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From the CBC:

Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion said on Wednesday that his party won’t defeat the government on the federal budget, but also won’t vote in favour of it.

“We’ll find a way to not defeat the government and to express our disagreement with this budget,” Dion said while leaving a caucus meeting in Ottawa on Wednesday.

He said the Liberals will still have an amendment, but the party has decided not to take the government down in the vote of confidence over the budget.

Shortly after Finance Minister Jim Flaherty released the 2008 fiscal plan on Tuesday, Dion called it a “grab bag” with little substance.

But he added that the budget included some measures Liberals had been pushing for in recent months and that its shortcomings were not serious enough to justify an election that Canadians don’t want.

Okay, I have a major problem with this.

This is now the second budget which the Liberal party has decided to not vote for because they “don’t want an election” but they still want to express their “disagreement with the budget”. They say now that they aren’t going to vote for it and they aren’t going to vote against it. So, why the hell are they even there? Basically there are 94 members of parliament who are simply not doing their job. They are supposed to either amend, vote against, or vote for bills. Not sit on their hands. If those 94 ridings wanted MPs who would sit on their hands and do nothing, they should have voted for ficus trees. At least those require less maintenance and don’t need to be paid $69,564 $141,000 per year by the Canadian tax payers, and they would do about as much work. Either the Liberal party should vote for this bill or they should vote against it, these mushy middle maneuvers are silly, come across as weak and, well, basically show that the Liberal party doesn’t stand for anything. If they honestly feel that this budget is a good budget, then vote for it. If they dislike it, vote against it. If they are so divided that deciding how to vote as a whole isn’t working, then they should allow each MP to vote how they feel about this budget. However, by abstaining, AGAIN, they are showing that this has nothing to do with what is good for Canadians and everything to do with power-mongering and politicking. In which case, anyone who still supports this party may as well vote for the Conservatives since at least those MPs are doing their jobs and Canada will get more or less the same outcome.

As well, the idiocy of the quote: “We’ll find a way to not defeat the government and to express our disagreement with this budget” is unbelievable. Basically, he’s claiming the party is made up of spineless twits who are too afraid to express their disagreement in the way that it is supposed to be expressed in parliament: You put up your own amendments and if they fail to pass, you vote down the budget. However, this is not true, they don’t disagree with the budget. If they did disagree with it, why did they put up on their own website that they support this budget? They specifically said this budget isn’t that bad because this “budget … adopts many of the measures the Liberal Party has championed.”

The only reason Liberals claim to disagree with this budget because they are mushy middle power-brokers and they cannot afford to lose any more of their base to the other left wing parties, but they also cannot be against this budget because they will lose right-wing support from within their own party. So basically, either way they vote, they are screwed.

And if they don’t vote, only their constituents are screwed

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From the CBC:

“Under the circumstances, I don’t see enough in this budget that would justify that we precipitate an election that Canadians do not want for now,” Dion told reporters about a half-hour after Flaherty introduced the budget in the House of Commons.

The NDP and Bloc Québécois said they could not accept the federal budget introduced in Parliament and will vote against it in a confidence motion slated for March 5.

From the Liberal Party of Canada’s Website:

Liberals Won’t Bring Down Conservative Government over Watered-Down Liberal Budget

OTTAWA – The Liberal Opposition will not bring down the Conservatives based on their latest budget because it adopts many of the measures the Liberal Party has championed, Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion said today.

“Because the Conservative government has already spent the cupboard bare with their previous budgets and Economic Update, this budget does not go as far as we would like in some areas, but it does not warrant an election that Canadians don’t want, at a time when so much remains to be done in this Parliament,” said Mr. Dion.

…

“This budget shows the Conservatives are adopting Liberal ideas, including bolstering the economy so it can weather a possible slow-down, but their actions over the last two years have left them virtually no room to maneuver should the economy continue to falter,” said Mr. Dion.

So what are the Liberals saying here? Well, basically they are claiming that the Conservatives are essentially the “Liberals-lite”. What a stupid insane thing to do when their primary opponent is the Conservatives. For the last 15 years everyone has referred to the Liberal party as “Conservative-lite” in Canada. Today, on their website, and by voting for this budget they are finally acknowedging the true. They are saying to the left-wing supporters of their party to screw off and basically accept the fact that they will do exactly the same as the Conservatives, and to the right-wing of their party that there is essentially no difference between the Conservatives and Liberals.

Why do I say this? Right in the headline of their press release, they acknowledge that the Liberals would have released more or less the same budget. They are going to vote for the same extension to the Afghanistan war, and probably would support any socially conservative policies if they could fall back on the excuse that “Canadians’ don’t want an election right now.” They openly admit to the fact that they are basically the Conservative party in policy and that they would really do nothing different than the Conservatives in their own fricken press release, and by voting for this budget, they are saying if you want to vote for their policies, you may as well vote for the Conservatives, since they would do the exact same thing. There is no choice.

So, the problem is if there is no difference then why the hell should I vote for them?

Should I vote for them because they have better budget policy? Not according to their own press release. According to that, they would have done more or less the same thing as the Conservatives. In this case, I may as well vote for the Conservatives.

Should I vote for them because they are more Green? Well, if I wanted to vote for a “green party”, why would I vote for a party that did essentially nothing for 13 years on the environment. In this case, I may as well vote for the Greens.

Should I vote for them because they are more left-wing? Well, in the last year they have voted multiple times against bills that would have help working-class families in the country. In this case, I may as well vote for the NDP or BQ.

Should I vote for them because they are more socially liberal? The only times in the last 15 years the Liberal party has tried to push through socially liberal policies is when they believed it would give them an edge in votes. Gay marriage, etc. have all been used as a political ploy to try to stem the flood of people leaving the Liberals to the NDP, Bloc and Green Parties. If they seriously believed in socially liberal policies, you would have seen far less reluctance to them during the last 15 years. They may have a small edge here, if there is a minority and the NDP have enough seats to force them to actually follow through on their promises. However, that is highly unlikely. My vote is probably better placed in one of the fourth parties or simply eaten.

Regardless, now I am stuck with a major problem. I don’t want to vote for the NDP, because simply put, they haven’t put any policies forward that cannot be placed on a protest sign or t-shirt. In other words, their policies, while interesting, don’t seem to be very thoroughly thought out, and I have an extreme fear that the same thing will happen federally with the NDP in power as happened in Ontario. Basically, they will win, and have no idea what they are supposed to do. If the NDP had a fully thought out strategy for exactly what they would do and how it would play out which didn’t involved miracles occuring, I would be more encouraged.

Regardless, the NDP voting against the bill to stop the war in Afghanistan in 2009 was the stupidest thing they could have possibly done. If they had voted for that, this whole debacle with the Manley report would likely have never played out. That insanely idiotic move was enough for me to seriously reconsider them as a real choice federally as they obviously need to learn a lot more about how the government really works. I cannot vote Bloc (unless they start running candidates outside of QC), so that’s out. So basically, I either eat my ballot, vote for the Greens and pray enough other people follow suit, or vote for the Liberals and pray for a Lib/NDP minority.

Either way, it’s another sad, sad day for the left-wing in Canada.

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edit: Bcer in Toronto has some interesting thoughts as well

When I was taking psychopathology at Waterloo, my term paper for the course discussed the effectiveness of various treatments of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. Specifically, I did a paper review of whether drugs, psychoanalysis, Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) (Spec. exposure and response prevention (ERP)), or some combination thereof was the most effective. What I had noticed was that drugs were very commonly over prescribed, but they did have a statistically significant effect as long as they were combined with some other method of therapy. Over the course of my paper I showed multiple studies which seemed to show that early, very short-term drug treatment combined with ERP seemed to be the most effective. It was especially effective at maintaining people on the program of ERP for the entire term of the treatment. It was especially effective for people with the most extreme versions of OCD. Which was interesting to me, since it implied that the drugs may work but only have strongly clear results for those with the worst symptoms.

Now, one of the papers (I don’t have the reference right now sadly, that was 7+ years ago), commented that repeating the experiment with a placebo may be useful as they believed the drug treatment may simply be keeping people on the program for ERP by convincing them they are actually doing something effective. I noted in my paper that while a placebo will likely not be effective, any drug which has a noticeable psychological effect will likely be effective if this is true (such as a low-dosage SSRI). Why would it have an effect? Simply because the person feels a change, and cannot account for it in any fashion other than the drugs are “working”. Another paper discussed that there was no obvious reason SSRIs or Tri-cyclic Acids (TCAs) should have such a strong effect on OCD. However, they also commented that it may be having the effect of decreasing depression and thus giving people more “will power”. At the time, I thought that this was the most reasonable reasoning within all of the papers for why Drugs+ERP worked so well. So, my naive conclusions stated that anti-depressant drugs should be prescribed for all cases of OCD, but only in small doses and permanently stopped once the patient seems to be responding positively to the ERP treatment.

However, as I have gotten older and been exposed to more people who are on cocktails of psychoactive drugs, I am starting to question whether the first theory may have been more correct. Most of the people I have been exposed to have some degree of diagnosed depression, and while OCD is not depression, I don’t think it is entirely improper to examine relations between treatments for the two pathologies. So, I have been pondering why the treatment regimes for depression are ineffective for so many people and why so many stay on drugs indefinitely. Could it be simply because so many people do not undergo any effective cognitive treatment or make necessary social changes in their lives? Now, a story comes out in the Independent that “anti-depressants don’t work”. Apparently:

In the study, researchers conducted a meta-analysis of all 47 clinical trials, published and unpublished, submitted to the Food and Drug Administration in the US, made in support of licensing applications for six of the best known antidepressant drugs, including Prozac, Seroxat – which is made by GlaxoSmithKline – and Efexor made by Wyeth. The results showed the drugs were effective only in a very small group of the most extremely depressed.

Two drugs were excluded from the study because of incomplete data. A third drug, chemical name nafazodone, has been withdrawn from the market because of side-effects.

Professor Irving Kirsch of the University of Hull, who led the study published in the online journal Public Library of Science (PLoS) Medicine , said the data submitted to the FDA would also have been submitted to the licensing authorities in Britain and Europe. It showed the drugs produced a “very small” improvement compared with placebo of two points on the 51-point Hamilton depression scale.

Which, while I think the Independent article goes a bit overboard in saying that they don’t work at all, it does emphasize that these drugs seem to be simply useless for all but the most extreme cases. Why? Well, there is some evidence that some anti-depressants can be addictive, and by taking drugs the fundamental problems causing, or encouraging the depression simply are not being resolved. When a patient has OCD, a doctor should not give them SSRIs and send them home. They need proper treatment to deal with the pathology. Why is our attitudes so different with depression?

As I discussed in an earlier post, while depression may have the symptom of a neuro-chemical imbalance, it may be caused by something more fundamental. Something that can be and should be fixed properly rather than patched with drugs that barely work.

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My Home MSN OTR fingerprint: 45B2B473 38D3426A A3C99890 F436C4F8 3F819715

My Home GTalk OTR fingerprint: E7177067 00830E64 5A5B2C40 3BC98A3A 93625985

My kjrose@gmail.com GPG fingerprint: 6060 3F5C C17F AB0D 5BEB 276D 29C8 4E47 CFFF AB21

My kjrose@intlstudents.org GPG fingerprint: 3B4E 9EE6 3234 1281 FF4E 7844 5B03 CE35 43BA 60AC

KJR / 1h

My IBI MSN OTR fingerprint: 459BF4A0 8B861852 B17FD947 EA9099EE 267045F5

My IBI GTalk OTR fingerprint: C58C3C85 AC81416B 8F23E480 E3E02DA5 9C8D78B7

More public fingerprints to come.

KJR / 1h

From Adbusters 16.2 (Links are mine)

We have countless TV channels to watch and video games to play. Our homes are bigger and our cars faster. But despite having more material wealth than in any time in our history, depression has become one of our leading afflictions.  By some estimates, one in five Americans suffers symptoms of hte disorder. The rate of major, clinical depression is ten times what it was in 1945.

Most psychiatrists would have us believe that depression results from a neurochemical imbalance in the brain — one that is genetically preordained. Drug treatments can be largely effective at righting what ails us l. But the sheer number of depressed people, and the rate at which this number is increasing, tells us something else is afoot. How could it be that so much of humanity, after thousands of generations of natural selection, is afflicted with such a debilitating disorder? Our genes shouldn’t be changing at the rate that depression diagnoses are rising.

A growing number of evolutionary scientists believe that depression is not a disease at all, but an adaptation that once was beneficial. Ed Hagen, a research scientist at Berlin’s Institute for Theoretical Biology argues that depression is so debilitating because its dire costs compel people to come and aid the sufferer.  But this mechanism evolved when people lived in much tighter-knit societie, where you couldn’t just ignore someone suffering in your midst. You couldn’t just hire another hunter or shaman, you had to fix what caused so much duress.

Our problem today is that we no longer live so communally. Depression usually leads to social isolation, and thus, continues to spiral. Yet in some traditional societies, like the Amish or the Kaluli tribe of New Guinea, depression is almost unknown. It may well be that our idea about hte individual pursuit of happiness may be buying us the opposite instead.

- Dee Hon

Just something I read that I felt was really interesting and important

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Here is a wonderful artistic short for everyone, “Love in a Backwards World”.

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h/t Ze

While surfing the web and pondering some random mathematical concepts for my research. I ran across this: http://net.gop.com/valentine/ . Basically it’s set of terrible valentine’s day jokes by the GOP vainly attempting to criticize the Democratic Party. Now, while looking at these I came to a strange revelation. With the current state of affairs for the Democrats, the Republicans don’t have a ready target to spend all of their money targeting. Historically, they have never attacked the Democratic party as a whole simply because attacking the Democratic Party did not have much of an effect on those who would vote Republican anyways. The issues are too complex, and attacking a Party as a whole is difficult to do as throughout the Democrats there are differing attitudes as to the best ways to run things.

The GOP has another option, which is to run on the merits of their candidate, McCain, but that is unlikely to happen as he is basically the best of a terrible lot, which the American populous have more or less written off as real options anyways.

So, they need to attack the Democratic nominees. Normally, this would be easy by this point. There would be a clear nominee at whom they could direct all of their energies. However, since there is no clear winner yet in the Democratic campaign, the GOP is being forced to split their finances and attack both of the nominees. Very unsuccessfully, if I may say so. It seems they are basically saying that Clinton would raise taxes, and that Obama is… well… I’m not entirely sure what they find negative about him. I guess they think he is young or something.

What do these valentine’s day cards have to do with anything. Well, it shows graphically how divided the GOP needs to be. They don’t have any one person to rally against, so it’s hard for them to fund raise, it’s hard for them to play dirty, basically it’s hard for them to do anything. If they attack Obama successfully, then Clinton picks up in the polls and their attacks are more or less useless. If they attack Clinton successfully, then Obama picks up in the polls and again when it comes to the presidency, their attacks become useless. In a way, it is incredibly beneficial for the Democrats to keep this divide up as long as possible, simply because the GOP is going to be forced away from doing what they do best, mud-slinging.

The longer the Democrats agree that both of their candidates are awesome, the shorter time the GOP will have to mount a solid directed campaign at the winning candidate. So, I say, let it ride to the convention. Obviously both of the names have a huge amount of recognition, and the Dems aren’t losing anything by actually being a democratic party without a coronation for a party favourite. Perhaps maybe in the end there will be a joint ticket between the two and things will look even better.

Just some crazy thoughts,

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h/t Ze Frank

I normally despise Axe commercials, mostly because they are the most ignorant misogynist tripe that ever goes on the airwaves. However, this commercial is actually really clever. (Click for full size)

It’s so odd to see  reasonably clever advertisements from a company who thinks that showing girls humping a water pipe is a good way to sell their product (Which smells like ass by the way.)

Besides this ad though, the idea of a Hillary/Obama (or Obama/Hillary) Ticket would actually be fairly kickass to me. Unfortunately, I don’t think they’ll be willing to take the other as their running mate.

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h/t Copyranter