The Constitution Article I Section 4 Clauses 1-2
Article I Section 4 Clauses 1 and 2
[1] The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the places of choosing Senators.
[2] The Congress shall assemble at least once in every Year, and such Meeting shall [be on the first Monday in December,]* unless they shall by Law appoint a different Day.
* Changed by the Twentieth Amendment
Now this is seat of your pants action packed law right here. I will give you a second to wipe the sweat from your brow over the sweeping advances in world of legal craft work presented here. (go ahead wipe away) But seriously not all parts of the Constitution are very exciting, this being one of them…
The state legislatures have the task of figuring out how congressional elections are held. The determine the schedule, how voters register, where they can vote. But congress has the right to change these state rules to set a uniform date for federal elections and to provide national protection for the right to vote. Wait a minute! This is not so dull after all!
When taken in the context of the civil rights movement this section along with several amendments are very important for understanding who can vote and when they can vote and how they vote. The first federal election law prohibited false registrations, bribery of election officials, and reporting false election returns. Congress passed this law after the Civil War with the goal of enforcing the prohibitions against racial discrimination in voting contained in the 15th amendment.
Later the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Congress added even greater protection for the right to vote.
Generally Congress sets its own schedule for how often it meets. The Constitution says it has to meet once a year. Originally it was on the first Monday in December, one year and one month AFTER the election (leading to all sorts of problems), the 20th amendment fixed that small oversight and moved the date to January 3rd unless the members pick another date.
The Day I Discovered The Meaning Of Life : Part 1
I’m not a great storyteller, which is a shame as I have a long story to tell. Most of it has been already written, a couple of years ago when I was trying to find out more about everything, but I always say to people that if you have written something you like then you should tell people about it.
Some of what I am going to say might sound pretentious - it’s not meant to - and some of it may sound complete nonsense, but maybe someone reading it will get something out of it. I hope so.
This is part one; I don’t know how many parts there will be, I’ll tell you when I’m finished, honest.
Sometime in 2002 I decided to take a Mensa test; Mensa is an organisation for people who score high marks in Mensa tests. I’m not sure why, I think I just wanted to see if I was “clever” in any sort of way, having never been fantastic at school, or having an aptitude for languages, or anything particularly brilliant. Anyway, I took a test and it turned out that I had an IQ of 156, which came as a bit of a shock. “What now?”, I thought.
Having not much time on my hands I didn’t fancy joining so that I could talk to other Mensa people about big numbers, but did get the idea that if I was supposed to be clever then I could think of the answers to things - maybe. I had started seriously thinking about our future, doing things for Greenpeace and Friends Of The Earth, writing letters to politicians and companies, that sort of thing; so,obviously the thing to do was to discover the meaning of life.
Well, it’s got to be out there somewhere, so why not?
Over the next 10 months I read LOTS of philosophy, and bought lots more that I haven’t even got round to reading (and probably never will - more of that later). As I read, I started to write…and it really came out, things I had never imagined I would think about. Sometimes it scares me to read the kind of things I wrote, and I don’t think I want to be in that place again for a while (not the train to work - that’s where I did most of my thinking - I mean my head).
If you would excuse me, I’m going to paste lots of things that I wrote in these posts. They may not make much sense, out of context, but as I said, maybe someone will get something out of them. This is the first thing I wrote, on 21 May 2003:
Do the thoughts of philosophers, or indeed anyone with original ideas, derive from innate knowledge? This is highly improbable, given the nature of inheritance. Our genetic makeup seems to rule out the inheritance of ideas - although that does assume separation of mind and body. In fact, if we take the monist approach, much if not not all of our knowledge could be inherited, and just awakened as we are stimulated throughout life.
Could there be such a thing that gives the impression of innateness, but is not inherited? Well, some things, such as the ability to learn language are, in all probability, part of our physical makeup. Knowledge itself seems to exist in a complex array of memories, be it physically contained in books, or present in the minds of people. This corpus is growing at present, but may only be growing due to the memories that exist. Historically, knowledge has peaked wherever there has been some major stimulus, such as freedom of expression, the need to create societies, technological discoveries and so on. Conversely, troughs in knowledge, and apparently troughs in the development of thought seem to occur at times of intellectual repression (though, not physical repression - this would act as a stimulus for thought) or where the need for survival as a society overrides the possibility for complex thought.
Overall, this forms a powerful image of the knowledge corpus as an energy blanket, which grows when it is stimulated, and can potentially be fed off by those who require that knowledge and have the ability to retain and utilise it. The thought of humanity as a single organism inevitibly comes about, but could it be something more mundane than this; perhaps that we are equipped with the ability to absorb information at a far greater rate than we are conscious of. Maybe, by a very early age, we already have a remarkable amount of knowledge, but are not yet intellectually mature enough to utilise it, and turn it into original ideas. It may be that intelligence is not the ability to absorb knowledge but the ability to utilise it.
Sorry about that.
I’ll write some more in a little while - if you want me to - and I will show you something like the meaning of life eventually, honest.
Keith
www.theearthblog.org
www.reduce3.com
And Proud Member Of The Sietch
Missing…Presumed Worn Out
Well, damn it! I’ve been away from The Seitch for too long (although others may think “Please stay away longer”!), and I haven’t been lazy, honest. Just recharging batteries and looking at the world from a slightly more horizontal and beer-induced vantage point which, although resulting in a less angry state, made me pen (type) a little article, sort of explaining why my holidays / vacations were no more than a few hours away, and not at all by plane.
What else can I say. Well, I notice that lots of these monsters are starting to appear on the streets of Essex:
Whilst in the States, if what I read is true, Ford are worrying that not enough Explorers are being sold because of the oil prices. $3 a gallon! Well, if I may say so, we had that price decades ago, and now it’s nearer to $9 a gallon here, and morons are still buying these:
The reason is that they are “business vehicles” which means that 17.5% of the cost can be claimed back as a business expense, allowing Michelle from just-up-the-road to drive her little Wayne the 400 smog-ridden yards to school in air-conditioned, built like a tank, luxury thing, whilst husband Brian who’s got (surprise, surprise) another of these:
can claim back 17.5% of the cost of ALL the fuel for both vehicles.
So, the polluter doesn’t quite pay all they should, and the poor person who makes an effort to buy one of these:
for the few times they do drive has to sit behind a monster driven by someone who just doesn’t care.
Keith Farnish (back and angry)
www.theearthblog.org
www.reduce3.com
And Proud Member Of The Sietch
Monday Confessional
BUSY! I have been so very very very busy. Instead of listing all of the stuff I have been up to I will keep it short and list the highlights.
- I am going to see Tess soon!
- My friend Alicia visited.
- I learned how to fix an electric stove on my own today
- I only electrocuted myself twice (and not that badly)
- The members come on Thursday
A short highlight reel. I am really excited about seeing Tess this weekend. We are going to pretend we have class because I won some tickets to Pop Goes the summer. A Cape Cod tradition. I guess the Boston Pops comes to Cape Cod at the end of each summer. I won table seats to it so it should be classy and nice. Maybe I will dress up. Mostly I just want to see Tess.
SB1 Passes Million Solar Roofs To Follow
by Jesse Broehl, Editor, RenewableEnergyAccess.com
After a long roller-coaster ride in the California legislature, the Million Solar Roofs Bill, SB1, is now law. Governor Schwarzenegger, who campaigned on a pledge to create a major solar program, signed the bill Monday. The bill, authored by Senator Kevin Murray, went through an evolution of different versions over the past three years leading to collective moments of both euphoria and disappointment for the solar industry. This final version proved suitable enough to California lawmakers and the competing special interests with a stake in its outcome.
“Nothing gets through the legislature that’s perfect for someone without being a problem for someone else,” said JP Ross, Policy Director for Vote Solar, one of the organizations that helped push for passage of this bill. “It was not the most perfect bill that passed, but the most perfect bill that could have passed. Everyone in the solar community is breathing a sigh of relief that we got what we needed; solar got the money in January from the PUC and now this codifies that into law.”
Following the larger solar policy topic in California has not only been a roller coaster ride but also a confusing ride, with policy and regulation taking on changing and divergent paths. SB1, as Ross noted, sets in stone a major victory achieved for solar back in January of this year when the Public Utilities Commission (PUC) voted to approve the California Solar Initiative (CSI). This provided two major items; the structure of a long-term (10-year) declining rebate plan, and the $3.2 billion dollars to fund it.
While the PUC’s plan was hailed as a breakthrough victory for solar, it left some key items unaddressed; chiefly, that net-metering caps needed to be raised. The Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) region was fast approaching its cap and would have reached it by early 2007, if not before, leading to a drastic halt in solar installations in the largest solar market. According to Ross, in 2004, the PG&E territory made up 85 percent of the California solar market. SB 1 now increases the cap from 0.5% of a utility’s total load to 2.5%, enabling approximately 500,000 new solar system owners into the net-metering program.
Another major item left unaddressed by the PUC’s CSI approved last January is a provision requiring the state’s municipalities to create their own solar rebate programs. The PUC regulates only publicly traded utilities (hence its name), leaving large “munies” like the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP), and the Sacramento Municipal District (SMUD) out of the major statewide solar program.
As a utility that wasn’t forced to promote solar, SMUD is largely viewed as being progressive and accepting of solar energy through the solar programs it has administered on its own. The LADWP, on the other hand, is viewed as being slack in any commitment to solar. The massive utility serving most of Los Angeles does technically have a solar rebate program but it is widely considered to be too poorly funded to be a real program.
Now, presumably, the LADWP will have to shape it up and administer a genuine and effective solar rebate program. SB1 now requires all munies in California to develop their own solar rebate programs so they will be making a similar, equitable effort — as do the public utilities that are already required to provide rebates. For them to do so, a total of $800 million, coming from the larger CPUC pot approved in January, will be spread out over 10 years.
SB1 also managed to find an acceptable middle ground in one of the most contentious areas in California solar policy: homebuilding solar mandates. Last summer, SB1 ground to a halt in the legislature over conflicts between a solar industry that wanted solar to be required on a small percentage of new homes and the homebuilders that would be directly involved. The homebuilders stung at the idea of any such mandates and went on to orchestrate a battle between building industry labor groups and the solar industry. By mid-summer, the lines of communication and negotiation went down just as the level of vitriol went up, and the bill died shortly thereafter.
This time around, SB1 struck an acceptable balance by mandating that solar systems be offered “as an option” on new housing developments over 50 units in size. The specifics still need to be worked out but it will likely involve the builders working with the solar industry to provide prospective homeowners with information about the basics of solar projects and what additional costs they would incur in exchange for the long-term stability in their electric rates that solar projects provide. And, the price for these projects will be more palatable to the consumer since the cost will be subsidized by the larger California solar rebate plan (CSI).
“Turning the vision of building a million solar roofs into state law has been a long time coming,” said Bernadette Del Chiaro, Clean Energy Advocate with Environment California, the leading sponsor of the Million Solar Roofs bill. “But in the end, this law was worth the wait and the fight that it took to turn a great idea into a landmark law.
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