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One year later, has Michael Sam been frozen out of the NFL?

When I was a kid, I always outsmarted myself in multiple-choice tests. I'd always get it wrong because I over-thought the question every time. In my adult life I've learned that the most obvious answer is generally the right one. The answer to the question I've posed to so many - Why is Michael Sam not with an NFL team? - is also likely the most obvious one: because he's openly gay. Defensive ends with the same size and the same speed - yet with less production in college and the NFL preseason - are in the NFL and Sam is not because he's gay and he just won't stop being gay.

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BuzzFeed profiles Paul Elam, founder of notorious MRA website A Voice For Men: "Elam calls AVFM “the largest men’s human rights group of its kind anywhere,” though it does few of the things human rights groups typically do. It provides no services, offers no legal aid, and litigates no cases. It does not regularly lobby lawmakers, advise candidates, produce public policy proposals or original research."
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How do we, the public, decide what's in the public interest? Specifically, in the context of eminent domain: In 2005, in Kelo v. City of New London, the concept of eminent domain, or taking of private property to benefit public interest, was expanded to allow governments to take private property and turn it over to private commercial interests, if deemed to benefit the public. Although some states later passed legislation designed to curb abuses of this power, the state of Virginia is now taking it to the next level.
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A dreadful start.
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We met at 18. We wed at 24. At 27 I checked my wife into a psych ward—for the first time. How mental illness reshapes a marriage.
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White men were rapping LONG before Eminem came on the scene!
comment posted at 12:42 PM on Dec-31-14

Via fivethirtyeight.com, the explanation for why I can't go 24 hours without hearing 'Feliz Navidad' between Thanksgiving and New Year's. Goddamnit.
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"They risked and persisted, sacrificed and saved." The Ebola Fighters are TIME Magazine's 2014 Person of the Year.
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"it’s the marketing equivalent of drawing go-faster stripes on your car." The Guardian slams the detoxing craze. (SLG)
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this is what "One Size Fits All" actually looks like on all body types
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Blake Ross details the ways in which the Nevada Taxicab Authority is fighting back against unscrupulous taxi drivers and out-innovating Uber & Lyft in the process.
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How Police Unions and Arbitrators Keep Abusive Cops on the Street
Officers fired for misconduct often appeal the decision and get reinstated by obscure judges in secretive proceedings.
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Flavor scientists in Australia have discovered a link between cup/container color and perceived coffee taste.
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A GOP columnist for the Houston Chronicle argues that the midterms signaled "spectacular, catastrophic failure" for the GOP. The columnist, Chris Ladd, identifies himself as a "GOPLifer." His assertion that the overwhelming Republican win on November 4 continued a very negative long term GOP demographic trend and ongoing failure to establish an appealing political platform has been recently highlighted by Lawrence O'Donnell and Daily Kos.
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Drone footage of the snow storm aftermath in West Seneca. NY. [slyt | 4k]
comment posted at 12:23 PM on Nov-21-14

In 1978, the first draft of The Empire Strikes Back was penned by a writer named Leigh Brackett. She passed away shortly thereafter and the script underwent a number of changes, first by George Lucas, before Lawrence Kasdan developed the final and more well-known screenplay. Brackett's initial draft is available for download here. The blog at starwarz.com highlights some of the more notable changes, such as Darth Vader not being Luke's father (though Luke's father appears as a character as a ghost Jedi on Dagoba), and a distinct lack of Boba Fett and carbon freezing. (Empire recently on the Blue)
comment posted at 12:26 PM on Nov-21-14

The Death of the Southern White Democrat Hurts African-Americans the Most (previously) while the South’s Republicans Look a Lot Like Its 1970s Democrats
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Today, by a 2-1 decision, the Sixth Circuit upheld the same-sex marriage bans in Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee and Michigan. reversing a federal district court decision and creating a circuit split: the Sixth Circuit has upheld bans, while the Fourth, Seventh, and Tenth Circuits have struck them down.
comment posted at 3:58 PM on Nov-6-14

A New York Times Op-Ed debates the need for a "Law Against Catcalling."
comment posted at 8:49 AM on Nov-3-14

Hannibal Buress called out Bill Cosby for the sexual abuse charges against him onstage in Philly recently: "Thirteen? And it’s even worse because Bill Cosby has the fucking smuggest old black man public persona that I hate. Pull your pants up, black people. I was on TV in the ’80s. I can talk down to you because I had a successful sitcom. Yeah, but you raped women, Bill Cosby. So, brings you down a couple notches. I don’t curse on stage. Well, yeah, you’re a rapist, so, I’ll take you sayin’ lots of motherfuckers on Bill Cosby: Himself if you weren’t a rapist. …I want to just at least make it weird for you to watch Cosby Show reruns. …I’ve done this bit on stage, and people don’t believe. People think I’m making it up. …That shit is upsetting. If you didn’t know about it, trust me. You leave here and Google ‘Bill Cosby rape.’ It’s not funny. That shit has more results than Hannibal Buress." Timeline of Abuse Charges. (TW: Sexual Abuse)
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As a taster, it’s important to know that compared with sour or salty, bitterness is slow to affect our palates. The first two are very simple chemical phenomena and require only the simplest of cellular mechanisms to fire off their signals to the brain. Bitterness, like sweetness and umami, requires an intermediate molecule, something called a G-coupled protein. It takes a little longer to do its thing, and this time dimension of tasting is something that you always need to pay attention to.
comment posted at 12:57 PM on Oct-20-14

How Liberal or Conservative is your name? A rare "what x are you?" online tool which is apparently based on real data. There is no need to search for the most liberal of all (past and present) MeFi moderator names, I've already done that for you.
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"As a chemist, I can tell you that no chemical is 100 percent safe all the time, under all conditions. Even I occasionally do a double take when I hear about the ingredients in some of our foods. But our fear of chemicals – what is often called chemophobia – needs to be tempered.
comment posted at 10:53 AM on Oct-16-14

A pair of dogs team up to retrieve a tennis ball from a backyard swimming pool. I could watch this all day.
comment posted at 3:42 PM on Oct-15-14

The Economist examines the cult of the genius GM.

In sports, just like the rest of life, the rich keep getting richer. Anyone who saw or read Moneyball knows that the deck is stacked against small-market Major League Baseball (MLB) teams. Their only hope of competing, Michael Lewis’s story goes, is to acquire brilliant, innovative general managers (GMs) like his protagonist Billy Beane, who have mastered the “art of winning an unfair game” by outmaneuvering wealthier clubs. The problem with this narrative is that there is nothing to stop the sport’s plutocrats from hiring the finest minds money can buy, just as they sign the best athletes.

The deep-pocketed Dodgers have lured away small market Tampa Bay's heralded GM Andrew Friedman to find out what happens when a man who consistently builds winners with one of the smallest revenue streams in the game can do with a payroll in excess of $200 million.
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"The United States had gone to war declaring it must destroy an active weapons of mass destruction program. Instead, American troops gradually found and ultimately suffered from the remnants of long-abandoned programs, built in close collaboration with the West."

- The Secret Casualties of Iraq's Abandoned Chemical Weapons (SLNYT)
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ArsTechnica: "7 million Dropbox username/password pairs apparently leaked" Reports started to come in late Monday evening about the cloud file storage service Dropbox having been "hacked" by a group that was offering up the complete list of millions of email+password combinations for Bitcoin donations. Later reports, including a statement by Dropbox, point to the potential list being several million combinations culled from various third-party sites, and then tested against Dropbox.
comment posted at 8:54 AM on Oct-14-14
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Max Fisher of Vox describes how Naomi Wolf has turned to rather outré conspiracy theories. Via Ayelet Waldman on Twitter, who commented "I think maybe we need not to condemn Naomi Wolf but to consider the possibility that she's having a psychotic break."
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"What happens, exactly, when a white family that wants a white sperm donor gets a half-black child instead? In the case of a lesbian couple from Ohio, it means a "wrongful birth" lawsuit against the sperm bank — two years after the fact. "
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