27-year-old U.S. Army Sergeant Joshua Ryan Tabor has served 15 months in Iraq and apparently he picked up some less than appropriate parenting techniques while he was there:

“We had a report of [Tabor] walking around his neighborhood holding a Kevlar helmet and threatening to bust out windows,” Stancil told ABCNews.com today. “In the process of talking to Tabor’s girlfriend about what was going on, we learned that he had also been abusing his daughter.”

Stancil said that when the cops coaxed the little girl out of the bathroom they saw that she was covered in “multiple bruises pretty much all over her body.”

“She was very open with us,” Stancil said of the young girl, whose name is not being released because she is a minor. “She basically came right out and said, ‘Daddy does this to me. He uses his hands.’”

Both the girl and the father admitted to the torture, even detailing how Tabor would sit the girl on the edge of the bathroom sink and hold her head down until it was nearly submerged in water, dunking her if she refused to recite the alphabet, said Stancil.

Yes, the terrible thing this little girl did that prompted her punishment was refusing to recite the alphabet.

But at least Tabor is being upfront and honest about what he’s done:

Tabor told authorities that “his purpose was to punish her by putting her in the water because he knows she is afraid of it and he wanted her to cooperate.”

“She said her letters after that,” Tabor told the cops, admitting that he had grown frustrated with the girl after practicing the letters for “approximately three hours.”

After three hours of practice I’d refuse to say the fucking alphabet as well.

It seems Tabor felt that his daughter was not mentally up to where she should be for her age. And we all know that the best way to motivate a mentally deficient child is by repeatedly dunking their head into a sink full of hot water. Tabor’s girlfriend may also end up facing charges in the incident. She noted that Tabor has an “anger management problem” to police. Gee, ya think?

Oh, and according to investigators, the 4-year-old girl seemed quite articulate and without any developmental problems. Though after living with this asshole for the past couple of months – he has joint-custody in five months increments – she’ll probably need some therapy in the future.

Here’s a letter to the editor in the Minneapolis Star Tribune from “Satan” in response to Pat Robertson’s comments about Haiti making a deal with the devil:

Dear Pat Robertson,

I know that you know that all press is good press, so I appreciate the shout-out. And you make God look like a big mean bully who kicks people when they are down, so I’m all over that action.

But when you say that Haiti has made a pact with me, it is totally humiliating. I may be evil incarnate, but I’m no welcher. The way you put it, making a deal with me leaves folks desperate and impoverished.

Sure, in the afterlife, but when I strike bargains with people, they first get something here on earth — glamour, beauty, talent, wealth, fame, glory, a golden fiddle. Those Haitians have nothing, and I mean nothing. And that was before the earthquake. Haven’t you seen “Crossroads”? Or “Damn Yankees”?

If I had a thing going with Haiti, there’d be lots of banks, skyscrapers, SUVs, exclusive night clubs, Botox — that kind of thing. An 80 percent poverty rate is so not my style. Nothing against it — I’m just saying: Not how I roll.

You’re doing great work, Pat, and I don’t want to clip your wings — just, come on, you’re making me look bad. And not the good kind of bad. Keep blaming God. That’s working. But leave me out of it, please. Or we may need to renegotiate your own contract.

Best, Satan

LILY COYLE, MINNEAPOLIS

We’ve had an ongoing thread here on SEB wherein a Christian asks why he is perceived as the bad guy. It’s a thread I’ve mostly stayed out of because the regulars are already doing a pretty excellent job of making the argument. Besides, I’m always posting examples of why Christians are often perceived as the bad guys anyway.

Here’s a really good one. It’s a video clip from a Christian who is upset with the recent expansion of the Federal Hate Crimes bill:

I can feel the love of Jesus now! It makes me all warm and toasty!

So, yeah, that’s a pretty good example of why Christians are often seen as the bad guys. With loving acceptance like that, who needs enemies?

Found via Attempts at Rational Behavior.

If you’re going to take the job of protecting the country from terrorists into your own hands, it’s always best if you can tell the difference between a Greek Orthodox priest and an Arabic Terrorist. Apparently, despite being a Marine reservist, Jasen D. Bruce is not one of those people, but that didn’t stop him from stepping up when his country needed him most:

The incident took place around 6:35 p.m. Monday, police said. The priest, Alexios Marakis, 29, is from Crete, Greece. He is visiting St. Nicholas Greek Cathedral at 17 E Tarpon Ave. but police said he was in the Westshore area to bless another retired Greek priest.

But Marakis apparently got lost and exited northbound Interstate 275 into downtown Tampa, police said.

The priest followed several cars into the Seaport Channelside Apartments on Twiggs Street. He got out of his car and asked Bruce for help.

Instead of offering help, Bruce struck the priest on the head with a tire iron, police said.

He then chased the priest for three blocks to the Madison Avenue and Meridian Avenue, police said, and even called 911 to say that an Arabic man tried to rob him.

Next time perhaps he should call the police first and let them handle the situation before breaking out the tire iron.

Still, you’ve got to give Jasen credit for knowing when he’s screwed up big time:

The priest was taken to Tampa General Hospital. There, a translator helped Marakis speak to police.

Then officers went to Bruce’s apartment to speak to the reservist again. But he already had an attorney with him and refused to speak, police said.

I have a feeling someone is in for some anger management and racial sensitivity courses, at a minimum, in the near future.

Which is an impressive feat when you consider how many assholes FOX News already has.

It seems the Obama administration has been pointedly not talking to FOX News due to the fact that they’re basically the unofficial PR wing of the Republican party. Needless to say this has everyone at FOX News stamping their feet and crying censorship and whining about how the Obama administration is too dumb to tell the difference between the News side of FOX News and the Opinion side.

The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart helps to explain that difference for us:

Once again the hypocrisy displayed by Conservatives, in this case the Cons at FOX News, simply takes one’s breath away. It really is hard to imagine that it isn’t a cynical ploy on their part because they assume their audience is too stupid to remember how they praised the Bush administration for doing to MSNBC what the Obama administration is doing to FOX. Then again given the average intelligence level of a FOX News fan, that’s probably a safe assumption to make.

I’ve never been on trial so maybe I’m just ignorant of proper legal defense, but somehow this just seems like a bad move:

A Halifax Crown attorney filed a complaint with police after a man she is trying to have declared a dangerous offender lost his cool and shouted at her in a courtroom Tuesday morning.

“I hate your (expletive) guts,” Christopher Edward Newhook yelled at prosecutor Catherine Cogswell during a profanity-filled outburst in Halifax provincial court.

“I wish I could cut your (expletive) head off with a rusty hacksaw blade.”

But wait! There’s more:

Mr. Newhook, who is being sentenced for stabbing a man in the head two years ago in Halifax, also called Ms. Cogswell a maggot, parasite and goof and said her mother was a goof for having her.

A goof? Really? Is that the best you could come up with for an ending? You started off so promising in the Bat-Shit Insane Competition, but that dismount is going to cost you points with the judges.

This is going to be very long so bear with me.

A little under two weeks ago I got the following email:

Subject: Link spam issues
From: Mike Hickmon

les

You probably do not realize it but your site has spam linked my site with hundreds of links causing my rankings to drop.

can you please remove all of the links from your site pointing to my site:  http://besthomemadeenergy.com

sincerely
Mike

He’s right, I didn’t realize it as I can’t recall ever linking to a URL that at first glance sounds like it’s at best full of dubious claims and at worst a scam. So I did a few searches on SEB’s entries and comments and there weren’t any links to http://besthomemadeenergy.com to be found. So I sent back a reply asking Mike to supply me with a specific entry to look at as I wasn’t finding anything at all. Here’s the reply I got back:

Les

Go to:  http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search        and type in:  http://besthomemadeenergy.com

click on the inlinks button and this should come up:  http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http%3A%2F%2Fbesthomemadeenergy.com&fr=sfp&bwm=i

as regards to how the links got put there i am not sure, but it is hurting my rankings

Thanks for the mega fast response!

Mike

So I tried that and there are, indeed, several links to http://besthomemadeenergy.com from SEB listed there. Entries included one about a Spiderman comic, one about the fourth season of Doctor Who, one about Microsoft’s web-based version of Messenger, one about the PS3, and one about a true believer murdering an atheist. All of which were clean of any links to http://besthomemadeenergy.com.

There are other links from SEB back to http://besthomemadeenergy.com listed in that Yahoo! Site Explorer search and you have to go through quite a few of them before you find one where the topic might somehow have anything to do with energy production. I was at a loss as to why so many unrelated entries would be showing up in the search, however, as all the links were clean. Then a possibility occurred to me and I sent the following reply:

Mike,

I’ve checked every link on every page that shows up in your Yahoo listing. There aren’t any links in any of the content I’ve produced or that my commenters have left that point directly to your site.

The only thing I can think of is you must be using Google AdSense for your advertising in which case ads for your site may have popped up on SEB from time to time. For example at least one of the ads that popped up while I was checking was for http://www.power4home.com/ for reasons I cannot begin to fathom as the topic of the entry it was on had nothing to do with energy.

You probably need to check things out with Google AdSense. They probably have some way for you to define URLs you don’t want your ads to show up on. The links aren’t from anything I’ve put on my site so I can’t help you.

Les

At this point I was satisfied that I had done all that I needed to do. Mike felt otherwise:

Les

That is weird, i have nothing to do with google AdSense.  Well Keep looking to it.

Mike

Keep looking into it? To what end I wondered. It wasn’t really my problem in the first place and I was merely being courteous checking into it. OK, I have to admit I was also satisfying my own curiosity, but the point still remains that I have very little reason to give a shit if I’ve checked my entries and found them to be clean.

So today I get the following email in my inbox from Mike:

Les

I found out how this started.  I hire a guy from India to do blog posting and on 9/9/09 he posted to the below page.  you must have erased it which is OK but somehow i got 250 links from your site.  i don’t want to beat a dead horse but if there is anything that you can do i would appreciate it.

http://stupidevilbastard.com/index/seb/comments/guy_who_invented_the_super_soaker_has_a_new_high_efficency_solar_power_cell/

Mike

Holy jumping Christ on a pogo stick! This fucker just admitted he’s a comment spammer! OK, technically he’s not doing the spamming himself, but he is paying someone else to do it which is just as bad in my book. Without people like him there’s nothing for the comment spammers to spam. The reason so many entries linked back to his site is probably due to Yahoo! crawling SEB before I got around to removing the spam and the comment showing up in the recent comments side bar on every page Yahoo! hit.

I don’t know why this possibility didn’t occur to me beforehand, but I didn’t stop long enough to think about it. It was at this point that I took a look at http://besthomemadeenergy.com itself. It’s a small site consisting of links to other websites that are selling DIY energy creation kits such as solar panels and windmills with outrageous claims about how effective they are and how little they cost. Mike’s site includes “reviews” of each of the five sites he links to and, not surprisingly, they’re all rated five stars. Mike Hickmon is an affiliate parasite comment spammer.

It’s a simple concept: You find a bunch of websites that offer affiliate payments for every click you send them and then you set up your own website with said link backs and glowing reviews of the sites in question. Then you spam the living fuck out of every website you can in hopes your page rank goes up and generates enough click throughs to make you a millionaire for little real effort. It looks like Mike is making use of ClickBank which a lot of scam websites make use of for their affiliate programs. Not every affiliate program ClickBank handles is fraudulent, but it tends to be very popular with the people running hustles and they have enough people using them that I’m sure policing all the accounts has to be a nightmare.

Needless to say I was now pissed off and I sent back the following reply:

Mike,

So, in other words, you hired a spammer to spam a bunch of blogs and he picked one you don’t want to be associated with? I’ve got two words for you now: Tough Shit. You deserve what you get for hiring an unscrupulous asshole in the first place. Comment spam is something I am constantly cleaning up after and I have absolutely no sympathy for anyone who makes use of it. Here’s a suggestion: Stop using spammers to advertise your site and you won’t have to worry about which ones your link shows up on.

Not only do I not give a shit that it’s hurting your page ranking, but now I’m highly motivated to look into what you’re selling and see if it’s a scam itself and then writing a nice big post about it with links back to your site just to make sure the page rank is nice and high. You want links to your site from blogs? I’ll give you some links. I am literally stunned at the unmitigated gall you’re exhibiting here.

Les

A Google search for http://besthomemadeenergy.com returns some 67,700 websites that link back to it. A good portion of which is because they contain comment spam left by Mike’s Indian spammer. They made sure to hit any site they could find dealing with topics such as green energy or home improvement or do it yourself, but they also hit any site that so much as mentions in passing anything to do with energy such as SEB.

Of course there is a chance that the sites Mike is pushing on his affiliate parasite page are legit so I took a look at one of them. He ranks Earth4Energy as the number 1 best site so let’s check it out. Right on the front page we get the following in big bold type:

How to make your own solar panels for less than $200

Did you know? The cost of solar panels can be slashed by making them at home? You have probably read about it or seen it on TV, but have you tried it yourself?

“I made my own solar panel. It was simple and saved me a lot of money!”

Right there you should have a shit load of red flags waving and it should only get worse the further you read down the page.  If you’ve been to similar websites before then the pitch is very familiar. Lots of noise made about the cost of “traditional” solar systems for your home being in the $28,000 to $30,000 range followed by claims that you can make your own solar panels for $200. Testimonials interspersed between from people who claim to have made upwards of 2 panels for $100! Amazing! Eventually you get to the pitch for the “instruction kit” they’ve put together which they claim to sell for $246 but which you can get through a (supposedly) limited time deal of only $49.97! HOW AMAZING IS THAT?!?

It’s bullshit is what it is and they’re pushing it hard. If you try to close your browser or navigate away from the page it pops up a window pleading with you to reconsider that you have to close before you can leave the site. If you’re skeptical, like me, the next thing you do is type in earth4energy scam into Google. The very first link is to this page: RIPOFF REPORT: Earth4Energy Scam – Earth4Energy Review – Revealing the truth about the Earth4Energy product. Sounds like a skeptical look at the Earth4Energy claims, right? Except that it’s not. They don’t even try to maintain a skeptical tone for more than a paragraph and it’s clear by the time you get done with the page that this site is probably constructed by the same folks who own the Earth4Energy website. You’ll find several similar supposedly skeptical reviews such as this one at Ezine@rticles. Speaking of which: Has anyone seen an entry at Ezine@rticles that wasn’t spam of some sort? It seems to be a favorite of spammers as I’ve removed literally hundreds of comment spams that link to that site. So much so that I have since blacklisted Ezine@rticles completely.

As it turns out this is a technique for selling questionable products called Internet Saturation Marketing. The basic idea is that in addition to the site you’re selling your craptastic products on, you go out and register a whole bunch of other sites that you then use to make your craptastic product site look legit. In particular you want to snap up any variations on your sites’ name with the words “sucks” or “scam” added onto it to ensure any of your unsatisfied customers don’t get them first. Then you install a blog or a generic website that claims to be skeptical of your craptastic products and is surprised to find they really do work. Then you sign up with the ClickBank people so you can have an affiliate program that will help to spread your garbage even further. Even with all that effort it doesn’t take too long before you can find a few sites that are actually critical of Earth4Energy, but it really shouldn’t take much more than a read through of the site to determine this for yourself.

But all of that is getting away from my good buddy, Mike Hickmon. It seems trying to push DIY energy scams isn’t enough for old Mikey as I learned from his Twitter page. Mike’s been a very busy affiliate parasite with websites devoted to cats, fish, dogs, and pets in general all of which use a variation on “The X Whisperer” to cash in on the popularity of that particular phrase. You’ll just love the disclaimer he has for his pet sites. Here’s the disclaimer for his The Pet Whisperer site:

Pet-Whisperer.com provides articles and information for educational and entertainment purposes only.

Furthermore, by using this site, you agree that Pet-Whisperer.com cannot be held responsible – directly or indirectly, in full or in part – for any damages or losses that may be suffered as a result of taking action on the information published on Pet-Whisperer.com

You assume any and all risks associated with any actions taken as a result of reading Pet-Whisperer.com

Due Diligence

Pet-Whisperer.com provides “reviews” and “recommendations”, as well as outgoing hyperlinks for a variety of People and record finder products & solutions, including a direct link to the company’s website.

Every effort has been made to accurately represent the third-party solutions, products and websites referenced on Pet-Whisperer.com, and ongoing efforts will be made on a consistent basis to ensure that the accuracy of this information remains current and up-to-date.

However, Pet-Whisperer.com is ultimately not in control of any third-party company or website, and cannot necessarily guarantee that a given review, recommendation or opinion of a third party website or product is going to be accurate at any given time due to a number of factors, including – but not limited to – the third-party’s website hosting conditions, changes in ownership or staff, changes of the company’s policies or activities, and other unforeseeable factors.

Therefore, by using this site in any capacity, you agree that it is your sole responsibility to do your own due diligence in order to protect yourself prior to using any third-party (non- Pet-Whisperer.com) product, service or advice.

Pet-Whisperer.com is not responsible for any damages or losses that may potentially result by accessing/using a website URL published on Pet-Whisperer.com. You must do your own due-diligence when visiting another company’s website or using another company’s product.

In other words: “I know the products I’m helping other people to sell in hopes of garnering a few pennies in affiliate fees are probably bullshit that are most-likely harmless, but on the off-chance you kill your pet with any of them I put this disclaimer here so you can’t sue me. Yes I am ironically telling you that you should seek out information on whether the products I’m pushing are any good while at the same time putting out misinformation claiming that they are good and then covering my ass just in case they aren’t any good. Funny old world, ain’t it?” The disclaimer also lies in suggesting that it provides, and I quote, “a direct link to the company’s website.” Mike doesn’t provide a direct link as all his links go through the aforementioned ClickBank service. He can’t directly link to the company’s websites because he wouldn’t garner any affiliate fees that way.

Based on his Twitter page Mike Hickmon has dozens of affiliate parasite websites set up for all manner of craptastic products. I know they’re all his because he shows up in all the domain registrations I checked:

Registered through: GoDaddy.com, Inc. (http://www.godaddy.com)
Domain Name: PET-WHISPERER.COM
Created on: 05-Jan-09
Expires on: 05-Jan-10
Last Updated on: 05-Jan-09

Administrative Contact:
Hickmon, Michael goebusiness@gmail.com
12019 herman dr
riverside, California 92505
United States
(951) 687-2129

I’m half tempted to give Mike a call and tell him how I feel about his business undertaking and comment spamming ways directly, but I think this rather amazingly lengthy blog rant is more than enough. I’ve made a point of linking to his http://besthomemadeenergy.com site repeatedly to ensure that Yahoo! and Google know that I’m linking to it. I think others should know about Mike Hickmon’s businesses and how they push questionable products. He’s not exactly a scammer himself, but he’s helping the scammers and cluttering up websites with spam in doing so. There’s certainly nothing illegal about what Mike is doing, but that doesn’t mean it’s legit.

So yeah, as you can tell, I’m pretty pissed off about this and I’ve spent probably way more time and energy looking into it and then ranting about it than I should have. However, if it stops one person from falling for the bullshit being pushed by assholes like Mike Hickmon then it’ll be worth it.

I’ve long ago gotten used to the near-constant comment, trackback, and referrer spamming that comes with running a blog—trackbacks got so bad I turned them off rather than have to clean them up every day—but now there’s two new tactics spammers have been using that are annoying as hell. Or at least they’re new to me.

First up is member account spamming. This is where they register an account on your blog and then put links to their sites in their member profiles and signatures, but they don’t leave any comments so you don’t necessarily see the links unless you check their profiles. SEB allows you to automatically register by responding to an email and then it sends me an email notice that you’ve registered. I’ve had to resort to checking every newly registered account to see if it contains spam links as I get the notifications. I only noticed this trend because some of the spammers use link-back checkers to make sure the member account exists and the hits to those accounts show up in my referrer log. It’s awfully strange to see hits on member accounts for people who have never left a comment on the blog. You have to admit that it’s a pretty clever way of circumventing the spam blockers most blogs run these days as member profiles aren’t typically checked and yet member lists are often crawled by Google.

The second method is even more annoying. It’s similar to the one above except that they don’t put any spam links in the member profile at all. Instead they target sites, like SEB, that have their own wikis setup. Any registered member can edit the wiki and wiki entries are not subject to spam scanning. So they register an account, activate it, and then go into the wiki and add pages in that look legitimate, but contain spam links. Just today someone registered an account and made a new “cetinionism” category page in the SEBPedia then used a copy and paste job from the Talk.Origins site to do a brief overview, followed by a link to another page within the wiki and then a link back to their “academic paper writing service” for “more information.”

The only reason I caught onto this is because some of the spammers pushed their luck by registering account names such as “AcademicStudy” and “WritingStudy” which are obviously spamish account names to begin with. When I didn’t see any spam links in their profiles I grew suspicious and started poking through the user activity log and noticed they all were editing pages in the SEBPedia. Sure enough when I checked the wiki whole new pages were in place that looked like a lot of work went into them, but which contained spam links. When I deleted the accounts the wiki pages went with them.

So if you’re running a system like ExpressionEngine and you’re using the wiki module (or you’re running a stand-alone wiki on your site) then you might want to examine your recent changes log to see if anyone is using it for spamming purposes. What boggles the mind isn’t that they’re clever enough to find new ways to spam your site, but that they’re still dumb enough to use account names that are obviously for spamming.

Because that’s exactly what Jesus would do:

Jensen Beach pastor sentenced to 20 years for mortgage fraud—South Florida Sun-Sentinel.com

STUART – A defiant Rodney McGill prayed for affliction upon his adversaries prior to his sentencing in Martin County Circuit Court, and turned his back on Judge Sherwood Bauer Jr. as he was handed a 20-year prison term for his part in fraudulently obtaining some $1 million in real estate loans.

“Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, for every witness called against me, I pray cancer in their lives, lupus, brain tumor, pancreatic cancer,” McGill intoned at his counsel table prior to the start of the hearing Tuesday.

This man believes in an all-knowing and all-powerful entity that is responsible for creating everything in existence and who, by divine will alone, keeps everything humming along from the smallest elementary particle to the largest galaxies. He is not considered crazy for this belief. Given the awesome undertaking of said being—maintaining all of existence through thought alone—this man believes that his trials and tribulations are important enough to such an entity that praying to it will garner its attention. He is not considered crazy for this belief. Considering this man’s relative insignificance amongst the countless billions of things that constitutes the Universe that occupy the mind of said entity he still somehow manages to believe he is special enough that said entity would afflict other aspects of its creation with the most horrific maladies and diseases known for daring to speak against this man in a court of law.

He is, amazingly, not considered crazy for this belief.

Is it any wonder, given these amazing and ridiculous beliefs, that this man believes himself to be innocent of any crime? There is no doubt in this man’s mind that he is in the right. How could there be given all the things he “knows” about the nature of reality and who is running the show? The truly amazing part, however, is the simple fact that even if his imprecatory prayers go unanswered and his appeals all fail and he ends up serving out his full sentence in jail, his belief in this all-powerful, all-knowing entity that supposedly has reason to give a shit about his fate will probably not waver in the slightest.

Behold the power of true faith. It can make you crazy.

Gotta love the Pope. If ever there was a perfect example of religious hubris and hypocrisy at its finest then the Pope is it. The fact that he can claim to be a font of morality after the travesty of justice that was the pedophile priest scandal shows that it’s not just the evangelicals that are immune to reality. Needless to say he find atheism to be a root cause of many of the ills the world faces.

Take, for example, environmental destruction. According to the Pope the blame lies with atheists and secularism:

Is it not true that inconsiderate use of creation begins where God is marginalized or also where his existence is denied? If the human creature’s relationship with the Creator weakens, matter is reduced to egoistic possession, man becomes the “final authority,” and the objective of existence is reduced to a feverish race to possess the most possible.

Creation, matter structured in an intelligent manner by God, is entrusted to man’s responsibility, who is able to interpret and refashion it actively, without regarding himself as the absolute owner. Man is called to exercise responsible government to protect it, to obtain benefits and cultivate it, finding the necessary resources for a dignified existence for all. With the help of nature itself and with the commitment of its own work and creativity, humanity is able to assume the grave duty to hand over to the new generations an earth which, in turn, the latter will be able to inhabit worthily and cultivate further.

I don’t know of any atheists personally, though I don’t doubt there are some out there somewhere, who feel that fucking up the planet isn’t a problem. I do know a lot of Christians who have argued that it doesn’t matter if we fuck up the planet because Jesus is coming back “Any Day Now™” and will wipe the planet clean of all unbelievers and restore it to like-new condition. In fact you can find numerous newspaper articles with arguments from Christians saying that environmentalism is Satanic and un-Christian and God declared man had dominion over the Earth to do with as he pleases, etc. and so on.

Meanwhile most of the atheists I know realize that this is the only home we have and if we make it too toxic it’ll be bad for the long-term survival of the species. We don’t believe in a magic sky fairy that’ll come down on a cloud and make it all better. We’ve got no one to rely on but ourselves. Yet, somehow, the Pope believes it’s all our fault.