(Image: Wikimedia Commons)

The US Central Intelligence Agency apparently isn’t content to simply sabotage democratically elected governments on every continent anymore. And perhaps, like everyone else in the world, it has decided to stop paying for (surprisingly credible) art and writing. So what other purpose can a supremely rich and powerful intelligence agency put its resources towards?

Colossal Biosciences, which sounds like a child’s made-up name for a science lab, has an answer: seeing “the woolly mammoth thunder upon the tundra once again”.

And In-Q-Tel, a nonprofit venture capital firm funded by the CIA — did you know the CIA had a venture capital firm? — is apparently sold. It joins an incredible list of investors who haven’t seen Jurassic Park, such as libertarian/Trumpist/Gawker-slaughterer Peter Thiel, motivational speaker Tony Robbins, rich person’s daughter Paris Hilton, and eerie finance bros the Winklevoss twins.

To what end does the CIA want to help bring the woolly mammoth back to life? We shudder to contemplate, but if, say, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro ever meets with a freak mammoth stomping we’ll have a theory on who’s behind it.

And the CIA isn’t the only US intelligence agency using its resources in a faintly baffling way. This week, via a freedom of information request by Rolling Stone, we found out that the Federal Bureau of Investigation spent 40 years from 1967 trailing Aretha Franklin, apparently attempting to establish links between the soul music legend and “black extremists”. While Franklin was far from an apolitical figure, four decades of surveillance doesn’t appear to have gleaned very much.

Nor did you have to show solidarity with Angela Davis to get the FBI’s attention in those days; you could produce a pretty decent sketch of the history of popular music in the 20th century just by listening to the artists the FBI put together files on, such as John Lennon, Biggie Smalls, Kurt Cobain, Marvin Gaye, and Miriam Makeba. Even The Monkees have a sheet, thanks to the misbehaving proto-boy band’s criticism of the war in Vietnam.