Great new diet!
On a more serious note, I'm appreciative of how often we have current event and political threads. I tend to participate fleetingly in them myself, because I feel that I'm always playing catch-up in terms of having enough command of the facts to post intelligently. But I love reading what people have to say.
And there is nothing to stop people from posting lighter threads (or equally serious threads on non-political topics), so I don't see all the political threads as a drawback. If people are driven away from joining the forum because they see discussion of the real world, are we really losing a lot of value when they don't join? Surely we want to attract the kind of poster who can at least tolerate discussion of current affairs, even if it isn't their personal top priority for an on-line community.