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Sept. 12, 2023 - Stay Free - Russel Brand
01:00:47
“IT’S MORE HARMFUL!” Exposing Big Pharma’s Alzheimer's GOLD RUSH - Stay Free #205
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If you're watching us on YouTube, Only the first 15 minutes will be available to you, then we'll be slinking off into the home of free speech to give you the truth about aducanumab and Alzheimer's, a drug that pledged to treat Alzheimer's that seemingly makes things a lot worse.
Is there a profit in it?
Who knows what's going on?
Remember, you can join us on Locals for a new and reasonable price, but it's time now for me to introduce our fantastic guest today, Max Lugavere.
Max Lugavere is a health journalist who specializes in nutrition and the brain.
He's a filmmaker.
He's the author of the best-selling Genius Foods, Genius Life, and Genius Kitchen.
Max, thank you so much for joining us today.
Thanks so much for having me.
Are you happy here?
I'm super happy.
Max, the first thing that I want to talk to you about is our lethal, deadly, contemporary lifestyle.
Is it true that 60% of calories that adults eat are coming from processed food, and that processed foods are sort of no food at all, and are almost akin to a poison?
Yeah, I mean, they are foreign to our bodies.
And the distinction really is, you know, processing occurs on a continuum.
So when you slice an apple, you are processing it to some degree.
Yeah, that's pretty finicky though.
Even mastication, I said mastication, grow up.
Even by taking a bite out of an apple, that's a process.
Yeah, but at least you're allowing yourself to masticate your jaw to do the work, which is what it was evolutionarily designed to do, right?
If you bleach the apple into a soup, Yes, into a soup, right?
You pulverize it.
Your jaw muscles don't have to work, your stomach.
I mean, there are all these muscles throughout your body that are essentially getting a workout.
When you consume a bolus of whole food, we digest food slower.
It sends satiety signals to our brains in a more deliberate manner.
And so people, there's actually research that shows that people who consume primarily these ultra processed foods, foods that have essentially been pre-chewed for you, Partially predigested tend to over consume them to the tune of about 500 additional calories So right there if you look at the fact that today 73% of the foods in your average American supermarket and probably I would I would reckon that the UK is close by Are ultra processed it makes sense why the obesity statistics now are so startling about 50% of Americans are not just overweight but obese and
It's a good example of how our biochemistry has evolved alongside nature, which is kind of obvious because we're on the same planet and there's a sort of a natural and literally organic harmony between us.
And even if you extract mastication and the digestive processes that evolved in order to digest the food that we eat, if you extract the necessity for that process, you induce a kind of new The new potential for mutation and sickness and illness.
I wanted to talk to you just for a moment about, we recently have been talking about Bill Gates' growing meat in labs, funding a new sort of, not plastic coating, it's apparently an organic material that allows food to be preserved for longer.
What do we think about the sort of technologization of food and centralised food and the pattern in food.
Is this ultimately, as it claims, good for climate change and good for health or do you
think that these endeavours have other motivations behind them? No I think it's a, as
you here in the UK would call it, bollocks. Yes that's what we would say. That's what we would say.
That's what we say, that's our language. Yeah I think it's quite inappropriate.
What it does is it illustrates this phenomena known as nutritionism, where we apply science to the fact that we've co-evolved with whole foods, right?
And so we try to break a food.
Since the dawn of nutrition science really began, we've attempted to distill foods down to its constituent nutrients, right?
Like an orange has vitamin C and maybe a few other things, right?
banana has potassium and maybe a few other things.
So we isolate these nutrients and we try to determine what's essential and what's not.
And by the way, that list of essential nutrients is constantly evolving.
And so when you take like a Silicon Valley guy who looks at food through this lens, food as
data, essentially, you end up with a product like in the U.S.
We have something called Soylent.
I don't know if that's available here, but it basically is it's purported to be a food that
you could essentially live on that has all of the required essential nutrients in it.
But if you look at the ingredients list, it's like ingredients list.
It's a slurry of garbage, essentially, but it ticks all the boxes for what we believe to be
our essential nutrients and not.
There have been no long-term randomized control trials to ascertain whether or not this will
actually lead to a thriving human as opposed to somebody who's merely just surviving.
And so, yeah, it is at the end of the day, I think a huge problem.
It's a reductionist approach that hasn't served us in any area, you know, in the sphere of
biology and certainly not nutrition.
You can see how technocracy, the control by a cadre of experts, is facilitated by the reduction
of all things to data and the idea that if you have a kind of a spiritual or open-minded
perspective, also open-minded, your brain will fall out towards food that isn't based on
patentable qualities.
It is in fact a kind of an understanding that's somewhat more holistic That is regarded as inferior, that all things are turned into data, all things are made material, all things are objectified, no room for mystery and it doesn't always work.
So let's just for a moment touch on one of the points you made earlier before moving into the rather more controversial subject which we won't be able to talk about on YouTube about this Alzheimer's drug that I understand you have sort of personal motivations in your investigation and desire to convey the truth around this drug.
Before we get into that though, which we'll do exclusively in the other place, would you tell us a little bit about the obesity epidemic and its impact on health and the relationship between obesity, big food and big pharma?
Yeah, totally.
So, as I alluded to, about half of the U.S.
population, and this is, by the way, this is a condition that we're exporting now, so I'm not sure what the exact statistics are.
I know that in the U.K., about 50% of the calories consumed by your average adult are from ultra-processed foods, and the U.S.
is higher.
It's about 60% for adults, about 70% for children.
It's worse for children.
My hope was that children would eat less processed food.
Yeah, more candy, confectionary products and things like that.
Yeah, it's a huge problem.
Particularly at a time when you're still developing, right?
And the brain is undergoing rapid development.
So this is reflected in the statistics that show us that 50% of adults are either flat-out obese, And 9 in 10 adults have some component now of metabolic illness.
So metabolic syndrome, it's a constellation of symptoms about 9 in 10 adults now have that.
So it leaves the dramatic minority in a state of good health, right?
And so I think the food environment definitely plays a huge role in that.
As I mentioned, 73% according to a machine learning algorithm of the foods available
in your average supermarket are ultra processed.
These foods are being pushed on us.
They're sold to us with in primary colors at eye level in your average supermarket.
They make health claims.
The healthiest foods in the supermarket don't make health claims.
They're found around the perimeter of the supermarket.
You don't see health claims on eggs, on avocados, on dark leafy greens, things like that.
But instead it's the food products that are extremely high margin, right?
Can you tell me about the criteria used to demonstrate, as this beautiful chart does,
that Lucky Charms might be healthier for you than, I don't know, oxygen?
Lucky Charms are a greater requirement than water and your own blood and bones.
I'm made of lucky charms!
Yeah, and you really are what you eat.
So this is a nutrient profiling system that was devised out of the Friedman School for Nutrition at Tufts University, which has this, it's like this very curious hierarchy, right, that places watermelon and kale at the top of the list, but just underneath that you see frosted mini-wheats, you'll see...
Yeah.
So if this was actually like in the NFL or NBA or APL.
Like a perfect food.
Like watermelon is Manchester City, kale are Arsenal or you know, I'm guessing it's Green Bay Packers.
I don't know what happens in your country, but frosted mini-wheats.
Yeah.
Frosted mini-wheats can't come in at number three.
Right.
No, I mean, watermelon and kale are perfectly healthy foods, but you would die if you, if you, you know, chose to base your diet solely on those two foods.
On watermelon or kale.
Yeah, on watermelon or kale, right?
So.
But frosted mini-wheats.
Frosted mini-wheats, yeah, it's an ultra-processed, super high-margin.
You want a combination of a little bit of watermelon, a bit of kale, and then a frosted
mini-wheat.
That sounds ideal.
I mean, in my view, you could flip the whole thing upside down, actually, because you'll
notice that the ground beef, you've got dairy, whole milk, is sort of at the bottom, at the
bottom end, but on top of that, you'll find Lucky Charms, you'll find egg substitute fried
in vegetable oil, right?
So these are the, essentially, the darlings of the food industry that have been given
an unduly high ranking on this list, and there have been critics of this chart, critics of
this chart who've said that...
Foods these foods were not meant to be compared across categories, right?
But actually if you were to go to the Tufts University website, they did the exact same thing but obviously presented in a much more favorable light.
So this is the problem with these kinds of systems that are heavily influenced by the food industry.
How are these kind of, this kind of data, how is it funded?
How is it put together?
Who's behind the compilation of this?
Yeah, I mean the food industry.
The food industry definitely has a hand in not just funding the school, but the researchers that are involved.
I see that Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Gates Medical Research Institute were somewhat involved in creating what I can now call the Lucky Charms graph.
How Lucky Charms are better at that for you than eggs and other whole foods.
But also look at the pharmaceutical companies.
Everybody is like There's essentially no industry that isn't complicit.
And then when you look to the 2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans Committee that was just assembled a couple months ago, 95% of those members had ties to either the food industry or the pharmaceutical industry.
So it's just across the board.
And this nutrient profiling system was essentially designed to influence consumer purchases by making front of package health claims.
And so to me, I mean, that's what a scoring system is essentially.
It's so that a consumer would be able to compare food items from across different categories.
And so I think it's a, yeah, it's a massive, it's a massive problem.
But the idea that this is objective information, the idea that you could trust the science and regard it as empirical data rather than a set of facts that are organized Particularly to direct you to consume particular foods, to live in a particular way.
We see this across all of public life.
When you unpack information, it's often that information has a sort of a trail behind it of financial interest.
And to see, as you say, Big Pharma, the kind of NGOs and foundations that frequently come up in our reporting is hardly a surprise in that crazy league of watermelon and Lucky Charms and little frosty wheat.
Yeah, I mean, look, I'm pro-science in the sense that I wish I could snap my fingers and have the kind of study replicated that would show us, for example, the kinds of big looming questions in the field of nutrition, which is a field that I genuinely love.
But the problem with following the science often is that the science follows the money.
And so you get something like this, which is just a four-year-old would look at that graph and be like, something's wrong here.
You know, it's plain that the reliance on a particular type of science has become a new orthodoxy.
I think in the last couple of years we became used to being castigated with the idea that science was not a subset of corporate and globalist interests.
and that happened while simultaneously some scientific voices were closed down
other scientific voices were amplified but we can't go into too much detail on
that while we are still on YouTube which are to a degree regulated by the World
Health Organization's guidelines which similarly accept incredible funding from
the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation of Lucky Charms. We're gonna leave now if
you're watching us on YouTube to make sure how much say how do I say that drug
again? A jacanamab. A jacanamab.
Yeah.
And what is the problem with aducanumab, one of the great drugs that's given Alzheimer's sufferers a real opportunity to live a better life other than possibly it doesn't work?
Can I still say that on YouTube?
Yeah.
If you're watching us on YouTube, click the link in the description right now and join us over on Rumble.
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an awakened wonder. Join us on this voyage to truth and freedom together. So tell us
a little bit more. Also, do you drink kombucha? Because we're developing vile slops, a fantastic
new kombucha brand. We're working on the name. It's been brewed up in the cellar even now
by Jim. He's got a great sort of water. I think what do you call it? Mother some sort
of like scoby, a scoby, some sort of fertile, ghastly little alien. I've looked at it. It's
our most nasty little thing in a jar. But vile slops will be coming soon and we're making
all sorts of pledges about it. But if we can get the FDA to sign it off, which I think
we can, it's going to be I think it's going to be a winner.
Can you tell us a little bit though about this? What's it called?
Kajagoogoo.
Catch me if you can.
Catch me if you can.
Yeah, so aducanumab is a monoclonal antibody drug that basically trains your immune system to identify markers on the plaques that are commonly seen in the brains of people with Alzheimer's disease.
So Alzheimer's disease is characterized in part by the presence of this immense plaque burden, plaques made of a protein called amyloid beta.
along with some other, you know, proteinopathies like misfolded tau protein.
And so Alzheimer's disease drug trials have a 99.6% fail rate.
So the, the, the, it's just dismal when it comes to finding a drug to treat this condition,
which by the way, begins in the brain decades before the first symptom.
What do you mean by that?
Alzheimer's, the presence of Alzheimer's can be detected decades before the first symptom.
Does that mean that new preventative measures could be applied?
That there are early indicators that mean you could change lifestyle habits?
Absolutely, yes.
Oh my god, I've never heard that before.
Yeah, so I mean you, you, ten years ago... Do you not know about that?
Let me know in the chat.
Did you know that?
Ten years ago, you couldn't mention Alzheimer's disease and prevention within the same sentence without getting ridiculed by the medical establishment, by the medical orthodoxy.
And this actually happened to me.
So my first project, I'm a health and science journalist, so I didn't take an academic path, but my mom had a rare form of dementia called Lewy body dementia.
And even prior to that diagnosis, you know, it was unclear the variant of dementia.
And so I went down the Alzheimer's disease rabbit hole.
And my first project was a feature-length documentary which I'm still working on.
It's called Little Empty Boxes and it explores all of the different lifestyle and dietary factors that might predispose a person to developing this condition which now affects millions and millions of people worldwide.
In fact, it's now the number one cause of death in the UK as of last year, dementia and Alzheimer's disease.
So dementia and Alzheimer's is the number one cause of death?
Yes.
I didn't know that either.
How come these sort of facts are so opaque and difficult to discern?
Why is it that we're only just learning about it?
This was ridiculed, so it's not, there's nothing conspiratorial about us not knowing that it's preventable, it's just that wasn't scientifically verified so it's understandable.
But the idea that it's such a significant cause of death, it seems extraordinary to me that it's not something that we commonly appreciate.
Did you lot know that?
Let me know in the chat.
Yeah, well, I mean, there's a saying that science advances one funeral at a time.
And this is because scientific personalities are very obstinate.
They're fiercely territorial.
We see this in Alzheimer's disease.
We see this at the highest echelons of academic medicine and nutrition science and the like.
And this is why it takes, on average, 17 years for what's discovered in science to be put into day-to-day clinical practice.
And so I've been working in this field trying to advocate for prevention for about a decade at this point.
But it's really only the past couple of years, the past three years, really, that the tide has begun to turn.
So in 2020, the Lancet Commission on Dementia published a statement saying that About 40% of Alzheimer's cases and dementia cases are attributable to what they call potentially modifiable risk factors, which basically means risk factors for dementia, the development of dementia, that fall under your control, i.e.
modifiable.
And so things like obesity, things like diabetes, hypertension, depression, low education status, these are all variables that we have... Diet and poverty.
There you go.
There you go.
But diet plays a massive role here.
There are some non-modifiable risk factors.
There are about three of them.
So you've got your age, your gender, and your genetics.
You obviously can't change those.
But this is a condition that largely develops.
We're now starting to see, due to an interaction between those risk factors that are hardwired in us and the environment in which we live.
And so that's where I think the data is becoming abundantly clear that we do have a say.
So it was your own mother's rare form of dementia that caused you to begin investigating the subject, is that correct?
Yes.
So I began as a generalist journalist and when my mom became sick it was like an atom bomb going off in my world.
She was the most important person in my life.
And in every doctor's office, what I experienced with her, I've come to call diagnose and adios.
And basically, a physician would run a battery of esoteric tests, write a prescription down, you know, or titrate up or down some medication that she was on and send us on our way.
And by the end of her life, she was on 12 different pharmaceuticals that were, I think, you know, in tandem or individually making her worse.
None of them helped.
And I can say that with certainty.
And so, I was very disillusioned by the tools that medicine had, you know, during that time when a person presents with the most feared condition for your average American, which is, of course, dementia at this point.
And I took it upon myself to use my journalistic skills and my media credentials to reach out to people and start doing my own research, diving into PubMed.
I mean, we live in a time now where, you know, all of the world's knowledge is available at our fingertips 24-7.
And I found it to be incredibly empowering despite the fact that I had this real tragic thing occurring in my personal life.
I exploited, I decided to exploit all those tools to the betterment of my, to the benefit of my family.
And what I learned was startling.
So I mean, dementia is a condition that begins years prior to the onset of symptoms.
And so that's a real window of opportunity to change the course of our cognitive destiny.
So if you're obese, become not obese.
If you're a type 2 diabetic, become not a type 2 diabetic.
You know, I mean, just being type 2 diabetic right now, which affects two thirds of, or I'm sorry, 50% of people in the United States now.
Increases your risk for developing Alzheimer's disease between two and fourfold.
So this is a massive, modifiable problem.
Yeah, that's extraordinary.
That's extraordinary.
I've never looked at it in those terms.
We sort of sold the idea that there's an inevitability that we're on some preconceived, predetermined route towards illness and pharmacological solutions that our behaviors and our diets are not Considerable factors in, you know, particularly in this kind of condition.
Yeah, and I'll give you another example where the pharmaceutical industry may be complicit, right?
So that 40% figure that I listed off to you, that was what was indicated in the Lancet report, which said the potential for prevention is high.
But I think that's a gross underestimate.
And one of another massively modifiable risk factor for people is the chronic use of what are called anticholinergic drugs, which is a category of drugs.
And I couldn't possibly list off all of the drugs.
But these are drugs that are like essentially sleep aids and they help with, you know, to relieve symptoms of allergies for people.
Chronic use of these drugs is associated with a dramatically higher risk of the development of Alzheimer's disease.
Can you tell me about aducanumab and what in particular is important about this and the potential falsification of papers and how it got its FDA approval?
Totally.
So ever since Alzheimer's disease was first coined in 1906 by physician Alois Alzheimer, He looked in the brain of a cadaver, a woman who had died from the condition, and saw plaque, essentially, in the brain, clumped around brain cells, neurons, like the plaque on your teeth, essentially.
And so from that day forward, amyloid plaque was thought to be the causal factor with regard to Alzheimer's disease.
And from a pharmaceutical drug discovery standpoint, the mission has been, well, if we can get rid of this plaque, then we'll have a cure for Alzheimer's disease.
But of course, as time goes on, we develop new imaging technologies.
What we see is that people without Alzheimer's disease also have amyloid in the brain.
Amyloid is produced naturally in all brains, essentially.
And so They would try all these different drugs trying to get amyloid out of the brain and that became that's called the amyloid hypothesis that became the domineering kind of route of drug discovery with the idea that if we can get rid of this this this villainous plaque that will find a cure for the condition right and so three spending three billion dollars a year on drug discovery
But by the year 2006, with Alzheimer's drug trials having a 99.6% fail rate, worse than for cancer, heart disease, any other condition, faith in that hypothesis was starting to wane until a paper was published in the journal Nature by a University of Minnesota researcher named Sylvain Lesny, which essentially Claim to have isolated a subtype of amyloid beta that, when injected into a healthy rat, caused severe cognitive deficits.
And so this was thought to be the missing link because, as I mentioned, cognitively healthy people have amyloid in their brain.
So researchers up until this point weren't really able to connect Amyloid beta with the most important symptomology, the most important symptom with regard to Alzheimer's disease, which is the severe and profound cognitive decline, until this paper was published where they claimed to have found the subtype, injected into a mouse, boom, we have like cognitive impairment, right?
And so since then, since 2006, that paper came out in Nature, which is like winning an Academy Award if you're a research scientist, right?
It's been cited thousands of times because science is cumulative.
It builds on papers that have come prior.
citing this paper and it really renewed faith.
It put, it sent a lot, it funneled a lot more money down this path and renewed faith in this
so-called amyloid hypothesis.
The problem was, and this was published last year, late last year in Science Magazine,
a Vanderbilt researcher named Matthew Schrag was known for kind of like scouring these
post-publication peer review websites where people look at papers that have gone through,
already gone through the peer review process but have flaws that they might flag
indicate and send off to the publishers.
And the peer review process doesn't look at, you know, they'll crunch numbers occasionally, but they don't look at, for example, Western blots, which are imagery, which is like basically like data presented in a more illustrative format.
And what Matthew Schrag found was that this 2006 paper, the images, the data was essentially fabricated.
There were artifacts indicative of Photoshop, like a cheap Photoshop cut and paste job.
So the paper was deemed completely fraudulent, like that data didn't exist.
And so again, since then, since 2006, All of this other research has come out building on top of it.
It funneled billions and billions and billions of more money looking into this path, this amyloid hypothesis.
Of course, it's wasted time, right, which is heartbreaking for anybody with a loved one with the condition.
And again and again and again, we see that amyloid is not the cause of the condition.
Certainly, when it builds up to the pathologic degree that we see in Alzheimer's disease, it becomes problematic, of course.
But it's like claiming that Um, cholesterol is the cause of heart disease.
It's like, what's causing the cholesterol to aggregate there?
What's causing the amyloid to aggregate in the brain, right?
It's there at the scene of the crime, but it's not necessarily the victim.
It's like claiming that firefighters cause fires because firefighters are always there at the scene of the fire, right?
It's correlation, not causation.
And so there are other theories as to why Alzheimer's disease develops and, you know, there's the metabolic theory of Alzheimer's and the like.
But this new drug, aducanumab, that was approved by the FDA, despite a panel of, it was about 11 or 12, I think it was 11 experts, the vast majority of them either disagreed with its approval or remained silent, like lips were sealed on its approval.
And nonetheless, the FDA approved it.
And it is minimally effective, right?
It might be better than nothing for certain patients, like a small subset of patients, but in the majority of patients that took it...
Were a significant proportion of the patients that took it.
I don't, I can't say for sure if it was the majority because I don't recall.
It led to severe side effects like brain swelling, bleeding, accelerated brain atrophy, which is already, you know, par for the course if you have Alzheimer's disease, like dramatic atrophy of the cortex of the brain.
And so it's not a cure.
It's just like this like this band-aid that probably does more harm than good.
So it possibly did nothing, it possibly made things worse.
Experts at the point when it was up for approval had doubts about it, questioned it or didn't speak about it and it was approved anyway.
Do you suggest that this is the type of thing that frequently happens and do you imagine that there are other motivations for its approval other than its efficacy?
Yeah, I mean, it's money.
I mean, first of all, it's wildly expensive.
And the benefit is it leads to a 0.45 cognitive benefit on an 18 point scale.
So 0.45 out of 18 points, that's the benefit.
And then you have all these horrible side effects to contend with, right?
Brain swelling.
Is it that drug?
Catch me if you can, Giselle.
Is it that what it done was broke down plaque but it didn't affect the causes of Alzheimer's?
Is that what it was?
Is that what they were able to demonstrate its effect was?
Exactly, yeah.
So it reduced the plaque, right?
So it's like, it serves as confirmation bias.
So as a toothpaste, fantastic.
But as a remedy for Alzheimer's and dementia...
Not so good.
There you go.
I mean, what it did was it served to confirm the biases of all of the many scientists who
are fiercely territorial over their reputations working in that field.
And again, like if we had a blockbuster, if I had a blockbuster drug to give my mom, you
know, at the depths of her despair and her difficulty with her dementia, I would, in
a second, I would have gone out to get it for her, right?
But these drugs don't work and they're potentially, you know, they're likely more harm than good.
So it's a big issue.
Max, it seems like what you're tracking is a food industry that promotes foods that likely contribute to senility, dementia, Alzheimer's and related conditions, then a drug industry that offers medications that are not effective And I begin to get the idea that we're on again a conveyor belt where one end of it we're sort of blobbed up with sloppy food as bad for us and basically poisonous and then treated with medications many of which have to be used in conjunction with others this sort of symphony of shoddy medications that are often not have not been effectively trialed.
And increasingly what we're finding is that the motivation for the pharmaceutical companies, for the food industry, for the FDA, is not scientific excellence or nutritional heights, but profit.
And it's pretty plain that it's become gargantuan and out of control.
As we often discuss on this show, I don't think anybody begrudges industriousness or Even a profit motive but when it reaches the point that it has done in the examples that you conveyed is a problem.
Also what's a problem is that when you try to have a conversation about these kind of subjects is that you're subject to incredible censorship.
Now am I right in thinking that the mainstream media opposed the documentary that you've already mentioned in which you try to present some novel ideas on Alzheimer's, its relationship to diet and the lack of effectiveness of many of the medications?
Oh yeah.
So when I first got started, an ambassador for one of these drug discovery funds, which is a nonprofit, right?
It's like you go to its website and you would think it was the most benevolent organization with the care of the patients as their sole priority.
But when I first got started on this project, I did a Kickstarter campaign for it.
And so it went kind of viral and we're raising money.
and all that and thankfully it was successful and we're now nearing the finish line finally.
But this ambassador wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal basically comparing my
efforts to, I think the headline was, Alzheimer's disease, the cure for Alzheimer's disease
isn't going to come in the form of coconut oil and other quack, you know, speculative
And this was like, this is years ago.
So this is even before that Lancet paper that said the potential for prevention is high, right?
But, but they, these, these, this, this, whether it's the, you know, the drug discovery funds or the researchers, people tend to be down on what they're not up on in the field of academia, right?
This kid comes along trying to- Are you that kid?
I'm that kid.
You're like a plucky kid.
Yeah.
You're an outsider.
You, Max- Lugavere, yeah.
Lugavere, with a name that sounds like a radical and an outlaw, you turn up with your new documentary where you want to talk about diet, the efficacy of certain medicines, presumably your personal experiences with your mother, and immediately there's opposition when it's at the kickstart.
starter phase. Yeah, immediately. And it was heartbreaking at the time because I thought
that this film had the potential and it does, it will do massive good for the world, but
because it took the spotlight for a second during that time off of, off of, we gotta
Alzheimer's disease is the only condition that can't be prevented, cured, or treated.
Let people get it, then cure it with toothpaste.
There you go.
And so it's like a house of cards built on fear, right?
If we stop the fear-mongering, then people are going to stop the funding of this, right?
They're going to stop writing the checks.
And so, yeah, I saw that up, like, up close and personal, and it was really heartbreaking.
And you still find the article.
It's something like, Alzheimer's disease, coconut oil, in the Wall Street Journal.
It was an op-ed.
Do you look at it sometimes?
I mean, you bastards.
I mean, I've thought about, I've thought about hitting that person up, but he was a really rude, rude human, unfortunately.
We've got some comments from our community, like Thomas Beard.
He wants to ask you about plant-based diets.
Are they a good thing or a bad thing?
I noticed that you liked our beef down at the bottom of the Lucky Charm link.
I'm a big advocate for omnivory.
I think it's our biologically appropriate diet.
But I think, you know, you can work a few levers to make a plant-based diet work if you're dedicated to it.
And, you know, as I know you are, and many people are.
Because you just think there are valuable nutrients, proteins, and things like taurine and stuff in meat that we just can't live without.
Yeah, I think, like, when we try to distill an entire food category, such as animal source foods, to one essential nutrient, like vitamin B12, we're practicing that reductionism that we talked about earlier.
We're practicing nutritionism.
And I think we've co-evolved with our food, we've co-evolved with all of the many what are called carna nutrients that are found in animal source products that are, you know, plug and play.
But ultimately, I think the big wins today for anybody navigating the standard American or the standard, you know, British food environment to be not overweight, to be not type 2 diabetic,
I mean those are the big rocks.
So yeah, I think you can make any diet work essentially, but my view is that
Omnivore is probably the most optimal.
Is it true that you disagree with some of the views of our other sexy diet guest,
Paul Saladino, on some of it?
He's got some theories on vegetables.
I think he says vegetables are a waste of time.
He hates them.
They should be shot.
Each parsnip should be interviewed now and asked to leave the country.
And if the parsnip for some reason resists, it should be pushed over the White Cliffs of Dover.
That's Paul Saladino's theories.
What are your views on vegetables?
No, I disagree.
I disagree.
I think vegetables are great.
I think if you're going to point a finger at kale or even oatmeal, which I think he's been doing quite a bit lately, and say that is the smoking gun for all of our health ills, I think that that's baseless.
But I think he does present some really good ideas as well.
Good, isn't it?
We've got to come to a kind of consensus of truth together.
Tesla said, and I can't believe I missed this question, Max, you mentioned earlier that Alzheimer's can be detected decades before symptoms.
How?
Well, um, so it's not that it can necessarily be detected, we can look for what are called risk factors at this point.
They can do imaging, they can look at brain volume, they can look at amyloid burden, but they're not doing those kinds of tests clinically, and that really is the holy grail of prevention, is to find the biomarker that dictates whether or not a person... Are you saying that biomarker hasn't yet to be found?
It hasn't yet been found, yeah.
But there's not enough trialing and research because that's not profitable, it's in fact expensive.
There was a blood test, and I wrote about it in my first book called Genius Foods, called IRS-1, where it was predicted with 90% accuracy something, or even higher than that, whether or not somebody was going to develop it.
But I think at this point it's good to know your genetic risk factor, to know whether or not you're a carrier of the ApoE4 allele, and then to look at all the other biomarkers that we know are associated.
Most closely you want to look at your metabolic health, So you want to make sure that you have a nice healthy blood sugar, you're not a type 2 diabetic, you're not overweight or obese, and I would also do my best to minimize at this point exposure to environmental pollutants, toxicants, air pollution, things like that.
If you know Duggan Oku, who's a great member of our community, and if you're not a member of our community yet, press the red button.
There are all sorts of incredible benefits, including regular scans to prevent... Oh, we don't do that.
That's just simply false advertising.
No, Dugganoku is a member of our community and he asks, hey Max, I want to ask you, through Russell of course, don't be cheeky, a question pertaining to diversity.
How do you feel that there is evidence to support the notion that diet may be more unique than what we're led to believe by our societies?
I've personally tried for years to figure out the diet which matches me best, sometimes living exclusively on grass.
Once for a week, only wine gums.
Another time, squirrel tail.
I've tried everything.
Some of those details I added.
What, how do I find a diet which matches me best while staying away from food that are filled with chemicals, plastics, or genetic modifications?
That's from Nodaganoku.
Yeah.
I mean, I think like, again, shop around the perimeter of your supermarket and stick to mainly minimally processed whole foods.
Everybody is different.
So there is no such thing as a one size fits all diet.
I like where he was going with that question.
And there's also, you know, everybody's different and then everybody has different microbiomes.
So you know we can say things like vegetables and things you know of that nature are good for you But if you don't have the microbiome cultivated to contend with a sudden onslaught Increase in fiber then you're gonna be paying a digestive penalty for that so you know you gotta I think a little bit of Experimentation is really important, but again.
I think as long as you're you're sticking mainly to minimally processed foods Omnivory I think for most people is gonna do the most good Things like that.
I think you're you're probably in the clear I Max, Dootie1947 says, Alright mate, I love my fried egg.
Organic, on toast, whole grain, with olive oil on it every morning.
Is this healthy?
Am I living in a gangster's paradise?
I would say that's pretty good.
I mean, eggs are... I love olive oil.
Yeah, olive oil is amazing.
Even if you're cooking with it?
Yeah, you can.
It's a myth that you can't cook with it.
Ha!
Yeah.
It's very chemically stable, owed to its predominance of monounsaturated fat, which is very chemically stable, and it's about 15% saturated fat.
And on top of that, extra virgin olive oil is loaded with polyphenol antioxidants, which protect the oil against oxidation.
Oh my God.
It's chemically very stable.
They cook with it in the Mediterranean.
I mean, people who, for generations, use extra virgin olive oil, they're using it to cook with, right?
Either that or, you know, animal-based fats.
But I think the healthiest fat to use, like the healthiest added fat to use is by far extra virgin olive oil.
And then eggs are one of nature's multivitamins.
I mean, it literally is a cognitive multivitamin, the egg yolk.
We've answered your questions.
That's what we've done.
That's why it's worth becoming an Awakened Wonder and a member of our community.
Another thing that you'll avoid by being part of a community is potentially depression.
40 million Americans are apparently depressed, or at least that many Americans are on antidepressants.
For all I know, it's many, many more.
Is depression exacerbated or even caused by diet, in your view, Max, seeing as how you claim to know everything?
I don't claim to know everything.
I don't.
I really don't.
I like to be really clear, actually, about what I know and what I don't know.
But with regard to depression, my first book was a deep dive into the topic of nutritional psychiatry, which is a growing field right now, and it's very exciting.
And it's showing us that for a subset of depressed patients, diet may play a role.
The mechanism here, it's being referred to by some as the inflammatory cytokine model of depression.
That depression is the result of chronic low-grade inflammation that's occurring in the body.
And we basically can control, to some degree, with our diets and our lifestyles, our overall inflammatory status.
And so we know that eating a diet that is rich in ultra-processed foods, you know, packaged shelf-stable vending machine foods, if you will, And an overly sedentary lifestyle, a lifestyle that relegates sleep to an afterthought, a lifestyle that is chronically stressed out.
We know that those are all pro-inflammatory and that that can have a downstream effect on the brain and our cognitive processes certainly as well as our mental health.
And so there are studies now coming out of Many highly regarded academic centers like the Food and Mood Center at Deakin University.
One study that I cite fairly regularly is the SMILES trial, which found that for clinically depressed patients who had really crappy diets, half of them were given the standard of care in Australia.
The other half were given a Mediterranean dietary pattern to adhere to.
They saw three times the rate of remission from depression in that group that was given the Mediterranean dietary pattern to consume.
Olive oil, you know, animal products, dark leafy greens, fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, things like that.
And the other group, you know, obviously they didn't have the improvement in symptoms to the same degree and they didn't see the same rate of remission.
So, we're seeing now that, you know, in the form of clinical randomized control trials, that diet does have a pretty powerful influence, right?
And we know that micronutrients like magnesium, which half of Americans don't consume adequate amounts of, we know that that's related to many, many processes, hundreds of processes in the body.
We know that it can play a role in the reduction of anxiety and depression and things like that.
We also know that...
Yeah, there are nutrients.
There are nutrients in animal products, in shellfish, that play a really important role in mental health.
And I like what you said about inflammation, that we're like inflamed as individuals and as a culture.
What do you think about fake meat, the sort of the vegan streak, the way out, Bill Gates' hobby course, fake meats, what are they, any good, or vile blobs of nothingness?
I mean, I think that they don't hold a candle to actual meat in terms of a nutritional value.
But I'll concede that many vegans enjoy it because it just tastes good.
Yeah.
And so I wouldn't withhold that from them, right?
Here's the thing about me.
I actually don't care what people choose to eat.
I'm not emotionally invested in what other people choose to consume.
I just like to lay out the facts free of...
As free from bias as I can possibly muster.
And so, yeah, from that standpoint, eat it if you enjoy it, but from a nutrition standpoint, it doesn't hold a candle to real red meat.
Mate, I want to thank you for coming on our show, for sharing that information so fluently, carefully and beautifully.
Thank you for mobilising your own personal story and suffering into something valuable for the community.
And thanks for responding so brilliantly to our community questions.
I wish you all the best with the documentary.
You've found the funding for that now, have you?
Yeah, we, well, we still have like, you know, a bit of a ways to go.
We need to find distribution for it.
But we have a trailer at littleemptyboxes.com and I host my own podcast too, so people can come and check me out.
It's called The Genius Life.
There you go.
We'll post the links to both of those in both of our chats.
And also Max's latest book, The Genius Kitchen, is out now.
And as Max mentioned, his podcast, The Genius Life, is also available.
Now, if you want to be a member of our community, one of the ways that I reckon you can reduce inflammation and also get some Awakened Wonder Pants, it starts today.
If you are an Awakened Wonder, simply by pressing the red button, you can join our team meetings, post-show shows, meditations, podcast recordings.
It's really worth becoming a member.
I guarantee that.
Now, last week, the world was lit up to a degree by Tucker's controversial interview with that dude that made them Obama revelations.
So in Here's the News today, we used that to begin an analysis of Barack Obama's time in office and his status as an elder and hero of the Democratic Party.
How can this status be maintained when you scrutinize Obama's time in office, particularly around war?
Here's the news.
No, here's the effing news.
Thank you for choosing Fox News.
Good news.
No, here's the fucking news.
Tucker Carlson's interview regarding Barack Obama shows we live in a truly divided news space.
But when analyzing the record of former presidents, what should we be looking at?
Their private lives or their record in office?
You'll be aware of the viral video that Tucker did recently.
Let me know in the comments if you saw it, if you care about it, if it was interesting to you.
Some people thought it was good, other people thought it shouldn't have been made because it's too salacious and it's an unreliable witness.
Where do you stand on that subject?
What we would like to offer you is that Barack Obama is still being used as a kind of hero
in the Democrat Party movement, when perhaps there's a strong argument that he could be
regarded, and I don't use this phrase lightly, as a war criminal.
That his actions were criminal, literally, under the Geneva Convention.
That children died as a result of his decisions and actions.
That drone strikes were undertaken.
And activities that if we thought they were being done by Korea, or Syria, or Russia,
we would be outraged by, and be personally willing to put on the camo and go to war ourselves
for.
So, let's have a look at what everyone else is talking about at the moment, before analysing
the reality of Barack Obama's record as a president.
I suppose all of us are interested in the private lives of great figures and the idea that there might be more to them than meets the eye.
And with such a significant and notable president as Barack Obama, it's just extraordinary, salacious, intriguing to even hear about him spoken of in this kind of context.
Certainly there's a conversation to be had.
Ex-owner Elon Musk called out Tucker Carlson for not providing objective evidence in allowing a convicted fraudster.
That doesn't sound good, does it?
What were you convicted for?
You know, just making stuff up.
And what are you telling us now?
Some true stuff?
To claim he had sex with Barack Obama on the text mogul's social media platform.
It's a weird image, isn't it?
As if he was sort of balanced on Twitter while it was happening.
As says for yourself, Carlson captioned the video, which has amassed nearly 40 million views as of Thursday.
This is further evidence of a completely bifurcated news space with independent media on the rise.
The previously unprecedented possibility that a story like this could be broadcast on this scale.
And for us, also an opportunity to look at the greatness of Barack Obama and the idea that Barack Obama is still a figure that will be trotted out in order to maintain Biden's credibility as a president.
The reason that Barack Obama remains a significant political figure is precisely because Joe Biden is observably in decline and associating him with Barack Obama is still a powerful boost to his image as a senescent occupant of the White House.
But are people who deify Barack Obama overlooking some pretty crucial facts about his time in office?
Putting aside this viral video, let's have a look.
Now, as I've told you loads of times, I was super optimistic when Barack Obama came into office, but perhaps the defining aspect of his time in office was the financial crash of 2008.
This was a seismic moment not only Not only for the presidency of Barack Obama, but for the
world.
In my view, we are still reeling from the consequences of that financial cataclysm,
and it was an opportunity to re-apportion wealth and re-establish the power of ordinary
people versus corporate, financial and globalist interests.
But what actually happened in 2008?
So let's have a look at a few bullet points of Barack Obama's time in office.
He bailed out the banks in 2008 instead of, of course, bailing out ordinary people.
He prosecuted more people under the Espionage Act than all previous presidents combined, and that's essentially silencing Americans who criticize American foreign policy or American deep state, notably Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, both prosecuted under the Espionage Act.
But perhaps most significantly of all, there were 10 times more airstrikes in the covert war on terror during President Barack Obama's presidency than under his predecessor George W. Bush.
Obviously because of Iraq, we all think of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld, whose names are synonymous with war undertaken for profit to capture resources, a war that was delegitimized by the failure to find WMDs.
And to imagine that Barack Obama conducted more covert airstrikes than that administration is surprising and still feels at odds with how we perceive Barack Obama.
During his presidency, Obama approved the use of 563 drone strikes that killed approximately 3,797 people.
In fact, Obama authorized 54 drone strikes alone in Pakistan during his first year in office.
One of the first CIA drone strikes under President Obama was at a funeral.
Murdering as many as 41 Pakistani civilians.
That's extraordinary because at that point we were still in the euphoria of the election of Barack Obama, truly believing this was an opportunity for hope and change.
We had not yet had our expectations damped down by the events of 2008 and the revelation
that it doesn't really matter who you vote for.
You are primarily going to get a system that serves corporate interests, financial interests,
military industrial, complex interests.
But to know that still in that euphoric honeymoon period, 41 innocent people were murdered as
a result of Barack Obama's decisions shows you that really we were in a kind of dream,
in a kind of delusion.
It was business as usual.
The deep state were able to conduct the kind of operations that they typically conduct.
The military-industrial complex asserted the control that they're always able to assert.
Nothing really significantly changed.
Like Joe Biden told a room full of donors after he succeeded Donald Trump.
Nothing will essentially change.
This I think is the thing we have to remember most of all.
We get caught up in the soap opera of these characters and really the interests that they truly represent are uninterrupted by the democratic fluctuations in which we participate.
Or don't.
Let me know in the comments if you agree.
The following year, Obama led 128 CIA drone strikes in Pakistan that killed at least 89 civilians.
Just two years into his presidency, it was clear that the hope that President Obama offered during his 2008 campaign could not escape US imperialism.
What I kind of like about that sentence is the indication that there's no point blaming Barack Obama, that Barack Obama essentially is just on a conveyor belt of Visual distractions that we temporarily are enamored of, while real power carries on behind the scenes.
Let me know if you agree.
The drone operations extended to Somalia and Yemen in 2010 and 2011, resulting in more destructive results.
Under the belief that they were targeting Al-Qaeda, President Obama's first strike on Yemen killed 55 people, including 21 children.
Inconceivable.
Really important news.
The sort of thing that we should be aware of.
The kind of things that are just sort of brushed over.
So much more important than any allegations in this conversation, I would contest.
That's not a criticism of Tucker.
Much more important than anybody's private life, 21 children were murdered.
And yet we think because, oh, this happened in Pakistan, or it's just somehow we package it off as necessary and ultimately kind of irrelevant, don't we, if we're honest?
Now, here's a short commercial from one of our bold partners, Winning Tobacco.
Stay to the end, I'll make it funny.
Thank you.
With so many important things to talk about, you don't want me nagging you about your diet, particularly when I don't eat that healthy, not all the time.
But I will share with you that the Mayo Clinic says if you want to help prevent heart disease, lower blood pressure, and cholesterol, eat, as you know, five servings of fruits and vegetables every day.
Not lab-grown fruits either.
I don't do that, and you won't do it either.
You're too busy thinking and worrying about conspiracy theories, aren't you?
That's why I take Field of Greens.
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Now, let's get back to this rather devastating and difficult news.
Ten of which were under the age of five.
Additionally, twelve women, five of them pregnant, were also among those who were murdered in the strike.
These blundered acts of murder by not only President Obama but the US government are morally reprehensible.
I suppose this is the kind of information that we have to bear in mind when we look at the accepted stance with the current war between Ukraine and Russia.
That America's role is to back brave Ukraine, and Ukraine are brave, for moral reasons, for humanitarian reasons.
How can that be the case when a president still regarded as a hero participated in the murder of women and children?
This is beyond the Even more civilian casualties came out of Afghanistan throughout Barack Obama's time in office.
have to say, kind of irrelevant, because the momentum of this system is so potent and powerful
that even dead children are just regarded as almost irrelevant shrapnel and collateral
damage in the operations of this unforgiving system. How can we begin to believe that any
war that America backs is just?
Even more civilian casualties came out of Afghanistan throughout Barack Obama's time
in office. In 2014, Obama began removing troops currently deployed in the country. However,
instead of this action by the President being one in pursuit of peace and stability in the
region, it only acted as an opportunity to drastically increase air warfare.
Afghanistan had war rained upon them by US bombardment, with the administration viciously dropping 1,337 weapons on Afghanistan in 2016.
In total that year, the Obama administration dropped 26,171 bombs, drone or otherwise, across seven countries.
Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan.
The US, in cooperation with its allies, including the Afghan government, killed 582 civilians on average annually from 2007 to 2016.
Most people's perception of Barack Obama does not include statistics like that.
If we imagine imagine for a while that Russia were conducting those kind
of military activities, and as far as I know, they are.
Certainly they are currently being vilified for their criminal invasion of Ukraine, and
no one is countenancing that point.
Many of us try to explain the recent history, and indeed 20th century history, that possibly
contributed to the current conflict in the way that American interests benefit.
But this kind of, if not egregious, then certainly profligate bombing of a variety of countries
under one of the most popular and least controversial presidents in our history.
I know a lot of you guys don't like Barack Obama because Democrats and like because of your kind of political persuasion.
But broadly speaking, Barack Obama is like now a sort of celebrity, isn't he?
Like he's Netflix shows and that kind of thing.
And when you see him on stuff, he's cool and chatty.
This is a piece of reality that many of us are not willing to countenance.
A reality that really we should be looking at and addressing.
In his memoir, A Promised Land, ah, that land, Obama defends his drone program, writing, I wanted somehow to save them.
Well, don't bomb them then.
And yet the world they were a part of and the machinery I commanded more often had me killing them instead.
Well, you went a bit off track.
President Obama would have the reader believe he wanted to help the suspected terrorist, but simply couldn't.
In reality, he consciously and undemocratically decided the fates of thousands of lives without due process.
That's a considerable distinction.
With the exception of the wars themselves, the claim that former President Barack Obama is a war criminal also lies within the double-tap initiative.
Double-tap drone strikes are as disturbing as they sound.
These attacks are follow-up strikes on first responders as they rush to the bombed area trying to assist any survivors.
That's a level of mendacity that's difficult to incorporate into the image of Barack Obama as a hero that's brought on to make Joe Biden more electable.
Isn't that kind of information enough to help us to revise our systems?
To recognize that what's required is radical change?
That the distinctions between the two parties and successive presidents isn't significant enough?
If this is the kind of thing that's deemed acceptable business as usual, surely business as usual is precisely what needs addressing.
Well, in 2012, an attack on the Shawwal Valley aimed at Taliban commander Sadiq Noor reportedly killed up to 14 people in a double-tap drone strike.
These attacks are both morally and legally reprehensible as they are conscious acts of murder against civilians, which is, again, this, from any other entity, would be used as legitimization to criminalize an entire state, wouldn't it?
If someone came out behind a podium, you know, with the Stars of Strife and the Eagle and everyone had a listen, guess what they're doing in Syria or Iraq or Russia?
They do this thing called double-tap strikes.
actually bomb an area and then when the first responders come to help the victims, many of
whom are children under five and pregnant women, they bomb them as well. You go, well actually I'm
willing to participate in a war against them, give us the stuff, I'll go, I'll go, that needs to be
stopped. Oh you don't need to go anywhere because it's happening here and in fact the person that's
making those decisions is being sold to you as a hero. And again I'm not naive enough to suggest
that Barack Obama is somehow the generator of that kind of malevolence, he's rather just a temporary
occupant of an office that demands that in order to support the interests that truly run America.
That's what we're saying again and again on this channel.
We are presented with spectacle.
We are presented with distraction.
The price of even our inhibited freedom is a machine that murders children and says there's nothing wrong with it.
A machine that sells us poisoned food and tells us there's nothing wrong with it.
That props up pharmaceutical industries and energy industries that couldn't operate under their own financial capital but require your taxpayer dollars to subsidise and fund them and tell us that there's nothing wrong with it.
There are so many more questions that require asking.
before blithely accepting some of these people as heroes.
Drone strikes conducted by the United States during a five-month long campaign in Afghanistan caused the deaths of unintended targets nearly nine out of ten times, leaked intelligence documents suggest.
Nine out of ten times, most of the time, should probably not happen.
Not a reliable model, is it?
In my recent conversation with Sam Harris, when he talks about terrorists and their potential ecstatic state when conducting jihad, there's a kind of fetishisation of the presumed evil of religious ideology.
But secularism leads to murder of this nature, just under the cold rational dispatch, collateral damage, no note, no funeral, no need for redemption, culpability or explanation.
So the idea that some types of violence are worse than others is one that has to be resolved.
And of course, Daniel Hale, the whistleblower, who revealed that information is celebrated as a hero around the world in prison under the Espionage Act that Barack Obama used more than any other president in history.
These drone strikes make a strong case for categorizing Obama as an international war criminal.
The 1949 Geneva Conventions ratified by the United Nations explicitly provides protections for not only the wounded but also for medical and religious personnel, medical units and medical transports.
Article 8 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court states that internationally directing attacks against personnel, installations, material, units or vehicles involved in humanitarian assistance or peacekeeping missions in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations is classified as a war crime.
These classifications, these words, they're meant to mean something.
You know, of course, that America could not appeal to the International Criminal Court to condemn the actions of Russia in Ukraine because they would know that they'd begin a conversation where they'd have to say, we have done the same, we have done worse.
This is the truth of American foreign policy, the influence of the military-industrial complex, and the set of interests that the American government truly represent.
This is the truth of a hero, albeit a partisan hero, like Barack Obama.
That they represent those kind of interests.
That if we were to obey the Geneva Convention, which obviously we're just going to ignore, then you'd have to say, no, Barack Obama, look, is just literally a war criminal according to that definition.
You just have to dispatch with that definition in order to maintain the heroic status of Barack Obama, which people are willing to do.
No one is willing to look at reality.
We're not willing to say, well, look, this is the cost of these systems.
It's not benefiting you.
You're not benefiting from that.
These people are not a threat to you.
You have to be convinced that they're a threat to you in order to facilitate that.
Whose interests are ultimately advanced by that kind of bombing, by that kind of murder of children?
Let me know in the chat and comments.
The law also states, "...intentionally launching attack in the knowledge that such attack will cause incidental loss of life or injury to civilians also constitutes war crimes for the guilty party."
Through the drone strike program and double tap attacks, there is no question that former President Obama and his administration violated international humanitarian law.
Obama's symbolic significance cannot outshine his relationship with the imperial endeavors of the American empire.
And yet it seems to the Democratic Party they do exactly that.
Barack Obama is still regarded as a hero.
In order for him to be regarded as a hero, you have to just wipe away the Geneva Convention.
You have to completely ignore the murder of children.
You have to do that.
It's impossible, isn't it, to combine those facts.
And even if you put aside the idea that Obama is somehow personally culpable, although evidently he was the president, I don't know how much higher up the chain you would need to get, You have to accept that the system itself is in need of radical re-evaluation.
And these are the kind of things that should be at the forefront of our mind, and this is what we should be demanding of any democracy, or indeed any nation, worthy of the name.
But that's just what I think!
Let me know what you think in the chat!
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