tina Trent said...

This already makes me feel much better about how my elderly aunt wept to me at being unable to visit her husband of sixty years in the nursing home, as his memory slipped away, and he was agitated by her absence.

Nancy said...

I want to see the nose swab they used to test the elephant for COVID.

Joe Smith said...

World's loneliest elephant meets the world's dumbest woman.

Hilarity ensues.

After meeting Cher, I's sure the elephant wished he was left alone.

Mary Beth said...

I'm happy the elephant got away from what sounds like bad conditions, but I wonder how well a bull elephant will assimilate into a new group of elephants.

Howard said...

"The very rich are different from you and me," said F. Scott Fitzgerald. How different? Well, Ivana Trump so abhors footprints on the carpet that she has the rooms in her home freshly vacuumed before she enters them. Christina Onassis used to have Diet Coke flown to her by private jet. And the elite members of San Francisco's Union Pacific Club needn't worry about handling dirty money, since every coin the enters the institution is scoured by the kitchen staff.

Bob Smith said...

It’s almost funny. Almost.

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...

Interesting news on S Korea (same third-wave anomalous virus spike scene around the world despite their great record “dealing with COVID”) and Taiwan (results atypical with low death rate) today that continues to reinforce the impression COVID is baffling epidemiology experts still. That weird W-shaped curve is strange but ubiquitous this year, and finding the cause will be fascinating. This is another example of how little we know about the way this virus has behaved. Humility should be having its best year ever but arrogance is still way ahead.

PM said...

Howard: It's the Pacific-Union Club and I think it's fair to say club members from W.R Hearst forward have handled more dirty money than we can imagine.

Qwinn said...

Sorry, but anyone who bought anything the media and "experts" tell us about COVID after they unanimously declared, 5 months ago, that the George Floyd riots and looting were a "public health issue" and therefore permissible in a pandemic, completely exempt from all the rules applied to everyone else... is someone who has completely lost their sanity. No one with that broken a bullshit detector, with that stultified an inability to detect gross internal inconsistencies, can be considered sane. Such a person cannot be considered capable of any rational thought beyond the fact that they Love Big Brother.

Attonasi said...

There is nothing good about the people pushing COVID or what they are doing.

This entire event makes you weep for humanity.

Both the authoritarians using fear and the masses that accept their place are sad and this is a repetitive occurance.

I Have Misplaced My Pants said...

I wonder if there are any foster children in whatever city Cher lives in who could use some new clothes or Christmas presents or decent therapists. But it’s cool; that elephant and its peabrain are very happy she spent five or six figures on it.

Nonapod said...

Humility should be having its best year ever but arrogance is still way ahead.

For most people admitting that they were wrong is far more difficult than simply pretending that they never claimed what they claimed or reverse engineering their past statements to fit something that's closer to the truth. This is especially true on the internet.

I certainly don't envision too many people will ever be typing out "I was wrong about Coronavirus" any time soon. And people were predicting all sorts of things about how this pandemic was going to play out back in March one way or the other, most of which have been proven wrong. Come to think of it, did anyone who guessed back in March really guess right?

tim maguire said...

The difference between COVID and CAGW is that COVID is grossly overblown, whereas CAGW doesn't exist at all.

But the connection between the two is a good insight you have here--the primary purpose of each is as a bludgeon to beat people with political views that don't match the culturati.

Jupiter said...

How are they moving the elephant? And why does Cher have to be there? Couldn't she just pay for the operation?

Maybe her next big hit is going to be a song about a persecuted Christian girl in Pakistan, and she is making a video where she rides around on the elephant in a revealing burkah.

John henry said...

Blogger Bruce Hayden said...


College isn’t for everyone.

There is a story called "The Verger" by Somerset Maugham. I probably read it 50 years ago but it stuck with me ever since.

This guy had been working as a verger at the Cathedral, London IIRC. A verger is sort of a janitor. The new bishop found that he could not read and write and fired him.

On the way home, dejected, he was looking for a tobacco shop but didn't find one. He did find a stall for rent. He figured a tobacco shop would do well there and rented the stall,

Years later, when he had dozens of tobacco shops all over London and was very successful, someone discovered he was illiterate and asked him "Do you ever wonder what you would be if you knew how to read and write?" "Yes", he replied, "I'd be the verger at St Whatsit Cathedral.

I always think of Bill Gates when I think of that story. Just think what he could have done had he not dropped out of Harvard! Had he not dropped out, he would have been snapped up by IBM and be running some high level development lab. We never would have heard about him.

I was not mocking Cher or Bill for dropping out. Both, in different ways, have done very well for themselves. For both, continuing in school would have been a waste of their time and the world's resources. I admire both for what they have done for the world.

And recently I read a story about a woman who went through grad school to become a licensed psychologist. She makes $80m/yr and owes $200m in student debt. Meanwhile her husband went through community college, learned to be an electrician. He earns $100m and has no debt.

My granddaughter is in 11th grade so getting to that point. She is thinking of Industrial Engineering so she does need school for that. But if she wanted to do something else, like be another Jen Psaki (but less ignorant) I'm not sure I'd advise 4 years of college. I'm glad I don't have a lot of input in this because I am not sure that would be the right decision either.

John Henry

John henry said...

How much does Cher get paid for doing this?

Is she donating her time? Her expenses?

My guess would be she does it for expenses which will be considerable, especially considering it is her and probably an entourage.

I just don't understand what Cher's presence contributes to the enterprise.

John Henry

JAORE said...

Would Che still do this if someone told her the elephant represents the Republican Party?

YoungHegelian said...

@JH,

I just don't understand what Cher's presence contributes to the enterprise.

The elephant really likes "If I Could Turn Back Time".

Leland said...

So Pakistanis can't have another elephant? Their zoo gets none? I can understand why the elephant goes to Cambodia and not India or Africa. It is probably an Asian elephant and no way would Pakistan give an elephant to India. I'm not at all surprised to see Cher dealing with the trade and shipping of an exotic animal.

How much does Cher get paid for doing this?

You can bet she did this for charity and will be writing off the expenses and her time on her taxes. And I agree, those expenses and the value of her time will be a bit more than what any of us would be paying to travel around the world and visit a zoo and a wild life sanctuary.

Joe Smith said...

"So Pakistanis can't have another elephant?"

So Cambodia needs another elephant?

Carrying coal to Newcastle...

Anne in Rockwall, TX said...

Some people fight for animals. Priscilla Presley is fighting against the soring of horses in the Morgan community. At least it is helping horses here in the US.

Narr said...

The four-year degree is a waste of time and effort for most people, as far as providing a good grounding in the things that matter; its value is simply that of a credential proving the ability to sit still, conform, and regurgitate on demand.

I would bet money that you will find NO ONE in the upper functionary ranks of both parties who doesn't have a college degree, especially among the D's, who like to imagine They So Smart.

I did well in college and three graduate programs (humanities only) because I wanted to learn the subject matter AND get better work. But I'm a complete autodidact when it comes to the unprofitable and idiosyncratic topics that have most interested me since boyhood.

My son wasted a few semesters in college and one of my few interventions in his affairs was to suggest that he didn't have to pretend to be a college student--there are plenty of ways to make one's way in the world, and he could find one. My wife and I then took the tax-deferred accounts we had set up for his education and spent the money on ourselves.

Narr
Emeritus professor



William said...

From the grand to the grandiose is only a flight of fancy away....I wonder what impact elephant farts have upon the environment. I guess there aren't that many of them compared to cows, but how many does it take. The plus side is that if this elephant no longer lives in isolation, he will perhaps feel the social need to suppress his flatulence, so that will be a plus for the environment.

CWJ said...

"'The very rich are different from you and me,' said F. Scott Fitzgerald. How different? Well, Ivana Trump so abhors footprints on the carpet that she has the rooms in her home freshly vacuumed before she enters them. Christina Onassis used to have Diet Coke flown to her by private jet. And the elite members of San Francisco's Union Pacific Club needn't worry about handling dirty money, since every coin the enters the institution is scoured by the kitchen staff."

Howard, what you describe are extreme eccentricities. They are the sort of thing in which people have always had a gossipy voyeuristic interest, and are integral part of celebrity. None of your examples impinge on anyone's life apart from the participants.

Cher's elephant quest is no different except that in today's censorious times, she's engaging in an activity sanctimoniously denied to others. It's not the eccentricity, it's not even the hypocrisy really. Metaphorically, it's a let them eat "cake" reminder that even though bread is available and you can afford it, you can be forced to eat crumbs.

Joe Smith said...

"And the elite members of San Francisco's Union Pacific Club needn't worry about handling dirty money, since every coin the enters the institution is scoured by the kitchen staff."

The St. Francis Hotel on Union Square in San Francisco has been doing this since 1938. We stayed there in February and I didn't notice if they're still doing it.

"In the mid-1930s, this employee cleaned the change women were using to pay for lunch so they wouldn’t get their white gloves dirty. Today, coin washer Rob Holsen cleans about $700 to $800 in coins a week in an old, manually operated machine."

Howard said...

I just copied that straight from an amazon description of the book the rich are different which was the first hit when I googled the Gatsby quote. I liked it because Ivana Trump requires her carpet hoovered. Appreciate Joe's inside baseball knowledge

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...

Not a guess per se but a truthism I shared in March and repeated frequently was that “viruses gonna virus” in order that my fellow meadhousians might gird themselves for a battle in which our options are limited. Humility. We can and have altered slope of the curve to an amazing degree but in the end we cannot change the area under the curve. That was our experience 100% of the time prior to COVID-19 but this time is different. The difference is that we will have one or more highly effective vaccines to deploy, apparently before the virus has done all the virus-ing as it was gonna. That is awesome. I can’t say for sure that it will immediately affect the DpD curve but it is a good opportunity for “hard stop” (to quote Tim) that will bring the tail up short for sure. We really are awash in good news if you ignore the news industry.

Howard said...

What struck me about the smallness of Cher's actions was the millions of human girls and women who need rescuing from Pakistan

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...

That was for you Nonapod but by the time I finished it I forgot who I was responding to.

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...

Right you are about that Howard.

Michelle Dulak Thomson said...

Ann, "galavanting"? Surely the word is "gallivanting."

John henry said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
John henry said...

Leland says Cher will be taking a deduction for her expenses. I don't know how one takes a deduction for income not received.

Then I wondered about that the expenses. If the elephant (or the organization behind this) is not a tax deductible charity, can she take a deduct for her expenses? ("write it off")

Perhaps she can claim it as advertising/publicity? But I wonder if that would be acceptable under IRS rules.

Does anyone have any better knowledge of this?

And since everything I know about life I learned from Nevil Shute and Jerry Seinfeld:

https://youtu.be/XEL65gywwHQ?t=29

John Henry

DanTheMan said...

>>I just don't understand what Cher's presence contributes to the enterprise.


Cher is the star of the movie about the star, Cher. The elephant is just a supporting member of the cast.

Iman said...

In a just world, Cher would be flattened under the massive foot of Kaavan within 5 minutes.

mandrewa said...

"I certainly don't envision too many people will ever be typing out "I was wrong about Coronavirus" any time soon."

I was wrong about a few things, but I was right about a whole lot more.

Here's something I was wrong about. I thought the epidemic would have wound down at this point and that relatively few Covid-19 deaths would be occurring.

But in total opposition to that prediction the media and the government have most people believing that there is a huge and deadly epidemic affecting most of the population, and not just the elderly, that is going on and that means that for most people, and especially for those on the left, fear runs rampant. Supporting this belief is soaring case counts and rising official Covid-19 death numbers.

So I was wrong about that.

Or then again, maybe I was not totally wrong. Because there are a number of puzzling aspects to this situation that don't add up. I'll give two examples. First is the comparison of the deaths this year compared to the expected number of deaths. You would expect a dramatic divergence if we were in the middle of a deadly epidemic. This is not what we are seeing.

Second, and somewhat humorously, is the amazing way we seem to have cured the flu this year. No seems to know how we did it, but amazingly almost no one seems to be dying from the flu. It's an unprecedented event in human history.

mandrewa said...

Now on to some of the things that I got right. I should start by stating that in no case I did originate these ideas. My contribution is solely in recognizing who is talking sense versus the many who were talking nonsense.

I will do this in order of relevance to our situation right now.

a) I realized as soon as I heard about it that cheap, simple, 15-minute, and at-home antigen testing could stop this epidemic in it's tracks. Slovakia has just demonstrated empirically a few weeks ago that this is what happens when you do this.

They made these tests available to everyone in the country. And that was possible because they are so cheap. It took just seven days to dramatically slow the spreading of the infection.

I'll take exception here, by the way, to something that Yancey Ward has said. Now I agree with Yancey Ward about most things. But he repeated the widespread false belief, I've encountered it in many places, that antigen tests are only 50% accurate.

Slovakia proves this is false.

I never really dug down to find out where the lie or false perception came from. But I knew one part of the problem. That is an implicit definition of accuracy that assumes the goal is to replicate the PCR test. I could see from almost all of the people repeating this story that few of them had any understanding that the antigen tests are testing a different thing than the PCR and that actually, in the appropriate context, this is a virtue.

But in any case we could basically stop this epidemic in its tracks using antigen testing, and we could have done this months ago. If only certain incompetent thinkers at the FDA and NIH hadn't prevented people from using these tests at home.

b) Vitamin D, exercise, losing weight, and the several other things that MedCram recommended are all still relevant. And almost all of MedCram's advice and thinking in general.

But specifically for Vitamin D, it's not enough to just take Vitamin D. Unless you're taking enough to get its level in your blood to over 30 ng/ml it's not going to help that much.

c) Hydroxychloroquine together with zinc. It's no longer as important as it once was as better treatments are arriving. But still lots of people died because they weren't given access to this early on in the course of their infection. And it remains a dark blot on the quality of the thinking in our research community as they repeatedly demonstrated that they cared more about being politically correct than saving lives.

d) I understood the significance of the Diamond Princess cruise ship data as soon as I heard about it. And how it invalidated the more fearful theories that some were promoting at the time.

Nonapod said...

d) I understood the significance of the Diamond Princess cruise ship data as soon as I heard about it. And how it invalidated the more fearful theories that some were promoting at the time.

I did as well, which indicated to me that the most hysterical projections (2 million+ dead!) were utter nonsense.

I also got right that we'd have vaccines by December, although at different points throughout the year I began to lose faith in that prediction a bit.

I got some stuff wrong I think, although I can't remember if I actually made any guesses on this forum or elsewhere. For example, I didn't think we'd be coming up on 300k dead by Christmas. Of course I'm well aware that a lot of people find those numbers suspicious and I don't care to get into whether or not the offical death toll has been artificially inflated. But even it was, I think it's still failry safe to conclude that at minimum this virus has proven more deadly than the flu overall. In comparison the worse flu years we get something like 60-70k dead, so unless you're going to conclude that the Covid death toll has been severely inflated you'd have to admit that it's definitely worse.

Nonapod said...

John Hopkins took down a study that seemed to admit that the number of deaths due to Covid was not that alarming really.

The normal death rate from all causes in the United States is something like 230k a month. So if there's been 260k deaths from Covid since march, so like 28k deaths per month, which would be like a 12% increase assuming that the death rate from all things stayed the same (which is a pretty big assumption since throughout the pandemic people have travelled much less which means that there's likely fewer automobile accidents for one thing).

Leland said...

"arrangements for a 30-day quarantine in Cambodia were in place."

So still the loneliest elephant, but now with the added stress of being transplanted to a new environment while locked in a small cage and having to make the adjustment for 30 days before introduction into a new herd as an unwanted bull. But hey, he got so spend time with Cher.


"If the elephant (or the organization behind this) is not a tax deductible charity, can she take a deduct for her expenses? ("write it off")"

If... yet Four Paws International does have a current 501.C3 status.

Howard said...

For all we know, he's the Paul Gauguin of painting pachyderms.

Todd said...

Nonapod said...

In comparison the worse flu years we get something like 60-70k dead, so unless you're going to conclude that the Covid death toll has been severely inflated you'd have to admit that it's definitely worse.

11/30/20, 1:16 PM


Sure but during regular flu season we don't normally have politicians forcing retirement homes to take in those that are sick with the flu thus allowing it to spread to other "at risk' persons.

Birkel said...

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/we-need-to-act-boldly-now-if-we-are-to-avoid-economy-wide-lockdowns-to-halt-climate-change-11600879250?redirect=amp#click=https://t.co/zTxjfJJWpZ

Not only will we have to lock down to avoid the tenth of one percent of people who will die with Winnie Xi Flu, we will also have to lock down for Glowball Warmening.

Where are Ken B and tim in vermont to tell me how good that will be for us?

Oh, I know you didn't explicitly want those things.
But you cheered giving an inch to the people I warned you would take a fucking mile.
And you don't get to claim you didn't see it coming.

This is the exact same problem I have with Freeman Hunt.
When you cheer starting us down the slippery slope, I will curse you when we pick up speed and lose co trol.
And when we get to the bottom, well, you all are just enemies in a low trust society.

Narr said...

Cher's just stealing from John Prine's songbook.

Narr
Sabu the Elephant Boy

Readering said...

Living our lives vicariously through Cher.

n.n said...

THIS IS ALL EXCESS DEATH! (Bull****)

A total of 1380 patients with confirmed SARS-CoV2 tests were identified; median age, 66.44 years (interquartile range, 52.6-76.3 years). Of these 1380 patients, 630 recovered with positive SARS-CoV2, [including 180 (28.6%) with DNR and 450 (71.4%) non-DNR], 640 died with death certificates attributing COVID-19 as the cause of death [including 570 (89.1%) with DNR and 70 (10.9%) non-DNR]. During the study period, there were 120 deceased patients with negative SARS-CoV2 testing [including 110 (91.7%) with DNR and 10 (8.3%) non-DNR] Figure 1.

Planned Parent, maybe. The choice to cross-contaminate did, at minimum, accelerate mortality.

n.n said...

She should have rode the elephant, thereby reducing her, if not his, carbon footprint. So, Cher doesn't care about the environment. She's Pro-Choice.

Ingachuck'stoothlessARM said...

what about to Romania?

Like the 'Monolith'. Now in Romania.

it's like the Elf on the Shelf--

... the 'Lith on the Cliff

FullMoon said...

That old elephant could feed a hundred homeless.

Clyde said...

Well of course Cher can travel! She was born in the wagon of a travellin' show, after all.

bagoh20 said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
The Godfather said...

S-H-*T! We turned down a post-Thanksgiving visit from our Grandchildren because Dr. Fauci didn't tell us about the elephant exception. We could have gotten an elephant if we'd known.