My Fellow Inebriates,

Once again the bears were left to their own devices yesterday. The Terry Fox Run was on, and parents were invited to accompany the primary kids (Miss P) as they “ran” a 15-minute course. (For some reason the littlest kids, Miss V’s kindergarten cohort, were confined to the school’s track and exhorted to run five laps, instructions they took literally, sprinting the entire 1.5 K while the older grades shambled leisurely around the neighborhood.)

Before the family left the house there was the usual charity shakedown for donation money, with both parents scrambling to find enough nickels and dimes to create a sufficiently jangly and weighty package for each of the kids’ contributions. There wasn’t much left for Terry’s legacy; the school had already hit us up for Fun Lunch (Hot Lunch) money, Scholastic Reading money, school-supply fees, and fieldtrip fees, on top of which they tried to flog us an Entertainment Book full of coupons that would cost $5,000 in babysitting money to take proper advantage of. Terry Fox ended up getting pennies and nickels with some lint mixed in.

My dad said this was just as well; we didn’t need to fuel the Cancer Machine. He was leaving, so I didn’t get to clarify this cynical (facetious?) remark, but luckily Scarybear was there to explain.

Scary says cancer is a multi-zillion-dollar industry for Big Pharma—so lucrative that, even though most cancers have already-discovered cures consisting of simple and inexpensive herbal treatments, Big Pharma is suppressing all such knowledge so it can keep the Cancer Machine rolling.

If I have two brain cells, Scary has maybe one, and I happened to be sober, so I decided to look into this. After all, if five-year-old V was out giving herself shin splints (“Terry Fox was a hero, Mummy! We have to keep the dream alive!”), not to mention an easy bedtime for all concerned, it made sense that she was doing it for a good cause.

According to Scary, “some dude” [Royal Raymond Rife] learned how to bombard organisms with just the right audio or radio frequency to kill them. But when the head of the American Medical Association [Morris Fishbein] tried to get a piece of the action, Rife, not trusting Fishbein’s ethics, refused to sell. So Fishbein effectively destroyed Rife, withholding research money and discrediting him publicly. Rife became disheartened and started drinking.

So was Rife a crackpot? Would his cure have worked? According to author Barry Lynes, in a 1934 study, 16 terminally ill cancer patients received Rife therapy. For little more than the cost of electricity, they were all cured.

I have no idea how Scary even learned about this story. He doesn’t read books if he can help it. He’s probably never going to get cancer. But he’s Scarybear, and if you mentioned Occam’s Razor to him he’d be familiar with it from watching a million hours of science fiction, but really, Occam’s Razor is the antithesis of what Scary’s about. Scary says “that dude” [Rife] is just one example of a guy who’s cured cancer only to be railroaded by powerful medical interests.

I asked Scary if Rife had destroyed himself by turning to alcohol after his invention was vilified. Scary said of course not, alcohol isn’t really addictive; it’s just that “powerful medical interests have put a secret substance into it that hooks the brain’s pleasure centers on it so that Big Pharma can make money treating alcohol-related diseases.”

“Oh,” I said. “So my behavior isn’t my fault.”

Said Scary: “Of course it’s your fault. You’re a total douche.”