{"id":4695,"date":"2020-10-23T10:44:41","date_gmt":"2020-10-23T14:44:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/?p=4695"},"modified":"2020-10-23T10:45:42","modified_gmt":"2020-10-23T14:45:42","slug":"the-strange-case-of-dr-jekyll-and-mr-ford","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/?p=4695","title":{"rendered":"The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Ford"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h1 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><a href=\"https:\/\/thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com\/\">Throne, Altar, Liberty\n<\/a>\n<\/h1>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">The Canadian Red Ensign<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/2.bp.blogspot.com\/-ShJ56ncRijQ\/Vic7ppYOalI\/AAAAAAAAABc\/d3gWM-vfhbM\/s1600-r\/red%2Bensign.jpg\" alt=\"The Canadian Red Ensign\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Friday, October 23, 2020<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<h4 class=\"wp-block-heading\">\nThe Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Ford\n<\/h4>\n\n\n\n<p>Nineteenth century Scottish writer Robert Louis\nStevenson is remembered mostly for his novels <em>Treasure Island<\/em>, featuring the pirate Long John Silver, and <em>Kidnapped<\/em>.&nbsp;&nbsp; Almost as well-known as these, and probably\nfar more influential in terms of the number of imitations it has inspired and\nadaptations that have been made, is a shorter work, published in 1886, the same\nyear as <em>Kidnapped<\/em>, entitled <em>Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde<\/em>\n(1).&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The story is about a physician, Dr. Henry Jekyll, who\nlike everybody else, struggles with the inner conflict between his base\ninstincts and urges on the one hand and his ethical standards on the other.&nbsp;&nbsp; Unlike everybody else, he, being a scientist,\ntries to find a scientific solution to the problem, which he sees more in terms\nof the need to protect his reputation than to suppress his vicious\ndesires.&nbsp;&nbsp; He invents a serum that\ntransforms him into Mr. Edward Hyde so that he can indulge the latter without\ndamaging his reputation.&nbsp;&nbsp; The potion,\nhowever, also produces a division in his moral character, basically separating\nall the wickedness into the persona of Mr. Hyde and all of the goodness into\nthe persona of Dr. Jekyll.&nbsp;&nbsp; The\nconsequence of all of this, is that Mr. Hyde is left with no inner constraints\non his wickedness, and becomes a thoroughly depraved, sadistic, sociopathic,\nmurderer.&nbsp;&nbsp; Dr. Jekyll, who by contrast\nbecomes more upright, humane and saintly, eventually loses control over the\ntransformation process and starts to transform into Mr. Hyde involuntarily, at\nfirst in his sleep, later when he is awake.&nbsp;&nbsp;\nThen, running out of the serum that reverses the transformation, and\nbeing unable to produce another batch that will work, he realizes that he is\nabout to become his evil alter-ego permanently, and commits suicide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>After the story was published and became widely known,\nthe names of the character became more or less synonymous with the kind of dual\npersonality in which a person can be sweet, gentile, and charming one minute\nand the exact opposite of that the next.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I have been reminded of this story every time that\nDoug Ford, the current premier of Upper Canada, or Ontario as those who like to\nkeep up with the times prefer to call it, has appeared in the news in the last\neight months and especially the last two.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Two summers ago, when the Progressive Conservatives\nled by Doug Ford, won a majority of 76 out of the 124 seats in the provincial\nlegislature, I breathed a sigh of relief for our neighbours to the east.&nbsp;&nbsp; They had suffered under Grit misrule for\nfifteen years, first under Dalton McGuinty and then under Kathleen Wynne, who\nwere in my opinion the two worst provincial-level Liberal leaders in the entire\nhistory of the Dominion.&nbsp;&nbsp; The election\nthat put Doug Ford in the premier\u2019s chair, also reduced the Grits to seven\nseats, the worst defeat they have ever suffered in that province, which was\nitself even greater cause to rejoice than the Conservative victory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When Doug Ford became leader of Upper Canada\u2019s\nProgressive Conservatives in the lead-up to the provincial election of 2018, I\nknew little about him other than that he was the brother of the late Rob Ford,\nwho from 2010 to 2014 had been mayor of the city which had been known as York\nbefore political correctness prompted its being rechristened with the Indian\nname of Toronto in 1834.&nbsp; During the\nyears in which Rob Ford was mayor, he was constantly under attack by the CBC\nand the rest of the mainstream progressive media, which only strengthened me in\nmy conviction that, as I said at the time, Rob Ford, drunk and on crack, ran\nhis city better than any other sober mayor in Canada, including and especially\nour own here in Winnipeg.&nbsp;&nbsp; That would\nhave been Sam Katz back then, and Mayor Duckie (2) who has since replaced him\nis even worse.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The same corrupt left-wing media that had relentlessly\npursued the destruction of his brother, went after Doug Ford during the 2018\nelection.&nbsp;&nbsp; They shamelessly dug poor old\nRob up from his grave \u2013 he had passed away from cancer two years previously \u2013\nand began whipping and crucifying his corpse.&nbsp;&nbsp;\nSince Ford was using populist rhetoric in his campaign, they naturally\ncompared him to Donald the Orange who through populism and nationalism had\nbecome president of the American republic in 2016.&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;Now,\njust to be clear, since my politics happens to be the royal-monarch-as-defender-of-the-Church\nkind of Toryism from which the Conservative Party has been lamentably drifting\nfor decades \u2013 or rather centuries \u2013 populism and nationalism are actually lower\nin my own estimation than they are in that of the progressive media.&nbsp;&nbsp; Forced to choose between the former and the\nlatter, however, I would gladly chose the populists any day.&nbsp;&nbsp; So it was that this progressive assault on\n\u201cOntario\u2019s Trump\u201d raised his stock considerably in my books.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Despite the media\u2019s amusing attempt to use his\npopulist rhetoric to hang the \u201cfar right\u201d label on him \u2013 neither populism nor\nwhat the media considers to be \u201cfar right\u201d is right wing at all, let alone\nextremely right wing &#8211; &nbsp;Doug Ford was\nbasically a mainstream, centre-right, Progressive Conservative.&nbsp;&nbsp; His platform consisted mostly of tax\nreductions, infrastructure improvement, de-regulation, and cleaning up the mess\nthat McGuinty and Wynne had made of the province\u2019s school system.&nbsp;&nbsp; While there was much that was lacking in\nthis platform, it was a major improvement over what the former governing party\nhad been offering.&nbsp;&nbsp; After Ford won the\nelection, the first year and a half of his premiership were fairly\nimpressive.&nbsp;&nbsp; He stuck it to the\nprovincial bureaucrats with a salary-and-hiring freeze, and went to war with\nthe environazis who were determined to make life more miserable and\nunaffordable for everybody because of their superstitious belief in a climate\napocalypse extrapolated through a computer simulation from the pseudoscientific\ntheory of anthropogenic global warming.&nbsp;&nbsp;\nThis included standing up to Captain Airhead, whom we are unfortunate\nenough to have as the Prime Minister of Her Majesty\u2019s government in Ottawa, and\nwho was threatening to impose a federal carbon tax on all provinces that did\nnot voluntarily adopt one of their own.&nbsp;&nbsp;\nShortly after the election, the new Minister of Education announced that\nthe province would repeal everything the outgoing government had done to turn\nthe schools into indoctrination camps for brainwashing young children with\nsexual perversion and gender identity politics although there have been reports\nthat the follow-through on this was less than spectacular and that all they\nreally did was make a few minor adjustments.&nbsp;&nbsp;\n(3)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The qualifying remarks in my last sentence\naside, Ford had gotten off to a fairly good start for a contemporary,\nmainstream, Progressive Conservative premier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Then the Chinese bat flu arrived in Upper Canada.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; When that happened, Doug Ford underwent an\nalmost-overnight metamorphosis into a despotic, bullying, COVID-monster, and\nbecame the darling of the media that had been demonizing him for the last two\nyears.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Of course, something similar could be said about every\npremier in the Dominion.&nbsp;&nbsp; Our own Progressive\nConservative Premier here in the south-east corner of Prince Rupert\u2019s Land, Brian\nPallister, declared a state of emergency and put our province into a most\ndraconian lockdown before there was any significant outbreak, gave that \u2013 in my\nopinion &#8211; power mad goon Dr. Brent Roussin a blank cheque for imposing\nrestrictions, no matter how stupid, self-contradictory, and outright harmful\nthey were, and only the other day doubled the fines for people who violate\nthese arbitrary regulations. &nbsp;&nbsp;Pallister,\nhowever, has long been known to be a jerk.&nbsp;&nbsp;\nThe only reason I welcomed his re-election the other year is that the\nother option was the truly odious Wab Kinew.&nbsp;&nbsp;\nDoug Ford, on the other hand, had given us every reason to expect much\nbetter of him, before he turned around and started acting like a squirt bottle\nused for cleaning the orifices of the nether regions of the body.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Now, some might come to Doug Ford\u2019s defence by saying that\nhis province was hit particularly hard by the bat flu.&nbsp;&nbsp; Granted, out of all the provinces its number\nof deaths was exceeded only by those of Lower Canada.&nbsp;&nbsp; This hardly constitutes justification of his\nactions, however.&nbsp;&nbsp; It is only to be\nexpected that in a country-wide outbreak, the two provinces of Central Canada\nwould have the most deaths.&nbsp;&nbsp; They have\nthe most people, after all.&nbsp;&nbsp; There is\nmore to it, however, than just that.&nbsp;&nbsp;\nThe bulk of the deaths in those provinces took place in long-term care\nfacilities, which, again, is predictable from the fact that the only people who\nare at any sort of &nbsp;statistically\nsignificant risk from the &nbsp;Chinese bat\nflu are those who are really old, with two or more complicating health\nconditions. &nbsp;&nbsp;In Upper and Lower Canada,\nthe situation in the nursing homes got so bad that the Armed Forces had to be\nsent in to take the place of the staff who had either contracted the virus\nthemselves or deserted in fear of doing so.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;\nThey sent back to their superiors reports of the horrendous conditions\nthey found there \u2013 conditions such as cockroaches, rotting food, bedding left\nsoiled for days on end, and worse \u2013 caused not by the bat flu but by neglect\nand abuse on the part of the administration and staff.&nbsp;&nbsp; While Ford is hardly to blame for such\nconditions, for in many of these places this sort of thing had been going on\nfor years prior to his premiership, the fact of the matter is that had he done\nthe common sense thing at the beginning of the \u201cpandemic\u201d and taken measures to\nprovide extra protection for the people most at risk, rather than listening uncritically\nto the imbecilic advice of medical experts who, themselves regurgitating\nnonsense cooked up by the World Health Organization to serve the nefarious ends\nof the Chinese Communists and the pharmaceutical conglomerates, recommended a universal\nquarantine on the young and healthy instead, this sort of thing could have been\ndealt with much earlier, and steps could have been taken which might have prevented\nthe outbreaks in the nursing homes from getting so bad.&nbsp; Jumping on board the lockdown bandwagon,\nprevented him from pursuing other, sounder, options, and made the situation\neven worse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When the World Health Organization screamed \u201cpandemic\u201d,\nFord traded in his tired old populism and common sense for a shiny new superstitious\nbelief in the infallibility of international health organizations and other\nmedical experts, and imposed their recommendations with a particularly heavy\nhand.&nbsp;&nbsp; When people with legitimate\nconcerns about the erosion of their rights, freedoms, livelihoods and businesses\nunder public health orders and who likely largely overlapped the people who had\nvoted Ford into the premier\u2019s office two years ago, began to protest against social\ndistancing, lockdowns, and the like, he dismissed them all as yahoos.&nbsp;&nbsp; In July, he rammed Bill 195 through the legislature,\na bill which gave him two years\u2019 worth of emergency powers which he could\nexercise without consulting the legislature.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;\nThis was a province-level equivalent of what Captain Airhead and his\nLiberals had tried to sneak into an emergency spending bill in Parliament in\nMarch, but which Her Majesty\u2019s Loyal Opposition had mercifully thwarted.&nbsp;&nbsp; Ford punished the members of his own party\nwho voted against this bill, such as Belinda Karahalios, the MPP representing\nCambridge, by expelling them from the caucus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>On Monday, September 28<sup>th<\/sup>, Ford held a\npress conference in which he announced that his province was officially in the \u201csecond\nwave\u201d of the bat flu, and that it \u201cwill be worse than the first wave we faced\nearlier this year.\u201d &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;As with all the other\nclaptrap about this so-called \u201csecond wave\u201d this was a cunning form of\nsleight-of-hand.&nbsp;&nbsp; That day, Upper Canada\nhad seen the highest number of new cases recorded in a single day since the\nbeginning of the pandemic. &nbsp;It had not\nseen a commensurate spike in the number of people gravely sick, being\nhospitalized, put in intensive care, and dying.&nbsp;&nbsp; Indeed, the new cases were mostly among age\ngroups which were not at any significant risk from the disease.&nbsp;&nbsp; This has been more or less the case\neverywhere throughout this so-called \u201csecond wave\u201d.&nbsp;&nbsp; My province, which seen the number of deaths\nmultiply since the beginning of September \u2013 we were at fourteen at the\nbeginning of September and are now at forty-seven, is not an exception. &nbsp;&nbsp;These deaths are, like those which more\npopulated provinces experienced in the spring, almost entirely among those who\nare both extremely old and extremely sick, because this is Manitoba\u2019s first\nwave, the entire misguided and totalitarian \u201cflatten the curve\u201d strategy having\nmerely delayed it, while causing a whole lot of unnecessary other harm in the\nprocess.&nbsp;&nbsp; <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Even before Ford made this announcement, he had\nlowered the number of people allowed to meet socially in Toronto, Peel Region,\nand Ottawa to ten, slapped a $10 000 fine on anyone who organized an event that\nbroke this rule, and a $750 fine on anyone who attended.&nbsp;&nbsp; It is difficult to decide which is more\nridiculous, the limit of social gatherings to ten in a country where assembly and\nassociation are two of the officially recognized fundamental freedoms, or the\ninsanely high amounts of those fines. &nbsp;(4)&nbsp; Certainly,\nthe late Rob Ford, who was well known for his love of large social gatherings,\nmust be spinning in his grave over all this party-pooping, and the whole\ngeneral way in which his brother has turned into a piece of rotting Communist excrement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>My unsolicited advice to Ford is to find the serum\nthat will turn him back to his original self and to do so quickly.&nbsp; &nbsp;Nobody, except the media progressives, who\nwant everybody to spend the rest of their lives, hiding under their beds in\ntheir basements, curled up in the fetal position, sucking their thumbs, afraid\nto go out lest the SARS-Cov-2 Bogeyman get them, likes this new version.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(1)&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Stevenson\ndeliberately left out both the definite article and the periods after the\nabbreviations for doctor and mister from his title.&nbsp;&nbsp; His original publisher followed his\nwhims.&nbsp;&nbsp; Most subsequent publishers have\nnot.&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(2)&nbsp;Brian Bowman looks like Jon Cryer, who, prior to his role as Alan on <em>Three and a Half Men, <\/em>was best known as\n\u201cDuckie\u201d in John Hughes\u2019 1986 \u201cBrat Pack\u201d teen rom-com, <em>Pretty in Pink<\/em>.&nbsp;&nbsp; An\ninteresting bit of trivia, although as completely irrelevant as this entire\nfootnote, is that Charlie Sheen, Cryer\u2019s co-star in <em>Three and a Half Men<\/em> (and earlier in <em>Hotshots<\/em>), was the original choice for the role of Blane, \u201cDuckie\u201d\u2019s\nultimately successful rival for the affections of Andie (Molly Ringwald) in\nthis film, a role that ended up going to Andrew McCarthy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(3)&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;See\n<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theinterim.com\/features\/broken-promises-and-politics\/\">this\narticle<\/a> from <em>The\nInterim<\/em>.&nbsp; It is worth noting that a\nserious effort to clean up the schools would have to involve more than just\nrepealing Kathleen Wynne\u2019s curriculum.&nbsp;&nbsp;\nI was in Toronto for a wedding almost ten years ago, while Dalton\nMcGuinty was still premier.&nbsp;&nbsp; On the ride\nback to Pearson International, my driver, a recent immigrant from somewhere in\nthe Middle East, struck up a conversation.&nbsp;&nbsp;\nWhen he found out I was from Manitoba, he told me how lucky I was to be\nliving in a rural, conservative, province, where I did not have to put up with\nthe likes of Dalton McGuinty, who was making the schools teach sexual\nperversions to young children.&nbsp;&nbsp; I didn\u2019t\nhave the heart to break the news to him, that the NDP which was governing\nManitoba at the time was just about as bad, although they had not taken the\nschools quite that far.&nbsp;&nbsp; My point, however,\nis that this conversation could not have taken place when it did, had McGuinty\nnot already started the schools along the path down which Wynne would take them\nmuch further.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(4)&nbsp;&nbsp;Of\ncourse there are those who have gone even further than Ford in this\nabsurdity.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Dr. Brent Roussin has\nlimited social gatherings to five in Winnipeg and the surrounding region.&nbsp; Back in Ford\u2019s own province, Patrick Brown,\nhis predecessor as PC leader and currently the mayor of Brampton, imposed fines\nof up to $100 000 on those not practicing \u201cphysical distancing\u201d as far back as\nApril.&nbsp;&nbsp; An orchard owner in neighbouring\nCaledon was threatened with a fine that large by the Ontario Provincial Police in\nlate September for letting people pick their own apples on his farm.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Throne, Altar, Liberty The Canadian Red Ensign Friday, October 23, 2020 The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Ford Nineteenth century Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson is remembered mostly for his novels Treasure Island, featuring the pirate Long John &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/?p=4695\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[770,2499,2498,2502,1707,2136,2501,836,1358,560,901,1439],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4695"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4695"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4695\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4696,"href":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4695\/revisions\/4696"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4695"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4695"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4695"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<br />
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