adventures of the yansquid

You’ve been struck by 🔪

Alex Trebek has been diagnosed with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer, and is vowing to fight the disease.

The Canadian-born “Jeopardy!” host made the statement in a video on the game show’s YouTube channel.

“Normally, the prognosis for this is not very encouraging, but I’m going to fight this, and I’m going to keep working,” Trebek said in the video.

✓ yes I have delusions

✓ yes I’m psychotic

✗ no this doesn’t make me “scary”

✗ no this doesn’t make me “dangerous”

✗ no this doesn’t mean I’m gonna hurt you

the use of gendered language, whether in law or in company guidelines, has been used as an excuse to exclude trans people from various kinds of reproductive healthcare. there have been stories of abortion providers pointing to the use of “pregnant women” in all clinic literature to justify not giving trans men assistance. there are issues where “women’s health clinics” will refuse to accept referrals for anyone who doesn’t have “F” on their records, which of course includes many trans women. there are in turn stories of trans women being unable to access “male” prostrate cancer screening.

language in this sort of capacity needs to be as factual and neutral and carefully constructed to avoid loopholes as possible. at this stage in my life, as a non-woman capable of pregnancy, i don’t really CARE anymore if you talk casually about pregnancy as something that happens to women. but i DO care if the medical system writes out some guidelines that, in only acknowledging pregnant women as a possibility, open me up to the possibility of being denied care by transphobes who can claim they’re just following the rules.

it’s for reasons like this that some people don’t get their gender markers changed, but that in itself creates dangerous situations when their marker doesn’t match their presented gender - I’ve heard horror stories of people getting arrested after being pulled over by a cop who thought they were lying about their identity.

hey, thanks for your message. there’s no way i’d be able to answer this question well enough in one ask so i will just give a very basic run-down off the top of my head on the situation in the philippines. it’s hard to answer this question bc the present conditions in the phil. are the culmination of the root causes of exploitation and oppression that we have faced since being colonized by the spanish. 

where do i even start lol… i guess i’ll start by saying that our call as kababayans and mass organizers in the philippines is now for the overthrow of president duterte. as of september 2018, there are more than 500 political prisoners. one of them is maojo maga, a trade unionist organizer for Kilusang Maya Uno (may first labour movement–a militant labour centre in the phil.). he was illegally arrested on false charges (firearms possession) and kidnapped by the philippine national police. his father-in-law, rafael baylosis, was also illegally arrested on false charges. rafael is a labour rights advocate and peace consultant for the National Democratic Front. 

in the past 2 years of duterte’s presidency, more than 20,000 people have been murdered in drug war-related extrajudicial killings. as you might know, duterte has waged a “drug war” in the philippines, and many drug users and pushers (most unconfirmed–there are no trials held for those murdered obviously) have died in the drug war. but it doesn’t matter whether or not these people are drug users because this drug war is really just a war on the poor. the pigs of the philippine national police (pnp–who, by the way, send representatives overseas to spread propaganda about the police’s good work in the philippines, check out how BAYAN members interrupted one such pr event in new york) go into urban poor areas and brutalize and murder poor people under the guise of culling these criminal drug users from society. they abuse and rape women who they take into custody or who go to the police to find the whereabouts of their missing or detained family members. 

it MUST be clear that the US has historically been and continues to be instrumental in planning and executing these wars on the people–the drug war, the counterinsurgency operations (such as the current one, Oplan Kapayapaan), the displacement of Indigenous peoples from their land (such as the Lumad people in southern Mindano), etc. the bureaucrat capitalists of the country and the politicians are lackeys of the US government and serve the interests of the national bourgeoisie only. 

through schemes like the Pork Barrel (an institutionalized money laundering scheme where politicians pool tax money into “pork barrels”–funds for public infrastructure programs–only to cancel projects and then take the money for themselves) the bureaucrat capitalists hoard wealth while the urban poor are brutalized and murdered by the police and live in squatters. aside from pork barrel schemes, the gov. also accumulates huge amounts of debt from china in order to fund infrastructure projects. china knows that we will be unable to pay off this debt and so instead our land or resources are used as collateral. 

the entire country is being militarized because duterte knows thats the people’s resistance is only becoming stronger and more organized. mindanao is STILL under martial law (in fact, martial law was extended by another year) but the entire country experiences martial law conditions (including but not limited to extrajudicial killings, the suppression of dissidence, the targeting and threatening of people connected to the national democratic movement, red-tagging, etc.) 

on january 30 of 2019, our kasama randy malayao was murdered. he was a peace consultant of the national democratic front of the philippines, and therefore was protected under the Joint Agreement on Safety and Immunity Guarantees (JASIG, which the NDFP and phil. gov. established precisely to guarantee some form of protection for those involved in the peace talks.) the strategic purpose of the peace talks is another post but the murder of randy by government forces is a clear message from the US-duterte regime that the national democratic movement poses a serious threat to fascism and imperialism. if the US-duterte regime refuses to hear the people’s demand for justice through peace, then what other avenue do they have?

this is getting pretty long now so i’ll force myself to wrap this up because i can go on forever lol. i want to stress that despite our call to oust duterte, we know that he is merely one president in a long line of presidents who have served the interests of US imperialism and the national bureaucrat class. if you take away anything form this post, it should be that the root causes of exploitation and oppression in the philippines are bureaucrat capitalism, feudalism, and imperialism. these are the material conditions that we must militantly work against for there to be revolutionary change for the people. when we organize, mobilize, and agitate the masses, these root causes must be at the centre of our analysis.

let me know if you want me to expand on anything. i recommend following bulatlat and IBON online for developments and statistics, as well as the social media of grassroots alliances such as karapatan, bayan (gabriela, migrante, anakbayan), and the international league of people’s struggles. all kababayans have a role in supporting the national democratic movement, wherever they are in the world (and, for the record, i do not organize in the philippines at the moment.) if you want to know more about how you can support national democracy in the philippines, please message me. BAYAN (a grassroots alliance of organizations, started during marcos era and still exists today as a people’s alliance) and ILPS (int. league of ppl’s struggles, an international anti-imperialist alliance) have chapters in many parts of the world, particularly in north america and asia. a fundamental part of our work towards national democracy is international solidarity actions with other national liberation movements, such as in palestine and venezuela. i can help you get in contact with bayan and/or ilps orgs in your area if you need it.

i’m gonna reiterate the calls for some campaigns we have going on right now:

FREE MAOJO MAGA! FREE RAFAEL BAYLOSIS! FREE ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS!

JUSTICE FOR KA RANDY MALAYAO!

We’re two decades past the publication of the now-retracted study that claimed to show a link between autism and the MMR vaccine, but we can’t seem to shake its effects. The physician who lead the study committed fraud and has had his medical license revoked. Numerous studies have demonstrated the complete lack of a link between vaccines and autism. Yet many people are still concerned.

Now, in the face of some of the worst outbreaks the world has seen in recent years, Danish researchers have published one of the largest studies of autism and MMR to date. Its finding should come as no surprise: there’s no link.

The results, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, are the result of following 657,461 children born between 1999 and 2010. Researchers followed up with those children starting at one year of age and continued through August 31, 2013. The massive size of the dataset allowed the study authors to control for various factors like age, sex, sibling history of autism, and other autism risk factors. In the end, 6,517 children received an autism diagnosis—and the risk was exactly the same regardless of whether they got the MMR vaccine. What’s more, as an editorial in the same journal issue points out, they showed that there was no association between when a child got vaccinated and when they got an autism diagnosis, further undermining any causal link.

Cleaning women washing a crucifix, 1938