Campaign finance and unicorns

This  recent Pearls Before Swine strip is so, so awesome:

 

Mega quick hits (part II)

1)  Before this Vox post I knew pretty much nothing about New Zealand’s government.  Sounds great.

2) How the Affordable Care Act is saving money.

3) To their credit, NC came up with a set of reasonable criteria to rank road projects on how worthy of funding they are.  Smart.  Alas, now a bunch low-ranked projects have been proposed to receive funding.  Not smart.

4) Is credit cart fraud almost a thing of the past?

5) Pope Francis‘ latest appointment of an American bishop is yet another great credit to his papcy.

6) I heard part of this great story on TAL today (will catch the whole thing on podcast soon), but I love how Michael Lewis calls it the Ray Rice video of Wall Street.

7) More from Oceania– fascinating tale of how environmentalism in Australia has been completely politically crushed.

8) When can you not trust a poll result?  When a Republican firm releases a poll looking bad for Republicans and a few hours later an “updated” poll is released showing it much less bad.

9) The magnetic field of the earth could flip soon.  Whoa.

10) Celiac disease is real.  But “gluten sensitivity”?  Not so much.  If you are not familiar with the nocebo effect, this is a great example.

11) The less our governor says, the better.  He’s got a serious penchant for going off on subjects where he really has no idea what he’s talking about.

12) The fact that all the water on earth is from outer space is so cool.  The fact that much of it is actually older than our solar system is even cooler.

13) Not surprisingly, the gender wage gap starts with how we teach our sons and daughters about money.