"So, but [Jolly] West himself said, oh, I never experimented on a human being, just the elephant. He would even make jokes about the elephant..."

".... because it was the one thing people knew. And he would say, oh yeah, it, it would sort of, it was his calling card and he used it as kind of a jokey thing. But he always denied any connection to this CIA.... You know, even in the Church Committee, you could see the connection because they revealed that the University of Oklahoma had been receiving CIA money. And West had a special office for him built there. He was hired there mysteriously when they wanted to move at what he wanted to build what he called this free zone of experiment, where he could give LSD, hypnosis, and sleep deprivation in combined doses, you know, in whatever increments he wanted to adjust. He was gonna build that out at the Air Force base. And he was all set to go. And I even had receipts and papers and a lot of correspondence in his files about this...."

Great episode. Full transcript here. 

You can buy Rebecca Lemov's book "The Instability of Truth: Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyper-Persuasion" at Amazon (commission earned). The audiobook is free at Spotify Premium.

"Elephants learn crucial social and behavioral skills from their mothers and other relatives, with whom they share intense emotional bonds."

"Instead of experiencing all this in their natural homes, elephants used in circuses are exploited—made to do meaningless circus tricks on the road."

A statement from PETA, quoted in "Elephant escapes circus, roams streets of Montana" (WaPo).

People are finding this amusing...

... but it isn't, really.

"If I became a writer and artist of children’s books... it was not because I had in mind to create children’s books."

"I wanted Babar to live on (or, as some will say, my father to live on). I wanted to stay in his country, the elephant world which is both a utopia and a gentle satire on the society of men.... Babar and I both... take the same care to avoid over-dramatization of the events or situations that do arise. If we take the correct, efficient steps, we both believe that a happy end will come.... [T]here is a message in the Babar books, a message of nonviolence."

Wrote Laurent de Brunhoff, quoted in "Laurent de Brunhoff, Artist Who Made Babar Famous, Dies at 98/After his father, who created the character, died, he continued the series of books about a modest elephant and his escapades in Paris for seven decades" (NYT).

Babar was invented by Laurent de Brunhoff's mother, Cécile de Brunhoff. It was a bedtime story, told to Laurent when he was 5, and retold to his father, Jean de Brunhoff, who took the story further in words and drawings. Jean created the first 7 books, then died of tuberculosis at age 37. Laurent continued his father's world — the elephant world, where he wanted to stay.

The obituary links to a NYT book review from 40 years ago. The book is "What the Lone Ranger, Babar, and Other Innocent Heroes Do to Our Minds," which explains how "Babar's story is a lesson in colonialism with racist overtones." We're told: "[The author, Ariel] Dorfman explicates these episodes and stories at academic length. He even deciphers the racial and sexual symbolism of Zephyr the monkey and Silver the stallion. For authority, he cites such authors as Gyorgy Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci and Frantz Fanon, blending in the psychoanalytic leaven found in much Marxist writing."

Babar racist? It's an easy shot. The elephant is a big target.

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."