At the Big Sun Café...

... you can shine all night.

"Obama needs to stop lecturing predominantly black audiences, some supporters say."

Writes Vanessa Williams in The Washington Post.

Obama has been making this point — and stirring controversy — since he was a candidate in 2008. Jesse Jackson Sr. was incensed by what he saw as Obama’s “talking down to black people,” yet it was Jackson who was criticized. Many in the black community believed that Obama’s chastisements were necessary to make himself politically palatable to white voters.

The president’s most recent such remarks — there were only a few Sunday, but they were widely reported — triggered a debate on blogs and social media that, in part, asked why Obama continued his lecturing.

To be fair, Jackson was criticized because he added — with a brusque cutting gesture — "I want to cut his nuts out." The metaphor of brutal violence made it easy to discount Jackson's message at the time.

"Phonetic description of annoying sounds teenagers make."

Text — in case you didn't memorize all that " Creaky-voiced long alveolar glide with mid front unrounded vowel and glottal stop" business — here. Via Metafilter.

ADDED: And if you enjoyed that guy — whose name is James Harbeck — here are all of this videos. I enjoyed "8 odd sounds from other languages that you could never make except you probably already have":



(Somehow, I found it irresistible to make all these sounds!)

"This is courage of the highest order, it sounds as if these members of the public are not soldiers, not policemen, not people whose duties demand this..."

"... they are extremely courageous people and that courage deserves to be recognised at the highest level."

As the police took 20 minutes to arrive, some women did extraordinary things.

"A complex and secretive algorithm chooses which reviews to display on Yelp.com."

"Some small business owners say they feel pressured to advertise with Yelp for favorable filtering."

"I'm offended by a $4 trillion government bullying, berating and badgering one of America’s greatest success stories."

"If anyone should be on trial here, it should be Congress... I frankly think the committee should apologize to Apple. The Congress should be on trial here for creating a Byzantine and bizarre tax code."

"You know when fluoridation began?...1946. 1946, Mandrake."

"How does that coincide with your post-war Commie conspiracy, huh? It's incredibly obvious, isn't it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual, and certainly without any choice. That's the way your hard-core Commie works."

From the comments at "Fluoridation fails in Portland by 20-point margin."

Issa says Lois Lerner waived her right against self-incrimination...

... by making an opening statement before invoking her Fifth Amendment privilege. She asserted: “I have not done anything wrong.... I have not broken any laws. I have not violated any IRS rules or regulations, and I have not provided false information to this or any other committee.”

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), a former federal prosecutor, said Lerner lost her rights the minute she started proclaiming her innocence, and that lawmakers therefore were entitled to question her. But Ranking Democrat Elijah Cummings of Maryland said hearing rules were not like those of a courtroom.

During the incident, Issa did not flat-out say whether or not Lerner had indeed waived her rights but instead tried to coax her into staying by offering to narrow the scope of questions.

By the afternoon, Issa was taking a harder stand. “The precedents are clear that this is not something you can turn on and turn off,” he told POLITICO. “She made testimony after she was sworn in, asserted her innocence in a number of areas, even answered questions asserting that a document was true … So she gave partial testimony and then tried to revoke that.”

"Why are they killing these children without any trial or investigation?" asked Zubeidat Tsarnaeva...

... the mother of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, after an FBI interview with a man in Florida ends with the government officials — investigating the man's connection to the Boston bombing — shooting him dead.

The officers had been interviewing [Ibragim] Todashev in his apartment for some time when he tried to attack them, [a federal law enforcement official] said....

"In our land our women have to see the same. You people will never be safe. Remove your governments they don't care about you."

"You think David Cameron is going to get caught in the street when we start busting our guns you think politicians are going to die? No it's going to be the average guy, like you, and your children. So get rid of them. Tell them to bring our troops back so can all live in peace."

ADDED: "They... stood around, waving knives and a gun, asking people nearby to take pictures of them 'as if they wanted to be on TV or something.... In my opinion, they were waiting for the police to arrive to be shot by the police. That's the only thing I can think.'"

"What might it mean for conventional structures if women could control, with a prescription, the most primal urge?"

"So many things, personal and cultural, might need to be recalibrated and renegotiated, explicitly or without acknowledgment. The cumulative effect of all those negotiations could be hugely transformative, in ways either thrilling or threatening, depending on your point of view."

"Viagra meddles with the arteries; it causes physical shifts that allow the penis to rise. A female-desire drug would be something else. It would adjust the primal and executive regions of the brain. It would reach into the psyche."

What it means if the Democrats believe "there will be hell to pay" if there's a special prosecutor in the IRS scandal.

The Washington Times reports:

Rep. Stephen Lynch, Massachusetts Democrat, warned IRS and Treasury Department witnesses before the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform not to stonewall congressional efforts to get to the bottom of the scandal.

“We know where that will lead, it will lead to a special prosecutor. … There will be hell to pay if that’s the route that we choose to go down,” he said.

Why will there be "hell to pay"? The Democrats have been saying a few low-level functionaries adopted a misguided policy and the Republicans are playing politics. If they really believe that, they should expect a neutral arbiter to vindicate their version of the story.

So if they think there will be "hell to pay," then I infer: 1. The Democrats' version of the story is itself political spin, 2. It is playing politics to say the Republicans are playing politics, and 3. The neutral arbiter will tell something close to the Republicans' version of the story (in which case Democrats will be deprived of the excuse that the Republicans are playing politics).

"A far-right French historian has killed himself at the altar of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris after declaring..."

"... that more radical action was needed in opposition to same-sex marriage in France."

Dominique Venner, 78, walked into the building at 4pm and put a letter on the altar before shooting himself through the mouth, according to local media reports. Hundreds of visitors were immediately evacuated from the site, which is the most visited Catholic monument in Paris.

The motive for the suicide and the contents of the letter were not immediately clear, although Marine Le Pen, head of the far-right Front National, tweeted her "respect" for Venner and said his death was an "eminently political" gesture.

Disgusting. You can't stand on traditional Christian values and commit suicide (and desecrate an altar). That's completely incoherent. Despicable.

Chimborazo!

Baotou!

"In case you missed it, there's some news out of Colorado that's better than hot pancakes and syrup. (If that's even possible.)"

Email, received just now, from Donna Brazile, the longtime Democratic Party character, identified in the email as Vice-Chair for Voter Registration and Participation/Democratic National Committee.

What subdivision of the supposedly sophisticated Democratic Party database am I in that my email address got selected for this especially folksy presentation of the news? Does the Democratic Party think I look fat? Does it see me as self-indulgent and pleasure-seeking? Does it assume I'm the kind of person who won't find it offputting to use Donna Brazile as the African American woman coming at me with a plateful of comfort food? And why pancakes? If I were cooking up this propaganda, using Brazile as the email signatory, the last comfort food I would choose is pancakes! And syrup... Like that's going to stir up sweet, mystic childhood memories without causing me to think that's racial and wrong.

(Cue the usual: If a Republican had done it....)

ADDED: Full text of the email:

1. Chelsea Clinton running NYU's "multifaith" institute. 2. The Harvard Kennedy School granting a PhD for a dissertation about the IQ of Hispanic immigrants.

1. We learn today that Chelsea Clinton will take on "a 'multifaith' role as co-founder and co-chair of [NYU's] brand-new Of Many Institute, a program to "develop multifaith dialogue and train multifaith leaders." It should be noted, in this context, that Chelsea Clinton's degree is a Master's of Public Health, and that she has been teaching at the graduate level at Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health.

2. Yesterday, we were talking about the Harvard students who are petitioning for an investigation into how the Harvard Kennedy School accepted a dissertation that reached conclusions that the students regarded as unethical, because it supported discrimination against persons of a particular ethnicity on the ground of purported lower intelligence.

Let's talk about these 2 stories together. Here are 3 highly prestigious institutions — NYU, Columbia, and Harvard — and schools/institutes within them that most of us would assume have a political slant in the liberal direction:  NYU's Of Many Institute, Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health, and Harvard's Kennedy School.

Both stories make the institutions look weak — NYU and Columbia for taking in the Clintons' daughter — and Harvard for awarding degrees for weak dissertations.

Be clear what I'm saying about Harvard. I mean to express no opinion about Jason Richwine's "IQ and Immigration Policy" dissertation. I haven't read it, and I'm not an expert in the field. I can't believe the professors at the Kennedy School liked where Richwine was going with his research, but I suspect that they went forward, approving his dissertation, because it wasn't any worse than the many  left/liberal dissertations they've approved over the years.

ADDED: Why is NYU's multifaith institute called "Of Many"? Is it based on "Out of many, one" — E pluribus unum?



AND: Do students at Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health take courses with Chelsea because of the value of networking the Clintons? That's pretty valuable! Inference: you're a chump if you're paying high tuition and not buying access to power.

1. "I mean, that's a storybook, man." 2. "This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen."

1. Senator Joe Biden, February 2007.

2. Bill Clinton, January 2008.

Just 2 old quotes we had occasion to bring up in conversation around Meadhouse this morning. Storybook/fairy tale... the positive/negative description of Obama the Candidate. The story continues. Obama the Candidate continues. What we were talking about was the idea that Obama is operating at a very high level of politics, not just high as in The President is at the top of our political structure, but high as in We are gazing upon the great political genius of our time.

It might be true in a way that Obama is the great political genius of our time, in that he was great enough to make us think that, but it's heartening to see that the greatest political genius really isn't able to be that great in America. Or is that itself a delusion, and allowing us to think that we're onto him is part of the way in which we are duped and part of the workings of the genius? If so, at least I got far enough to be able to ask that question.

Why is Chelsea Clinton leading a big new religion program at NYU?

"The former first daughter has tackled what the school calls a 'multifaith' role as co-founder and co-chair of its brand-new Of Many Institute. The program is described by the university as aiming to 'develop multifaith dialogue and train multifaith leaders.'"

Back in September, Clinton — who’s married to banker Marc Mezvinsky — told Time of her desire to study faith and education: “With all candor, because my husband is Jewish and I’m Christian, and we’re both practicing, it’s something that’s quite close to home,” she said.

A rep for NYU told us that the Of Many program is not academic, but is a part of the university’s Center for Spiritual Life. NYU’s Web site says the institute has developed a “minor degree in multifaith and spiritual leadership” shared with the Silver School of Social Work and the Wagner School.

I have never associated Chelsea Clinton with religion. She has a Master of Public Health degree from Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health and she's been teaching graduate level classes there.

But maybe the NYU "Of Many" concept of religion really is about "public health." Let's think about the interwoven nature of public health and religion — especially as the Clintons might understand it. When Hillary Clinton first emerged on the national scene, she was associated with religion. I remember a magazine cover — was it Tikkun? — depicting her as "St. Hillary" and lots of talk about "the politics of meaning," which was some politics-and-religion theme back in the 90s. And Hillary segued into public health in a way that we were supposed to understand, but didn't.

So here comes Hillary II, Chelsea Clinton merging health and religion. What does it all mean? How well will this lay the groundwork for a career in politics? I strongly prefer the separation of government and religion, and I don't want government to wield the powers of religion or powers over the human mind that are too much like the power of religion. And though government is going to have some role in public health, its growing and over-intrusive activity is disturbing. A politician who builds a career in health and religion should scare us. This is wedging very deeply into the realm of the individual — mind and body.

Here's some background reading: "All Politics is Cosmic," a 1996 article in The Atlantic by Lee Siegel, reviewing Michael Lerner's book "The Politics of Meaning." Excerpt:

Weiner's in.

Whip out your phallic jokes.

"Activists say authorities are unfairly targeting 18-year-old US high-school student because she is gay."

"An 18-year-old American is facing felony charges over claims that she had sexual contact with her underage, 14-year-old girlfriend...."

The American Civil Liberties Union of Florida said [Kaitlyn] Hunt was being criminalised for behaviour that "occurs every day in tens of thousands of high schools across the country, yet those other students are not facing felony convictions … and potential lifelong branding as sex offenders."

An 18-year-old with a 14-year-old is going on every day? Is this charge of anti-gay prejudice cloaking what is really a movement to lower the age of consent (or to widen the age gap covered by "Romeo and Juliet" laws)?

Moore, OK is "the only city in the world to have taken a direct hit from an EF5 twister twice."

And the previous Moore tornado, in 1999, had higher winds (at 302 mph). The Moore tornado was wide — 1.3 miles — but not the widest tornado on record (which was 2.5 miles, in Hallam, Nebraska in 2004).

The anti-car message conveyed by those curbside rows of bike-share kiosks falls flat...

... when the gas-powered vehicles they impede are ambulances and fire trucks.

City workers swooped in Monday night and yanked out part of a bike-share rack blocking the front of a West Village co-op — just hours after The Post called the Department of Transportation over complaints that an ambulance crew had trouble getting to a 92-year-old resident in distress.

So... your tax money is used to install these things and then yank them out again. You might say: Just site them properly in the first place. But every time an old lady is "in distress" the right place for bike-share racks becomes the wrong place, The Post calls the Department of Transportation, and — once again — city workers must swoop in and yank out. 

"Kai the Hatchet-Wielding Hitchhiker: Why did we love him?"

More cogitation about instant YouTube stars of the lowly outsider kind — this time from Monica Hesse of The Washington Post. There are a lot of words here, but I don't think she makes any progress in the long-running game of Understanding the Internet. Her musings peak with: "It’s the issue of our responsibilities as viewers and our awareness of the latent toxicity in what we consume."

Our awareness of the latent toxicity in what we consume... hmm... yeah... suddenly I am aware of... why am I slogging through the verbal mush of another Washington Post column? What am I doing to myself?!

Like that, you mean, Monica?

"Petraeus’s role in drafting Benghazi talking points raises questions."

"Security at this annex was the responsibility of the CIA, not the State Department. But because the annex operated under diplomatic cover, its existence as an intelligence facility was classified...."

"Sorry, gays. Obama prefers Latinos to you."

"But thanks for all the contributions!"

"Why not raise the rim, to restore basketball to its proper form?"

"I am a purist at heart for this game, and it galls me to see the players today lack the proper fundamentals in passing, cutting, shooting, setting screens and, above all, proper spacing."

But consider this:

One of the unique aspects of the game, as created by Naismith, was the height of the baskets: when peach baskets were nailed to the railing of the running track at the Springfield, Mass., Teachers College one day in 1891, they were hung at 10 feet -- because that was how high the railing was. There was no more thought given to it than that.

Which way does that cut? You could say the baskets should be raised, because the original height was just happenstance, and nothing profound. Or you could say they should not be changed, because they were never calibrated to the height of the players in the first place.

The Althouse Amazon portal: provides warmth and reduces drag for faster shopping.

By using the Althouse portal, you can buy things you want and – while paying nothing extra – make a contribution to this blog. We notice. We appreciate it. And even if somehow you forget to invoke your 5th amendment privileges we have no way of knowing it's you.

From the May 19, 2013 to May 20, 2013 Amazon Associates Report:

Blueseventy Skull Cap

"Woman Finds Dog Lost During Tornado While Being Interviewed."

"Top IRS official will invoke 5th Amendment."

"Lois Lerner, the head of the exempt organizations division of the IRS, won’t answer questions about what she knew about the improper screening — or why she didn’t disclose it to Congress, according to a letter from her defense lawyer, William W. Taylor III."

Is it legal to...

Here's how Google tried to complete the search for me:

Is it legal to carry a knife in Wisconsin
to make moonshine in Iowa
to make moonshine
to flip off a cop
to own a fox

Is that special for me? In fact, none of those guesses is correct. I'd say "own a fox" is closest. Photos coming soon will reveal what my question was, and I would not actually do what I was wondering about.

ADDED: We've got a turkey that seems to be taking up residence in our backyard:

"Boruch Spiegel, one of the last surviving fighters of the Warsaw ghetto uprising of 1943..."

"... in which a vastly outgunned band of 750 young Jews held off German soldiers for more than a month with crude arms and Molotov cocktails, died on May 9 in Montreal. He was 93."

“We didn’t have enough weapons, we didn’t have enough bullets,” Mr. Spiegel once told an interviewer. “It was like fighting a well-equipped army with firecrackers."....

At the Weeping Redbud Café...

.... let's do the lavender twist.

What does it mean to say that one case is a "far cry" from another?

Here's the unanimous opinion written by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in Metrish v. Lancaster, released yesterday, which dealt with a principle of due process that I won't try to summarize. (There's a summary here, at SCOTUSblog.) I only want to talk about the expression "a far cry," used in Metrish to say something lawyers and judges often have reason to say: one thing is very different from another.

[W]e consider first two of this Court’s key decisions: Bouie v. City of Columbia, 378 U. S. 347 (1964), and Rogers v. Tennessee, 532 U. S. 451 (2001)...

This case is a far cry from Bouie, where, unlike Rogers, the Court held that the retroactive application of a judicial decision violated due process....

This made me curious about the expression "a far cry." This is one of these expressions that we use because it has a metaphorical feeling, even though we don't think too concretely about what the metaphor is. (This is what George Orwell called a "dying metaphor" in his famous essay "Politics and the English Language.") What is the image in "far cry"? I picture Lancaster, Bouie, and Rogers standing on hilltops in a landscape and see Lancaster — it's Burt Lancaster, by the way — hollering over to Rogers and Bouie on their respective hilltops, and Rogers can easily hear him but Bouie can barely hear him. That's a colorful alternative to saying Lancaster is much closer to Rogers than to Bouie.

Let's whip out the out the old (and unlinkable) Oxford English Dictionary:

within cry of: within calling distance. a far cry  : a long way, a very long distance.

1632   W. Lithgow Totall Disc. Trav. (1682) ix. 396   Villages and Houses..each one was within cry of another.
1819   Scott Legend of Montrose iv, in Tales of my Landlord 3rd Ser. IV. 72   One of the Campbells replied, ‘It is a far cry to Lochow’; a proverbial expression of the tribe, meaning that their ancient hereditary domains lay beyond the reach of an invading enemy.
1850   Tait's Edinb. Mag. Feb. 75/1   In those days, it was a ‘far cry’ from Orkney to Holyrood; nevertheless the ‘cry’ at length penetrated the royal ear.
1885   Athenæum 18 Apr. 498/3   It is a far cry from the ascidian to bookbinding and blue china, yet it is a cry that can be achieved by Mr. Lang.

The ascidian — I had to look it up — is a sea squirt, and it's not yelling out to bookbinding and blue china, so this metaphor has been dying since at least 1885.

3 Pinocchios for White House aide's assertion that Republicans "doctored e-mails... to smear the president."

WaPo's Fact Checker Glenn Kessler looks at something Dan Pfeiffer said on 3 Sunday talk shows relating to the development of the talking points that Susan Rice delivered on 5 Sunday talk shows last fall.

[T]he reporters involved have indicated they were told by their sources that these were summaries, taken from notes of e-mails that could not be kept. The fact that slightly different versions of the e-mails were reported by different journalists suggests there were different note-takers as well.

Indeed, Republicans would have been foolish to seriously doctor e-mails that the White House at any moment could have released (and eventually did). Clearly, of course, Republicans would put their own spin on what the e-mails meant, as they did in the House report. Given that the e-mails were almost certain to leak once they were sent to Capitol Hill, it’s a wonder the White House did not proactively release them earlier.

The burden of proof lies with the accuser. Despite Pfeiffer’s claim of political skullduggery, we see little evidence that much was at play here besides imprecise wordsmithing or editing errors by journalists.

"Academic freedom and a reasoned debate are essential to our academic community."

"However, the Harvard Kennedy School cannot ethically stand behind academic work advocating a national policy of exclusion and advancing an agenda of discrimination."

A petition with 1,200 signatures collected by Harvard students, who seem to want an investigation targeting this one case, because the conclusion offends them. It seems to me the investigation ought to be much broader, into what the general standards are at the school. The students have a big interest in whether the degree means what it's supposed to mean, but the one dissertation they loathe ought to be presented as evidence that the school has low standards, and the investigation ought to range across the political spectrum. But the students are speaking in terms of which policies are ethical, and that sounds like they want a political standard to restrict research, which, ironically, would not be an ethical policy.

"But maybe he should have asked before the gallery opens. Everybody’s talking about it."

Well, if "everybody's talking about it," then the artist made a great decision.

[T]he residents of a glass-walled luxury residential building across the street had no idea they were being photographed and never consented to being subjects for the works of art that are now on display — and for sale — in a Manhattan gallery.

Key word: luxury.

A middle-class value — privacy — is challenged. But it's built into the scheme that only the rich have had their privacy invaded. The artist — Arne Svenson — gets his publicity in the major media. And to top it all off:

Svenson’s apartment is directly across the street, just to the south, giving him a clear view of his neighbors by simply looking out his window.

Easiest art project ever.

“For my subjects there is no question of privacy; they are performing behind a transparent scrim on a stage of their own creation with the curtain raised high,” Svenson says in the gallery notes.  “The Neighbors don’t know they are being photographed; I carefully shoot from the shadows of my home into theirs.”

"Apple used a 'complex web' of offshore entities — with no employees or physical offices..."

"... that allowed it to pay little or no taxes on tens of billions it earned overseas, according to a Senate investigation unveiled Monday."

While the practice of using foreign operations to avoid U.S. taxes is legal and common among multinationals, Apple’s scheme was unprecedented in its use of multiple affiliates that had no semblance of a physical presence, Senate staffers said.

Why wouldn't Apple do what is legal to avoid taxes?

“Apple claims to be the largest U.S. corporate taxpayer, but by sheer size and scale it is also among America’s largest tax avoiders,” [Senator John] McCain said.

Isn't that exactly what you would expect?

"You know what has excellent continuity and no appreciation for story?"

Reality.

Linked by a comment to the Metafilter discussion the very funny "Star Trek Into Darkness: The Spoiler FAQ."

"The president’s approval rating, at 51 percent positive and 44 percent negative, has remained steady..."

"... in the face of fresh disclosures about the IRS, the Benghazi attack and the Justice Department’s secret collection of telephone records of Associated Press journalists as part of a leak investigation."

"Travel nightmare: Dakar, Dhaka — what's the difference? A wrong airport code sends travelers to the wrong continent."

"The code for the airport in Dakar, capital of Senegal, is DKR. The code for the airport in Dhaka, capital of Bangladesh, is DAC...."

Dhaka is 6,900 miles from Dakar. The first leg of the flight got them to Istanbul, where the screwup took place:

"When the flight attendant said we were heading to Dhaka, we believed that this was how you pronounced 'Dakar' with a Turkish accent"....

"Why is Facebook blue?... It’s because Mark Zuckerberg is red-green color blind..."

"... blue is the color Mark can see the best."

That factoid begins an article about the use of color in branding, which does not otherwise involve the topic of designing color images with knowledge of how it looks to people who see some but not all colors. The article gets into assertions about what women like and what men like. Both respond to blue and green and are repelled by orange and brown, but women go for purple, which men don't like, and men like black while women dislike gray. That's sort of interesting, but it's much softer information than the hardcore physical reality of red-green color blindness.

Is there software that lets you check what your design looks like to someone who's red-green color blind? One answer, I guess, is stick to blue. But it seems to me that there are many blues, including blues that lean toward red (before you'd say purple) and blues that lean to yellow (before you'd start calling it green). A person who's not red-green color blind might think that's a really lovely blue at the very point where it might look ugly to a person with red-green color blindness.

I've been thinking about this topic a lot because I've been losing my sense of smell, to the point where I'm smell-blind — anosmic — in some sectors of the sense of smell. It would be one thing to have no sense of smell at all, like complete color blindness. But when you have partial perception, you care about the part that you have, but you'd like a good experience with it, but other people, who may be providing the experience, don't know what it's like for you.

Nate Silver is #1 on Fast Company's "100 Most Creative People in Business 2013."

Here's the whole (nicely displayed) list. Here's the big article on Silver:

Nate Silver is now trying to see what's coming next for him. He has just turned 35. His interest in politics, always more intellectual than emotional, seems nearly exhausted by the election season. "I definitely get tired of the politics stuff," he tells me. "Or at least I'm tired of it now. You basically have a lot of sociopaths and crazy people who work in the politics industry who are kind of enabled by it being such a strange profession. Just a lack of. . . ." Silver stops to reach over for a french fry, eat it, and think. "I mean, well, the fact that it's seen as so optional to actually be truthful?" It offends his sensibilities as a data scientist in pursuit of truth. "You know," he continues, "whereas business can be amoral, I think politics is actively immoral on many occasions. So people will ask if I will go work for a campaign and I say, 'No way.' I can make a lot more money working for a hedge fund and it would be a lot less actively evil. At least you're not trying to manipulate people's belief systems."

In my view, the way not to get tired of the politics stuff is to be, specifically, interested in the behavior of real human beings, with all their flaws. That they are unusually flawed human beings — "sociopaths and crazy people" — becomes a positive. You are observing and analyzing these people, who are manipulating and dissembling and lying. This does not conflict with your own love of the truth. You pursue the truth about their lies and manipulations.