Look to your father, young man

Yesterday, I told you about Jacob Lawrence Crosby’s apparent love for calling Dr. Paul A. Offit a “vaccine industrialist.” Were I a betting man (if I am a man or a muppet), I’d place a bet that the kid thinks that this post and that last post constitutes harassment or even “cyberstalking.” It’s not. We are just playing the same game that the kid plays when it comes to attacking the credibility and integrity of people he doesn’t personally like. It’s a game about degrees of separation.

For example, in this blog post, people are “talking heads” to the vaccine industry because of their degrees of separation from people associated with vaccine development and/or marketing. In Crosby’s Labyrinth, Seth Mnookin is a vaccine industry talking head because Mr. Mnookin knows and is related to some people that, again, in Crosby’s Labyrinth, are all about giving kids autism or something. See, Mr. Mnookin’s uncle, Robert, is a chair at Harvard Law. The mother-in-law of Alison Singer, co-founder of the Autism Science Foundation (a foundation not obsessed with vaccines and focused more on the realities of autism science, thus an anathema to the kid), is a professor there.

That’s right. You’re not seeing things. Because the mother-in-law of the founder of ASF is a professor at the school where his uncle chairs a department, Seth Mnookin is a vaccine industry “talking head.” Here’s what Larry The Kid wrote:

“While aggressively promoting his book, Seth Mnookin also claimed to have become involved purely as an objective journalist. This was later disproved – his uncle Robert Mnookin Chairs Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation, where the mother-in-law of Alison Singer is also a professor. Singer runs and founded the “Autism Science Foundation” – a front group of the vaccine industry dedicated to stifling research into the vaccine autism link. Singer has also made false reassurances of Mnookin’s objectivity.”

Note that Larry The Kid never tells us how Ms. Singer’s “reassurances of Mnookin’s objectivity” are false.

In the same blog post, Jake Tapper, a CNN anchor, is in cahoots with Big Pharma because:

“…Tapper appears to have quite a rapport with Seth Mnookin, at least on Twitter. CNN led the media lynching of Dr. Wakefield in January 2011 and Fred Hassan, former president of PhRMA, sits on the board of directors for Time Warner – the company that owns CNN. Tapper gave Seth Mnookin airtime as an expert while mentioning on Twitter the fact that his book won an award from the National Association of Science Writers – a pharma-linked union of “journalists.” Tapper’s father, Dr. Theodore Tapper, is a South Philadelphia pediatrician. After a virus that causes fatal wasting disease in piglets was discovered to have contaminated millionaire vaccine industrialist Paul Offit‘s rotavirus vaccine, Dr. Tapper dismissed concerns about this as “much ado about nothing.” Like father, like son.”

Be careful with whom you associate on Twitter, otherwise you’re a pharma shill. Also, take note that Larry The Kid Crosby never tells us how the NASW is linked to pharma. He just writes it as a fact. (What are falsehoods that are written? Oh, yes, libel.)

And so it goes with Jacob “Larry The Kid” Crosby. He tried to get an oncologist fired because the school for which the oncologist works gets money from a pharmaceutical company. Not the oncologist himself in some bank account in the Cayman Islands, no. The school. If we go by that measure, then Jacob Lawrence Crosby has a lot of explaining to do to his devoted follower. (Or followers. It’s hard to tell because most of the commenters on his blog read exactly the same.)

You see, the University of Texas system, where Larry The Kid is attempting to get a PhD in epidemiology…

Hold on. Hold on. Let’s take a pause to laugh that off and then continue…

…The University of Texas system is getting money from “Big Pharma” in the form of grants for research. Now, the kid might be paying his tuition out of pocket since his family is said to be well-off. So he might be clean of getting any money from big pharma, but does that stop him from being taught by professors and faculty that are getting some of their salary from these grants? Does his self-righteousness and indignation about “big pharma” or the “vaccine industry” end when it benefits him?

I’m not even going to mention that Alex Cranberg, a regent in the UT system, is Jake Crosby’s uncle from his mother’s side, or that Mr. Cranberg is a bit of a “lightning rod”:

“Suspicion has surrounded Mr. Cranberg from Day 1. First, there was the speed with which he became a regent — one of the most prestigious appointments a governor can bestow upon a Texan. Mr. Cranberg received the nod just two weeks after registering to vote in the state following a move from Colorado for personal reasons. “Frankly, I’ve got a lot going on and would not have moved specifically for this job,” he said.

Then there were his associations. Mr. Cranberg is a longtime friend of Jeff Sandefer, the Austin energy investor who wrote a controversial set of seven proposals for changing higher education and has promoted them with Mr. Perry’s aid. “I don’t expect anybody to tell me what to do and have me do it,” Mr. Cranberg said.

Of all the regents, Mr. Cranberg was the one closest to Rick O’Donnell, a fellow former Coloradoan and an associate of Mr. Sandefer who had publicly questioned the value of academic research. The U.T. System’s hiring of Mr. O’Donnell as a special adviser to the board was one of the sparks that lit the statewide controversy. (Mr. O’Donnell’s employment was terminated after 49 days, during which he was “unfairly attacked,” Mr. Cranberg said.)

At the height of the debate, Mr. Cranberg was widely considered by critics in the Legislature and the academic community to be the ringleader of a bloc of regents who were influenced by Mr. Sandefer and others aiming to, among other things, stage an attack on academic research and coordinate an ouster of U.T.’s president, William Powers Jr. Most recently, after a request for extensive data on all the faculty members in the system, Mr. Cranberg was accused by the same groups of trying to micromanage the universities.”

For me to say that Jacob Lawrence Crosby is in any way “tainted” by his kinship with Mr. Cranberg would be disingenous. We have zero proof whatsoever that Mr. Cranberg’s position allowed a science denialist and anti-vaccine activist like Jake Crosby to enter the PhD program in Texas. None.

So let’s talk, instead, about Larry The Kid’s father, Mr. Giff Crosby. The elder Crosby has an interesting work profile. Per Liz Ditz:

“Jake Crosby’s father, Giff Crosby, appears to have spent his entire career in the advertising industry.  According to his LinkedIn profile, Giff Crosby today works for Dentsu America. Previously he was a copywriter for such products as Miracle-Gro (2008).

In 1999, Giff Crosby was employed by DDB (formerly Doyle Dane Bernbach), where he was an Executive Creative Director (ECD) slated to work on such firms as Compaq, Lockheed Martin, and The Bank of New York and new business. That same year, DDB picked up the vaccine maker Merck as a client.

The industry giant Monsanto brought RoundUP, a highly-toxic, carcinogenic weedkiller,to market. Doyle Dane Bernbach, which employed Mr. Crosby, provided advertising services to Monsanto.”

Note that Giff worked on the advertising for RoundUP. In fact, he seems proud of his work, so much so that he shows a television commercial for the stuff on a video hosting site:

Yes, of course, it could be some other Giff Crosby who posted that and other advertising videos. Jake, if your dad didn’t post those videos, or didn’t work on advertising RoundUP, please have him drop us a line.

Why does it matter what Croby, the father, did? It matters because Jacob Lawrence Crosby’s old masters make a big deal about glyphosate, the active ingredient in RoundUP:

“In recent weeks, we’ve learned some very disturbing truths about glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto’s broad-spectrum herbicide Roundup, which is generously doused on genetically engineered (GE) Roundup Ready crops.

GE crops are typically far more contaminated with glyphosate than conventional crops, courtesy of the fact that they’re engineered to withstand extremely high levels of Roundup without perishing along with the weed.

A new peer-reviewed report authored by Anthony Samsel, a retired science consultant, and a long time contributor to the Mercola.com Vital Votes Forum, and Dr. Stephanie Seneff, a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), reveals how glyphosate wrecks human health.

…

Indeed, according to Dr. Seneff, glyphosate is possibly “the most important factor in the development of multiple chronic diseases and conditions that have become prevalent in Westernized societies,” including but not limited to…”

Hint, the first chronic disease and condition on the list starts with the letter , A, and then a u.”

Autism? Is it autism? It’s autism, isn’t it? Yes, yes it is:

“Just before Christmas, a bunch of articles started making the rounds in the usual places citing a senior MIT scientist as proclaiming mind-numbingly ridiculous things like, Half of All Children Will Be Autistic by 2025, Warns Senior Research Scientist at MIT and, just the other day, MIT scientist links autism to Monsanto’s Roundup and predicts HALF of U.S. children will be autistic by 2025.”

Orac then tears apart Seneff’s assertions:

“As I’ve pointed out time and time again, if you look at two different variables that have shown an increase with time, you can almost always make it look as though there’s a correlation. Only occasionally does that correlation equal causation. It was that claim that the “autism epidemic” began (i.e., autism prevalence started increasing dramatically) beginning in the early to mid-1990s and that that correlated with an expansion of the vaccines in the vaccine schedule or, in the US, that it correlated with the addition of mercury-containing vaccines to the vaccine schedule. From these observations, it was claimed, that it had to be the vaccines, or the mercury-containing preservative thimerosal used at the time in some childhood vaccines, that was causing autism. Lots and lots of epidemiology since then has confirmed that there is no detectable link, epidemiology that I’ve written about time and time again, but that hasn’t stopped the antivaccine movement. What the increase in autism prevalence corresponds to is really the expansion of diagnostic criteria for autism spectrum disorders that occurred in the early 1990s as well as increased screening for the condition, which, as I’ve pointed out, will always increase the prevalence of any condition.”

But what if, just what if, glyphosate did cause autism? If that were the case, we’d have three competing theories of how autism is “caused” or is “induced”.  Theory #1 is that the MMR vaccine causes children’s guts to “leak” and cause brain damage somehow. It’s Andrew Jeremy Wakefield’s theory, and it has been going strong since 1998. It has been so strong that Jacob Lawrence has supported Wakefield pretty strongly (until recently), even having Andrew Jeremy go to Brandeis University and chat ever-so-poshly about the fraudulent paper that failed to associate the MMR vaccine with autism.

Ah, the memories of when Jake’s love for Andy seemed so pure, so strong. I bet Jake would have asked how high to jump if Andy had requested of Jake to jump to conclusions.

Theory #2 is that the vaccine additive thimerosal causes autism by some weird mechanism that chemical castrators say has something to do with testosterone. Larry The Kid is a big proponent of this theory as well. See, he has stated that vaccines made him “toxic”, so he fights against thimerosal with all his might, kind of. (You’re not toxic, Jake. If thimerosal did anything to you, it would have intoxicated you. To say that you are toxic is to say that you are bad for people. Aside from your anti-vaccine activism, you’re not a danger to anyone.)

Theory #3, which is making the rounds in “cure autism” or “autism is caused” circles, is that glyphosate in herbicides like RoundUP cause autism because there is a correlation between the use of the chemical and the number of diagnoses of autism. Mind you, there is no evidence of how this could be the case biologically, but things like facts and such don’t matter none to those people.

Knowing these three theories, if your father had made a living at some point selling glyphosate, which theories would you ardently support? Theory #1? Theory #2? Theory #3? Surely, you wouldn’t support theory #3, would you? You’d be selling out your dad. You’d probably ardently support other theories than #3 to take the heat off your dad’s former source of income.

No, there is no evidence at all that this is what Jacob Lawrence Crosby is doing by pushing on his handful of readers the ideas that vaccines and nothing but vaccines cause autism. Nothing in the public record shows that he is deflecting criticism of glyphosate and aiming it toward other causes in order to protect his dad. But, if you apply the lines of effed up logic that exist in the tangled-up universe that is Crosby’s Labyrinth, this all ain’t out of the real of possibilities.

Wouldn’t it be nice if Jake Crosby told us how he feels about the glyphosate theory so adored by his former friends at Age of Autism that they wrote about it here, here, here, and here? Wouldn’t you sleep better at night if he somehow reassured us that all of his “work” against vaccines is not in service of Monsanto? Of course you would.