Today's Interesting Reads. Or My Posts If I Made Them As Tiny As Tweets.

Egypt is in trouble, because it has more population than it can support.  The Muslim Brotherhood is not equipped to face the problem of population control or perhaps doesn't want to face it.  Tourism is down, poverty is up.  

The Egyptian problems are difficult, the solutions incompatible with rigid religious rules and the most obvious solutions (spend a lot of money on basic education, then on further education, to create alternatives to subsistence farming which is feasible in only a very small land area) politically impossible.  I'm very sad for all Egyptians but especially Egyptian women and girls.  Those who participated in the Arab Spring must feel quite deceived.

Yet another example of weird sourcing in the US media.  This story tells us that a study has found sex and drinking make people happier than religion and children.  But the source it provides is to an Indian lifestyle site.  The reader must go there to find references to the study author.   But was the study published in a peer-reviewed journal?  I cannot find any mention of that, though it seems to be part of a  University of Canterbury's showcase lecture series.  

Does this matter?  If it doesn't matter for hahaha-who-got-paid-for-finding-the-obvious, then how do we decide where to draw the line? 

That was a message from the priggish Echidne.

Finally, this Ted Talk is worth watching.  It is about the roles men can take to work to reduce domestic and intimate partner abuse.  I especially liked the bit about how "gender" has come to mean "women's stuff", just as "race" has come to mean "black stuff." as if men didn't have a gender or whites didn't have a racial identity, too.