I case you haven’t followed the comments in Monday’s guest post on energy by Chuck Smith (Of Two Minds blog), you really should. There have been some long and quite thoughtful exchanges. What you really see is a lot of skepticism about the imposition of the centralized, industrial model onto energy production and distribution in light of technologies that lend themselves to more distributed systems. The centralized industrial model “fits” with the dominant mode of financial and political control, making distributed power proponents almost by definition just a bit subversive. In any case, it’s been quite an interesting dialog. And do keep in mind that you can “subscribe” to an RSS comment feed by clicking on the link at the top of the comments section.

Here’s some other suggested weekend reading. From the Los Angeles Times, a story describing the views of USC demographer Dowell Myers. His description of what’s happening in California should trigger warning bells for us as well.

Because a wave of demographic change has just hit L.A. County, said Myers, and a tsunami could be headed our way. Thanks to all the aging boomers, the ratio of seniors to working people in Los Angeles County has surged for the first time in four decades. And this is going to throw “everything out of whack,” Myers said. “Healthcare costs, pensions, etc.”

While the number of seniors grew, the number of children between the ages of 5 and 9 fell by a staggering 21% between 2000 and 2010. And at the same time, immigration has leveled off and begun to decline.

As a result, home prices will stagnate for years to come, Myers said, and for-sale signs will petrify.

“There are too many sellers and not enough buyers coming up,” said Myers. “And it’s going to get worse.”

The falling birth rate was also described in a USA Today story this week based on the 2010 census (“Census reveals plummeting U.S. birthrates“).

Myers says the demographic shift also means greater emphasis needs to be placed on education, since they are going to need to fully prepare the next generations of workers to be as productive as possible.

Then I flagged an article on the complex analysis needed to understand the extended impacts of rising sea levels that will hit even areas far from the coasts. It certainly seems that we need to be considering these factors in all of our planning decisions going forward.

A headline about “virginity tests” and abuse of women demonstrators in Egypt caught my eye. We’re rightly outraged, of course. But it wasn’t that long ago that similar physical exams of young women were relatively routine parts of arrests right here in Hawaii.

This was really the discovery that launched Meda’s very successful career as a feminist criminologist. She was dubbed “the mother of feminist criminology” by one reviewer, and the label is apt.

We were grad students at UH in the early 1970s when one of her sociology professors obtained old juvenile arrest files from Honolulu’s family court dating from early in the 20th century. Out of curiosity, Meda asked one of the people methodically coding these files to set aside those of the girls, which she then set about analyzing.

That’s when she discovered the notes of physical examinations of girls that included commentary that would accurately be described as virginity checks. One of her first publications was an article in Psychology Today in 1974, “Juvenile Delinquency: The Sexualization of Female Crime,” describing her findings.

In any case, it reminded me that the culture wars going on now in the Middle East today have parallels right here at home.

And one final tidbit. Yesterday I looked for an update on our former neighbor in Kaaawa, Eric Herter, who moved from Kaaawa several years ago to take up residence in sunny Maine.

To my surprise, a number of his short videos showed up in a search of the Internet Archive, most interviews with or presentations by activists, journalists, and others on issues of war, peace, and politics. Browse through and you’ll find lots of interesting things.

And so it goes on a wet Saturday morning.