It's the Pope's fault!

What this time? According to, say, the L.A. Times and its faithful acolytes, pretty much everything. Take this miserable hot weather, for instance. If only he'd, uh, spoken out. Yeah, that's it. Spoken out.

Unfortunately the blame-the-pope faction has run into a little hitch in the gitalong over here on the AIDS front. It seems that "A letter by Australian bioethicist Dr. Amin Abboud published in the July 30 edition of the British Medical Journal notes that "A regression analysis done on the HIV situation in Africa indicates that the greater the percentage of Catholics in any country, the lower the level of HIV."

More here.