Category Archives: News

News

Biden DOJ sues Tennessee for law against HIV-positive prostitution

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What would you think if I told you that the same member of the Biden administration who was responsible for raiding the homes of peaceful pro-lifers and persecuting police officers for protecting the public from criminals is now suing the state of Tennessee? Why is she suing the state of Tennessee? Because Tennessee has a law that is tough on prostitutes who have HIV.

Her name is Kristen Clarke.

Let’s start with pre-dawn raiding the home of a pro-life activist.

Daily Signal reports:

Republican Texas Rep. Chip Roy grilled the assistant attorney general for civil rights at the Department of Justice on Tuesday over the DOJ’s targeting of pro-life activists like Catholic father Mark Houck.

Kristen Clarke, who oversees investigations into violations of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, came before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government on Tuesday for a hearing on the “Oversight of the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division.”

[…]Roy drew attention to the fact that Clarke’s division charged at least 26 individuals with FACE Act violations in 2022 and more in 2023.

“Even under your watch, it’s at least 35 to 1 or 2,” Roy emphasized. “That is not even-handed. It’s far from even handed. And importantly, Mark Houck, who was targeted, had a raid of his home, prosecuted under this, was acquitted by a jury! Have you apologized to him on behalf of the Department of Justice for that grave violation of his civil rights? Having his family have to watch him being raided at his home? And then he’s acquitted by a federal jury? Have you apologized to him?”

She refused to apologize to Mark Houck. Roy replied to her non-apology:

“So the answer to that is no,” Roy said.

Houck was arrested at his home by heavily armed police, in front of his wife and 7 children, who were traumatized. Houck is now suing the Biden DOJ for “malicious and retaliatory prosecution.”

In a different Daily Signal article, Virginia Allen notes that Clarke has a reputation for far-left activism:

Well, the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division is responsible for investigations into crimes against pro-life pregnancy centers, and the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ is run by a woman named Kristen Clarke. Kristen Clarke is pro-defund the police. She is for supporting Antifa, BLM, and she is on her own Twitter account vehemently opposed to pro-life pregnancy centers. So, you’ve got a major conflict of interest within the DOJ, and you’ve got [Attorney General] Merrick Garland running cover for her, insisting that the DOJ is being perfectly evenhanded.

Virginia says “Kristen Clarke is pro-defund the police”. To assess that, let’s take a look at this article from Daily Wire:

The U.S. Department of Justice is opening a civil rights investigation into the City of Memphis and the Memphis Police Department to determine whether there is a pattern or practice of conduct that violates the constitution or federal civil rights law, the U.S. Justice Department announced Thursday.

Time will tell whether this is a serious investigation, or something more like what happened with Mark Houck. One thing for sure – Memphis has a reputation as an extremely high-crime, high-violence area.

According to this article by WREG News Channel 3:

Homicide rates dropped dramatically across the country in 2023, but Memphis is bucking the national trend with a triple-digit increase in killings.

Memphis Police records show 393 homicides in Memphis as of Dec. 28 this year, and 337 of them were considered murders. At least two more people have been killed in the past 24 hours.

The city is poised to end the year with about 400 homicides. That is roughly 100 more than last year and 50 more than 2021.

Do you think that Kristen Clarke’s actions will produce good results for law-abiding Memphis taxpayers?

OK, now let’s look at Kristen Clarke’s actions against the conservative state of Tennessee.

This is from April 2023, in Christian Post:

The U.S. Department of Justice has filed a lawsuit against Tennessee for passing a law that bans chemical castration and body mutilating surgeries from being performed on youth who are confused about their sexual identity.

[…]Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in a statement that she believed no one “should be denied access to necessary medical care just because of their transgender status.”

And here is the very latest from February 2024, in Daily Wire:

The Biden administration’s Justice Department filed a lawsuit Thursday against Tennessee’s aggravated prostitution law for people with HIV.

[…]“People living with HIV should not be subjected to a different system of justice based on outdated science and misguided assumptions,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s civil rights division said in a statement.

If you think that I am being rough on Kristen Clarke, then take a look at these interesting articles from Daily Signal:

I really recommend that you check those articles out.

Also, pray for Kristen Clarke. I noticed that she comes from a West Indian black background like me. (Except I have multiple STEM degrees, and immigrated here by merit through employer sponsor). Pray that God would lead her and give her more wisdom to treat Christians and conservatives fairly. It’s too bad that we can’t have more Bible-believing Christians in high places, but we can always pray that God would change the hearts and minds of those who are there now.

News

New study: Harvard professor finds no racial bias in police shootings

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If there’s one thing that the secular left wants you to believe about the police, it’s that white police officers are constantly shooting innocent black people with no criminal records for “crimes” like wearing “baggy pants”. When I speak with secular leftists, especially women, this view is taken as being as true as the fact that the Earth orbits the Sun. But is it?

You might not know about this, but there is a pretty interesting black professor of Economics teaching at Harvard University. The Free Press has an article about him:

Roland Fryer, an economics professor at Harvard, is a superstar by any measure. At the age of 30, he became the youngest black person ever to receive tenure at the Harvard. The MacArthur Foundation declared him a genius in 2011. And in 2015 Fryer won the prestigious John Bates Clark Medal, given yearly to the most promising economist under 40.

[…]Abandoned at birth by his mother, Fryer clawed his way out of poverty to land a spot at the University of Texas, Arlington, earned his Ph.D. at Penn State, done postdoctoral research at the University of Chicago with the Nobel Laureate Gary Becker, and, finally, wound up at Harvard, where he eventually met his wife, a biologist, and became one of the university’s most celebrated professors.

OK, that’s very interesting. But now he’s authored a new study that has caused him to require armed security.

Here’s a report about it from the Daily Caller, based on a recent interview with Bari Weiss.

Harvard economics Professor Roland Fryer needed armed security with him to go out in public after he published a study finding no evidence of racial bias in officer-involved shootings, he said in an interview with The Free Press founder Bari Weiss.

Fryer, a top economist who became the youngest tenured black professor in Harvard’s history at just 30 years old, published a study in 2016 showing there was “no racial differences in officer involved-shootings.” After he published the study, “all hell broke loose,” Fryer told Weiss, noting people “lose their mind when they don’t like the result.”

“I lived under police protection for about 30 to 40 days,” he said during the interview. “I had a seven day old daughter at the time…I was going to the grocery store to get diapers with an armed guard.”

And here is his conclusion:

“On the most extreme use of force – officer involved shootings – we find no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account,” Fryer’s study found.

[…]He said he was “surprised” by the result because he expected to find evidence of bias.

[…]After the study was complete, Fryer said he hired eight additional freshmen to redo the study but came up with the same result.

Here’s a clip from the podcast that was posted on Twitter:

If you want to listen to the full podcast, it’s up at The Free Press.

News

Alexander Vilenkin: “All the evidence we have says that the universe had a beginning”

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I’ve decided to explain why physicists believe that there was a creation event in this post. That is to say, I’ve decided to let famous cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin do it.

From Uncommon Descent.

Excerpt:

Did the cosmos have a beginning? The Big Bang theory seems to suggest it did, but in recent decades, cosmologists have concocted elaborate theories – for example, an eternally inflating universe or a cyclic universe – which claim to avoid the need for a beginning of the cosmos. Now it appears that the universe really had a beginning after all, even if it wasn’t necessarily the Big Bang.

At a meeting of scientists – titled “State of the Universe” – convened last week at Cambridge University to honor Stephen Hawking’s 70th birthday, cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin of Tufts University in Boston presented evidence that the universe is not eternal after all, leaving scientists at a loss to explain how the cosmos got started without a supernatural creator. The meeting was reported in New Scientist magazine (Why physicists can’t avoid a creation event, 11 January 2012).

[…]In his presentation, Professor Vilenkin discussed three theories which claim to avoid the need for a beginning of the cosmos.

The three theories are chaotic inflationary model, the oscillating model and quantum gravity model. Regular readers will know that those have all been addressed in William Lane Craig’s peer-reviewed paper that evaluates alternatives to the standard Big Bang cosmology.

But let’s see what Vilenkin said.

More:

One popular theory is eternal inflation. Most readers will be familiar with the theory of inflation, which says that the universe increased in volume by a factor of at least 10^78 in its very early stages (from 10^−36 seconds after the Big Bang to sometime between 10^−33 and 10^−32 seconds), before settling into the slower rate of expansion that we see today. The theory of eternal inflation goes further, and holds that the universe is constantly giving birth to smaller “bubble” universes within an ever-expanding multiverse. Each bubble universe undergoes its own initial period of inflation. In some versions of the theory, the bubbles go both backwards and forwards in time, allowing the possibility of an infinite past. Trouble is, the value of one particular cosmic parameter rules out that possibility:

But in 2003, a team including Vilenkin and Guth considered what eternal inflation would mean for the Hubble constant, which describes mathematically the expansion of the universe. They found that the equations didn’t work (Physical Review Letters, DOI: 10.1103/physrevlett.90.151301). “You can’t construct a space-time with this property,” says Vilenkin. It turns out that the constant has a lower limit that prevents inflation in both time directions. “It can’t possibly be eternal in the past,” says Vilenkin. “There must be some kind of boundary.”

A second option explored by Vilenkin was that of a cyclic universe, where the universe goes through an infinite series of big bangs and crunches, with no specific beginning. It was even claimed that a cyclic universe could explain the low observed value of the cosmological constant. But as Vilenkin found, there’s a problem if you look at the disorder in the universe:

Disorder increases with time. So following each cycle, the universe must get more and more disordered. But if there has already been an infinite number of cycles, the universe we inhabit now should be in a state of maximum disorder. Such a universe would be uniformly lukewarm and featureless, and definitely lacking such complicated beings as stars, planets and physicists – nothing like the one we see around us.

One way around that is to propose that the universe just gets bigger with every cycle. Then the amount of disorder per volume doesn’t increase, so needn’t reach the maximum. But Vilenkin found that this scenario falls prey to the same mathematical argument as eternal inflation: if your universe keeps getting bigger, it must have started somewhere.

However, Vilenkin’s options were not exhausted yet. There was another possibility: that the universe had sprung from an eternal cosmic egg:

Vilenkin’s final strike is an attack on a third, lesser-known proposal that the cosmos existed eternally in a static state called the cosmic egg. This finally “cracked” to create the big bang, leading to the expanding universe we see today. Late last year Vilenkin and graduate student Audrey Mithani showed that the egg could not have existed forever after all, as quantum instabilities would force it to collapse after a finite amount of time (arxiv.org/abs/1110.4096). If it cracked instead, leading to the big bang, then this must have happened before it collapsed – and therefore also after a finite amount of time.

“This is also not a good candidate for a beginningless universe,” Vilenkin concludes.

So at the end of the day, what is Vilenkin’s verdict?

“All the evidence we have says that the universe had a beginning.”

This is consistent with the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin Theorem, which I blogged about before, and which William Lane Craig leveraged to his advantage in his debate with Peter Millican.

The Borde-Guth-Vilenkin (BGV) proof shows that every universe that expands must have a space-time boundary in the past. That means that no expanding universe, no matter what the model, can be eternal into the past. No one denies the expansion of space in our universe, and so we are left with a cosmic beginning. Even speculative alternative cosmologies do not escape the need for a beginning.

Conclusion

If the universe came into being out of nothing, which seems to be the case from science, then the universe has a cause. Things do not pop into being, uncaused, out of nothing. The cause of the universe must be transcendent and supernatural. It must be uncaused, because there cannot be an infinite regress of causes. It must be eternal, because it created time. It must be non-physical, because it created space. There are only two possibilities for such a cause. It could be an abstract object or an agent. Abstract objects cannot cause effects. Therefore, the cause is an agent.

Now, let’s have a discussion about this science in our churches, and see if we can’t train Christians to engage with non-Christians about the evidence so that everyone accepts what science tells us about the origin of the universe.