In 2002, Santa Clara passed an initiative that raised a fee $20 per year per household for open spaces and recreation. It passed by a clear majority.

Fast forward and a group (I think their official name is Mr and Ms Average Tax-Hating Californians - MaMATHC) sued claiming that it was a tax, not a fee and therefore required 2/3 rather than a simple majority. The California Supreme Court agreed.

Fast forward a bit more and MaMATHC won a class action lawsuit to get that money (7 years of it) refunded (with $7m going to Grabbit and Run LLC in lawyers fees, not to mention the costs of administering the refund).

I just got my claim form in the mail yesterday. I can join the class action and claim back 7yrs x $20. In a reversal of the usual taxpayer revolt, I tore mine up. I’d rather my tax money go to open spaces.

I think this little affair is a neat microcosm of the state problems as a whole.

To recap:

1. Legislature is powerless because of term limits so …
2. All the important stuff happens by the initative process but…
3. The initiative process is a blunt instrument and hard to wield effectively so…
4. It results in wacky ideas like long term commitments to spending, impossible to increase taxes, and…
5. Term limits

..and so the cycle repeats.

Because we don’t expect the legislature to actually do anything (that’s what the initiative process is for) they don’t. Instead they cluster around the wingnut/moonbat extremities and obstruct obstruct obstruct.

We are prisoners to the extremists at either end of the political spectrum.

I wish we had a do-over on the California Consitution and started by getting rid of the initiative process.

You don’t get a dog and then bark yourself.

And so can you (with the LA Times’s handy-dandy online budget balancer)

Here’s how I did it (I cover the last billion with borrowing):

See the whole thing here.

Here’s a civic dilemma for you.

Santa Clara wanted to set aside some open space for recreation and the general enjoyment of the people and put an initiative on the ballot to raise the funds. It passed.

But the California Supreme Court decided that the $20 a year per property tax payer constituted a tax rather than a fee. Taxes require a 2/3 majority. Fees only require a simple majority. It ruled the tax illegal.

What to do with the money that they have already raised for open spaces (about $130 total per household)?

A group who call themselves Taxpayers of Santa Clara sued and won a class action ruling that the county had to return the money - after deducting the $7m in lawyers fees (plus sundry other administration costs). I got my letter today.

If I fill in the form, I get my share of the bounty and the Open Spaces Authority fires a few park rangers and probably closes some parks.

In a taxpayer revolt - and a reversal of the usual situation - many taxpayers are refusing to claim their refund to

• Protest the frivolous lawsuit
• Show Taxpayers of Santa Clara that they do not represent us
• And to announce that we rather like open spaces and would like to fund them

Dear Santa Clara,

You can keep my $130.

Dear Taxpayers of Santa Clara,

You suck.

Dear Tony Tanke of Davis (who represented the Taxpayer of Santa Clara),

Enjoy your $7.4 million.

You suck too.

Ragged Clown

My mistake. It wasn’t a dilemma at all.

Just how beautiful is everyone’s second favourite planet?

The BBC has the answer: a lot.

The Edge has an article describing research into how the brain reconstructs the passage of time from imperfect clues from the senses.

This is the problem of temporal binding: the assignment of the correct timing of events in the world. The challenge is that different stimulus features move through different processing streams and are processed at different speeds. The brain must account for speed disparities between and within its various sensory channels if it is to determine the timing relationships of features in the world.

Think about that for a second. There are all these message that get jumbled up and arrive out of sequence. Somehow your brain tries to figure out what order they should be in. How does it do that?

It guesses.

When it comes to awareness, your brain goes through a good deal of trouble to perceptually synchronize incoming signals that were synchronized in the outside world. So a firing gun will seem to you to have banged and flashed at the same time. (At least when the gun is within thirty meters; past that, the different speeds of light and sound cause the signals to arrive too far apart to be synchronized.)

But given that the brain received the signals at different times, how can it know what was supposed to be simultaneous in the outside world? How does it know that a bang didn’t really happen before a flash? It has been shown that the brain constantly recalibrates its expectations about arrival times. And it does so by starting with a single, simple assumption: if it sends out a motor act (such as a clap of the hands), all the feedback should be assumed to be simultaneous and any delays should be adjusted until simultaneity is perceived. In other words, the best way to predict the expected relative timing of incoming signals is to interact with the world: each time you kick or touch or knock on something, your brain makes the assumption that the sound, sight, and touch are simultaneous.

And if it guesses wrong?

Imagine that every time you press a key, you cause a brief flash of light. Now imagine we sneakily inject a tiny delay (say, two hundred milliseconds) between your key-press and the subsequent flash. You may not even be aware of the small, extra delay. However, if we suddenly remove the delay, you will now believe that the flash occurred before your key-press, an illusory reversal of action and sensation. Your brain tells you this, of course, because it has adjusted to the timing of the delay.

Think that’s weird?

Wait until you find out how long it takes for your brain to figure this stuff out. And what it does before it has all the information in.

What would it be like if you brain lost the ability to order events correctly? Read the article and find out.

Someone reads my blog!

Thank you!

If you don’t watch bloggingheads.tv you really are missing out.

The basic format is the familiar, two people with opposing views debate but the genius of bloggingheads.tv is that the debaters try to seek common ground rather than score weak, partisan points or to shout each other down.

bloggingheads.tv/ posts several debates a week and, while many are lame, there are some real gems.

Today’s gem has Brink Lindsey (libertarian) and David Frum (conservative republican) discussing the reasons for the recent decline in conservative fortunes.

They cover all the usual ground (a dumbing-down populism, George Bush, Hannity& Limbaugh, tension between libertarians and social conservatives etc etc) but, about 24 minutes in, they rustle up a nice hypothesis that I find quite compelling. It goes something like this…

In the 60s and 70s, it seemed like traditional values were under assault from liberal ideas like feminism, welfare, homosexuality, multiculturalism, secularism etc etc etc. As a result, divorce, abortion, out-of-wedlock births, crime, teenage promiscuity and other social ills were spiralling out of control and America was headed to hell in a liberal hand basket.

Perhaps appropriately, conservatives organized around preventing this terrifying decline but…and here’s the punchline…

Among the people most likely to be liberal - affluent, college-educated people - the decline never happened! Among liberals, all those indicators of traditional conservative values - divorce, traditional families, illegitimacy, stay-at-home mums, crime, under-age sex, drug use, hard work and ambition - have steadily improved over the last 30 years.

The red states and the less affluent (less liberal) communities have not fared so well but the conservative movement still ascribes to theories of cause and effect that are thirty years out of date.

Not noticing that liberal values have not led to a collapse in traditional values, conservatives have redoubled their fight against what they wrongly perceive as the causes of social problems in their communities.

In a confusion of baby and bathwater, conservatives are still attempting to throw out the wrong thing.

Brink Lindsey is one of the pioneers of liberaltarianism - the idea that libertarians have more common ground with liberals than with conservatives. Since almost everyone I know describes themself as either liberal or libertarian and based on this exchange, I think there is something in it.

It’s customary, whenever someone publishes a list of the 100 best anythings, to go down the list and

1. Complain about the missing entries.
2. Complain about the entries that don’t belong.
3. Take perverse credit for the entries that are there.

Without further ado, here goes on the 100 best novels since 1923:

• I have only read 14.
• But have seen the movie of another 9.
• Hated one.
• Failed to finish another.
• Why isn’t there more Graham Greene?

I have been meaning to read Cuckoo’s Nest for ages. I think it’s finally time.

Peggy Noonan is on form today in the WSJ.

America so often gets Iran wrong. We didn’t know when the shah was going to fall, didn’t foresee the massive wave that would topple him, didn’t know the 1979 revolution would move violently against American citizens, didn’t know how to handle the hostage-taking. Last week we didn’t know a mass rebellion was coming, and this week we don’t know who will emerge the full or partial victor. So modesty and humility seem appropriate stances from which to observe and comment.

That having been said, it’s pretty wonderful to see what we’re seeing. It is moving, stirring—they are risking their lives over there in a spontaneous, self-generated movement for greater liberty and justice.

Peggy parts company with the more strident commentators on her side who want Obama to declare America’s interest.

To refuse to see all this as progress, or potential progress, is perverse to the point of wicked. To insist the American president, in the first days of the rebellion, insert the American government into the drama was shortsighted and mischievous. The ayatollahs were only too eager to demonize the demonstrators as mindless lackeys of the Great Satan Cowboy Uncle Sam, or whatever they call us this week. John McCain and others went quite crazy insisting President Obama declare whose side America was on, as if the world doesn’t know whose side America is on. “In the cause of freedom, America cannot be neutral,” said Rep. Mike Pence. Who says it’s neutral?

Meanwhile on another blog, freedom-loving Will Wilkinson bemoans empty gestures of support.

So folks on Twitter have been turning their avatars (little profile photos) green to show solidarity with the protesters in Iran. There are websites to help you do this. But why do this? How does it help? I want the Iranian people to live in freedom, just as I want all people to live in freedom. But the point of the gesture eludes me, unless the point of the gesture is to be seen making the gesture by others who will credit you for it. Like so many political gestures, it is vanity dressed up as elevated moral consciousness. It doesn’t help.

It maybe a tiny, vain gesture but I like to imagine a conversation between two incredibly brave protestors on the streets of Iran:

Protester #1: I feel that the rest of the world does not care about us.
Protester #2: Psst. Did you know that thousands of twitter users have changed their icons in a tiny gesture of solidarity? Pass it on.

Dear All the Single Ladies (all the single ladies),

The effect that your - and Beyoncé’s - anthem has on you is mesmerizing.

With just the merest first few bars you become united in solidarity with your sisters everywhere. If you could harness just a little of the song’s awesome potency you would become the greatest political power the world has ever seen.

If you learned the dance moves too, you would rule the world.

Yours in admiration,

The Ragged Clown