I was trying out my new bottle of Iroshizuku Deep-sea Blue/Black Ink, and this is what it wrote.

Dark as the deep ocean
Rabid conformity
Perception as informed by authority
So all desire is pretentious
Japan

Monday 2016 02 22 - Zika, microcephaly, and heliocentrism.

The US Elections circus is in full swing, and the number of irrational statements and beyond the pale discoveries about literally everyone but Bernie Sanders is pretty spectacular. Hillary, the corporate representative of robber-barons, has taken to stealing Bernie Sanders' campaign positions and then attacking him with outright lies – which had better work, since money, gerrymandering, influencing debate-scheduling, plagiarizing and mud-slinging have not been yielding fruit as expected. Still, she is so well-funded and connected in corporate media that no rebuttal or exposition of her dishonesty will get the same coverage as her sponsored lies, because nobody is farther up the ass of the corporate electoral complex than this apparatchik. Which brings me to the curious problem with science illustrated in this weeks panic-du-jour.

Zika is a tropical fever like Dengue, that has existed for millennia, been isolated since 1947 (in Uganda), mostly just gives people fever and the occasional rash, and never got much public attention until, in the past months, Zika infections in pregnant women were linked to a sudden explosion in microcephalic births, particularly in South America. World-wide outrage and completely disproportionate and reactionary responses ensued from all quarters, especially those with a fledgeling understanding of quadratic growth in epidemiology, until a group of Argentine physicians, called Physicians in Crop-Sprayed Towns (PCST), looked into the problem a little more closely.

As it turns out, there is a mosquito in the ointment, as it were. Maybe, just maybe, the outbreak of microcephaly is linked to the use of a larvicide called pyriproxyfen, applied broadly to the water in these regions, ironically, to curb the populations of these Zika-carrying mosquitoes, and the fact that many cases of microcephaly that have been so tested have been successfully linked to previous Zika infection is simply because a lot of people get Zika.

As soon as the news came out, there was a rush by activists to link the microcephaly to Monsanto, which, it is true, has a major financial interest in the production of the larvicide, but does not outright own it. There was also a rush by certain corporate interests to discredit the correlation found by PCST between pyriproxyfen and microcephaly, resulting in mediatic contrition, condemnations, and other strongly-worded finger-waggings.

Of interest is that part of the propaganda being bandied about by corporate mouthpieces is discrediting the assertion that Monsanto has had a hand in media outlets declaring that one 50% counts more than another 50% in the correlations game. Sumitomo Chemical, they say, is not really 'owned' by Monsanto – they have a 'partnership'. Well, if you have a looksy at Sumitomo's consolidated financial statements from 2010 to 2014, it was losing 50B yen annually in 2010, and then, when Valent, Sumitomo's wholly-owned US subsidiary, became Monsanto's partner-in-crime in the manufacture of Round-up, suddenly Sumitomo starts pulling 30 and then 50 billion yen annual profits. Suddenly. To characterize their relationship as a 'parnership' is a little misleading at best.

The net effect is that despite the fact that the correlation between pyriproxyfen and microcephaly is very similar to that between Zika and microcephaly, Zika does not have reputation-protecting 600lb gorillas pounding the ground with fists the size of USA Today & the NYT, in very dangerous proximity to frail governments, so in the race for public opinion, the curtain is quietly drawn over the possible discovery and we move on in a world of corporate taboo science. The problem here is that this correlation should be studied further. There is a problem with physical proximity in part of the data, true, but having corporate thugs therefore tacitly forbid looking into the correlation further is tantamount to burning scientists at the stake for challenging scripture.

Like Galileo with heliocentrism, we may never get to examine correlations in a rational and scientific way to discover the true reason for the microcephaly outbreak. But if I had to put my money on it, I would bet that a notable Monsanto investor, the Gates foundation, will soon be setting up projects to care for its victims and research all scientific avenues that do not violate the limits already set on this research, thus helping to create a need, and then servicing it in such a way that it will never go away.