The Untold Story of Breonna Taylor

This is yet more evidence that no-knock raids should be banned.  They are useful only for the war on drugs.  Libertarians deplore the war on drugs and there are many who agree with that.  If Ms Taylor became known as a victim of the war on drugs, her death could have some benefit.

The police involved are certainly not to blame.  If someone shoots at them, they are entitled to shoot back.  It's the insane rules under which they operate that are to blame.  If they knocked in a normal civil way, a perp may have time to flush his stash down the toilet but where is the tragedy in that? It is surely a much lesser tragedy than the death at police hands of an innocent person

People should be demonstrating about the death of Ms Taylor but they should be blaming police rules, not the police themselves


Breonna Taylor had just done four overnight shifts at the hospital where she worked as an emergency room technician. To let off some steam, she and her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, planned a date night: dinner at a steakhouse, followed by a movie in bed.

Usually, they headed to his apartment, where he lived alone and she had left a toothbrush and a flat iron. But that night, they went to the small unit she shared with her younger sister, who was away on a trip.

It was dark when the couple pulled into the parking lot, then closed the door to Apartment 4 behind them.

This was the year of big plans for the 26- year-old: Her home was brimming with the Post-it notes and envelopes on which she wrote her goals. She had just bought a new car. Next on the list: buying her own home. And trying to have a baby with Mr. Walker. They had already chosen a name.

She fell asleep next to him just after midnight on March 13, the movie still playing.

“The last thing she said was, ‘Turn off the TV,’” he said in an interview.

From the parking lot, undercover officers surveilling Ms. Taylor’s apartment before a drug raid saw only the blue glow of the television.

When they punched in the door with a battering ram, Mr. Walker, fearing an intruder, reached for his gun and let off one shot, wounding an officer. He and another officer returned fire, while a third began blindly shooting through Ms. Taylor’s window and patio door. Bullets ripped through nearly every room in her apartment, then into two adjoining ones. They sliced through a soap dish, a chair and a table and shattered a sliding-glass door.

Ms. Taylor, struck five times, bled out on the floor.

Breonna Taylor has since become an icon, her silhouette a symbol of police violence and racial injustice. Michelle Obama and Kamala Harris spoke her name during their speeches at the Democratic convention.

Oprah Winfrey ceded the cover of her magazine for the first time to feature the young Black woman, and paid for billboards with her image across Louisville.

Beyoncé called for the three white officers who opened fire to be criminally charged.

N.B.A. stars including LeBron James devoted postgame interviews to keeping her name in the news.

Even as she tried to move on, an ex-boyfriend’s run-ins with the law entangled her, leading to what her family’s lawyer called ‘catastrophic failures’ by the police that ended in a deadly raid.

In Louisville, demonstrators have led nightly protests downtown, where most government buildings and many businesses are now boarded up. As outrage mounted, the city fired one of the officers, pushed out the police chief and passed “Breonna’s Law,” banning “no-knock” warrants, which allow the police to burst into people’s homes without warning. Protesters say that is not enough.

Nearly six months after Ms. Taylor’s killing, the story of what happened that night — and what came before and after — remains largely untold. Unlike the death of George Floyd, which was captured on video as a white police officer in Minneapolis knelt on his neck, Ms. Taylor’s final moments remain in shadow because no such footage exists.

But a clearer picture of Ms. Taylor’s death and life, of the person behind the cause, emerged from dozens of interviews with public officials and people who knew her, as well as a review of over 1,500 pages of police records, including evidence logs, transcripts of jailhouse recordings and surveillance photos. The Louisville Metro Police Department, citing pending investigations, declined to make anyone available for interviews.

The daughter of a teenage mother and a man who has been incarcerated since she was a child, Ms. Taylor attended college, trained as an E.M.T. and hoped to become a nurse. But along the way, she developed a yearslong relationship with a twice-convicted drug dealer whose trail led the police to her door that fateful night.

Sloppy surveillance outside her apartment in the hours before the raid failed to detect that Mr. Walker was there, so the officers expected to find an unarmed woman alone. A failure to follow their own rules of engagement and a lack of routine safeguards, like stationing an ambulance outside, compounded the risks that night.

While the department had gotten court approval for a “no-knock” entry to search for evidence of drugs or cash from drug trafficking, the orders were changed before the raid to “knock and announce,” meaning that the police had to identify themselves.

The officers have said that they did; Mr. Walker says he did not hear anything. In interviews with nearly a dozen neighbors, only one person said he heard the officers shout “Police!” a single time.

Sam Aguiar, a lawyer representing Ms. Taylor’s family, blames “catastrophic failures” by the police department for the young woman’s death. “Breonna Taylor,” he said, “gets shot in her own home, with her boyfriend doing what’s as American as apple pie, in defending himself and his woman.” Ms. Taylor had been focused on her future with Mr. Walker. But her history with 30-year-old Jamarcus Glover, an on-again off-again boyfriend who had spent years in prison, was hard to escape, even after she cut ties with him a month before the raid.

When the officers rammed the door of the apartment, Mr. Walker later explained, he fired his gun because he feared it was her ex-boyfriend forcing his way in.

Although Ms. Taylor had no criminal record and was never the target of an inquiry, Mr. Glover’s frequent run-ins with the police entangled her. She had been interviewed in a murder inquiry, and paid or arranged bail for him and his associates.

When Mr. Glover called from jail after an earlier arrest in January, she told him that his brushes with the law worried her, according to a recording; each said “I love you” before hanging up. A GPS tracker the police placed on his car later showed him making regular trips to her apartment complex, and surveillance photos showed her outside a drug house.

In a series of calls hours after her death, as Mr. Glover tried to make bail, he told another woman that he had left about $14,000 with Ms. Taylor. “Bre been having all my money,” he claimed. The same afternoon, he also told an associate he had left money at Ms. Taylor’s home.

Mr. Aguiar, the lawyer for her family, said that no drugs or cash were found at her apartment after the raid. Thomas B. Wine, the Jefferson County prosecutor, countered that the search was called off once the shooting occurred.

With three investigations underway, including a federal civil rights inquiry, a full public accounting of the botched raid is not yet possible. A city on the defensive has withheld some of the most basic information about the case, roiling public anger.

Still, as journalists in recent days have reported about Ms. Taylor’s ties to the drug dealer, city officials have made a point of not excusing the outcome of the raid. Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer said in a statement: “Breonna Taylor’s death was a tragedy. Period.” Christopher 2X, a longtime community organizer whom Ms. Taylor’s family turned to after her death, said her relationship with Mr. Glover had to be acknowledged. “You can’t just look away from it and act like it’s not there,” he said. “My hope is courageous people will say: ‘There it is — it’s what it is — but was this shooting justified? She should be alive today.’”

SOURCE





Now Charles Darwin gets cancelled: Natural History museum will review 'offensive' exhibitions about the Father of Evolution because HMS Beagle's Galapagos voyage was 'colonialist'

The Natural History museum is conducting a review into potentially 'offensive' collections including its Charles Darwin exhibitions.

In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, museum bosses have ordered an audit into certain collections that some staff believe are 'legacies of colonies, slavery and empire'.

Rooms, statues and collected items in the museum that could be 'problematic' may be renamed, relabelled, or removed.

The review into the museum’s links to slavery and colonialism could result in a potential overhaul of the museum's collections and public spaces.

In documents seen by The Sunday Telegraph, museum staff were told that as a result of the Black Lives Matter protests, the museum would undertake a review of room names, statues and collections that 'could potentially cause offence'.

The executive board of the Natural History museum is said to be 'very engaged' with the issue and circulated an academic paper to staff which claimed 'science, racism, and colonial power were inherently entwined'.

The paper proposes publicly acknowledging the past to create 'less racist' museums.

Collections under review include specimens of exotic birds gathered by naturalist Charles Darwin on his expedition to the Galapagos Island with Captain Robert FitzRoy on HMS Beagle in 1835.

According to the academic paper shared with museum staff, the HMS Beagle was cited as one of Britain's many 'colonialist scientific expeditions'.

It wrote that one of the purposes of the voyage was 'to enable greater British control of those areas'.

The paper also argues that 'museums were put in place to legitimise a racist ideology'.

Other collections that could come under scrutiny by the anti-racist review are specimens gathered by botanist Sir Joseph Banks who sailed with Captain James Cook, as well as items gathered by Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus who thought Africans were 'crafty', 'indolent' and 'negligent'.

The flora collection of Sir Hans Sloane, one of the British Museum's founders, may also come under review.

He was labelled him a ‘slave owner’ by the British Museum in August and his bust was removed from a pedestal.

The ceiling of the main Hintze Hall of the Natural History Museum - where 'Hope', a skeleton of a blue whale is hanging (pictured) - could also be 'problematic' due to paintings of colonial exports such as cotton, tea and tobacco.

A statue of Charles Darwin that sits in the museum's main hall could also come under questioning as well as a statue of scientist Thomas Henry Huxley because of his theories of five 'races' of human.

According to The Sunday Telegraph, Michael Dixon, the director of the Natural History Museum, explained to staff: 'The Black Lives Matter movement has demonstrated that we need to do more and act faster, so as a first step we have commenced an institution-wide review on naming and recognition.

'We want to learn and educate ourselves, recognising that greater understanding and awareness on diversity and inclusion are essential.'

SOURCE







Revolutionary Martyrs in America

When political conflict crosses over into physical force, ideological “martyrs” are inevitably created. For the dead, it’s a tragedy, but to their causes, it is often a windfall. In the immediate aftermath of the German defeat in the Great War, the Communists attempted an armed insurrection, which ended in failure.

The revolt was improvised and small-scale and was quickly crushed by the superior firepower of government troops. Berlin was largely undisturbed. Long-distance trains continued to run on time and newspapers remained on sale, as the rebels passively confined themselves to only a few select locations.

But the Communists came away from the fiasco with two martyrs: Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. One hundred years after their deaths, the European left still reveres them as the Marxist saints. The American left-wing magazine Jacobin even took time to remind its readers of the name of Luxemburg’s executioner so future generations might despise him. Luxemburg and Liebknecht’s fame outlived their insurrection.

On January 15, 1919, the leaders of the German revolution were murdered by far-right soldiers enraged by the rising socialist movement. The man who masterminded the killings was Waldemar Pabst — a fanatical nationalist officer whose paramilitaries became the rank and file for Nazism.

As a Spanish scholar observed, politics is practiced by the living on the bones of the dead. No sooner had the Nazis come upon the German scene than they sought to create political martyrs of their own to match Luxemburg and Liebknecht. Goebbels achieved this by raising a fairly unremarkable Nazi street casualty named Horst Wessel to fame as a mystical symbol of the German struggle.

Wessel was living in a flophouse when he was killed by “Albrecht ‘Ali’ Höhler, an armed pimp, perjurer and petty criminal. Höhler, a heavily tattooed cabinetmaker who had just recently been released from prison … a Communist and a member of the Red Front Fighters’ League,” possibly over money, possibly over a girl. Not very promising material in itself but in Goebbels’ hands, enough.

Goebbels had been looking for someone to turn into a martyr for the Nazi cause… Although Goebbels could not get Hitler to attend Wessel’s funeral, Hitler did speak at Wessel’s grave three years after his death … the “enormous procession … led by Hitler, Goebbels, Ernst Röhm, and other top officials of the [party], … marched to the St. Nicholas Cemetery … Hitler spoke of Wessel’s death as a symbolic sacrifice.” … the stage was set as an altar made from “laurel trees, branches, candelabra and a larger-than-lifesize portrait of Wessel”. Hitler lavished praise on “those fanatics who are consumed by the great task of their age” – “fanaticism” being a positive virtue among the Nazis – “who live for that task and who die for it … [they would] later be not only the martyrs of their struggle but also the seed from which the subsequent harvest [would come]”.

Goebbels continued to use the martyrdom of Wessel as a propaganda device for years. At the 1934 Nuremberg Party Rally, a group of Hitler Youth sang an anti-Christian song which included the lines “We don’t need any Christian truth … We follow not Christ but Horst Wessel”

Goebbels understood the formula for making a good political martyr lay not in the deceased himself but the propaganda treatment of his life. The Nazi media machine lost no time producing hagiographies based on Wessel’s life or on persons killed in similar circumstances. Hans Westmar, S.A. Mann Brand, and the life of Herbert Norkus are examples of these.

If the Nazis had not lost the War, Horst Wessel might rival Che Guevara in fame. Guevara himself was a complete operational failure in Bolivia, yet “celebrated poets such as Pablo Neruda, Allen Ginsberg, Julio Cortázar, Nicolas Guillén, Derek Walcott, Al Purdy, Rafael Alberti, Ko Un, and Yevgeny Yevtushenko regard Che as ‘the world’s icon of rebellion.’ In September 2007, Guevara was voted ‘Argentina’s greatest historical and political figure.” Such is the power of the propaganda treatment.

Key to making a successful political martyr is personalizing the Hero, making him into someone you might aspire to be — if you left out the shabby bits and got him played by a glamorous actor. Millions are familiar with the “iconic photograph of Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara taken by Alberto Korda.”

The Maryland Institute College of Art called the picture a symbol of the 20th century and the world’s most famous photograph. Versions of it have been painted, printed, digitized, embroidered, tattooed, silk-screened, sculpted or sketched on nearly every surface imaginable, leading the Victoria and Albert Museum to say that the photograph has been reproduced more than any other image in photography.

By contrast, almost nobody can name any of the “38 Albanian Catholics, all killed between 1945 and 1974 by their country’s Communist regime,” even though they were approved by Pope Francis for beatification in 2016. Nor are there many who even know that:

At least 21 million people are believed to have died in repression, persecution and “terror famines” after 1917, including 106,000 Orthodox clergy shot during the 1937-8 Great Purge alone, according to Russian government data. A total of 422 Catholic priests were executed, murdered or tortured to death during the period, along with 962 monks, nuns and laypeople, while all but two of the Catholic Church’s 1240 places of worship were forcibly turned into shops, warehouses, farm buildings and public toilets.

That’s because they are faceless multitudes without a Goebbels to burnish their fame nor any Alberto Korda to immortalize their image. A hundred million people may have been killed by Communism, but the world mourns the Communist because his face is on a t-shirt. Given this, it is easy to understand why antifa wants to control who can video the riots/protests in Portland.

YOU’RE NOT ALLOWED TO FILM!” is a cry you hear incessantly at protests in Portland, Oregon, always shouted at close range to your face by after-dark demonstrators. You can assert that, yes, you can film; you can point out that they themselves are filming incessantly; you can push their hands away from covering your phone; you can have your phone record them stealing your phone—all of these things have happened to me—and none will have any impact on their contention that “YOU’RE NOT ALLOWED TO FILM” and its occasional variation, “PHOTOGRAPHY EQUALS DEATH!”…

I wondered, the first time I attended the protests at the federal building back in July, who all these young people with PRESS emblazoned on their jackets or helmets were. I asked one such guy who he worked for. …

“Independent Press Corps,” he told me. As it turned out, dozens of other young PRESS people happened to work for the same outfit, which I at first assumed was a fancy way of saying “I want to report stuff and stream it on my Instagram.”

This turned out to be naive. The IPC is an organized group in league with the activists, and it is usually their footage you see streamed online and recycled on the news: mostly innocent protestors being harassed and beaten by police.

They want to control who’s on the t-shirt. Photography equals death only for those taking unauthorized images. Those crafting the authorized images are busy making the new political martyrs of the 21st century.

SOURCE






Kenosha Merchants, Their Businesses in Ruins, Ponder What Healing Looks Like

Eric Oertle spent part of Sunday reviewing security video from the night his life came crashing down. It was all he could do to keep from crying. He says he was “sick to death” to see what was on the video. Each frame was more devastating than the last.

The footage shows looters smashing the windows of Computer Adventure, the sales and service store on a corner lot that Oertle and his wife, Pat, started in Kenosha’s Uptown neighborhood more than 30 years ago.

It was 10:55 p.m. on Monday, Aug. 24, the second day of “civil unrest” following a Kenosha police officer’s shooting of Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old black man whom police said they were attempting to arrest in connection with a domestic incident.

“They came in with baseball bats, smashed our glass cases, stole everything they could, or smashed what they didn’t steal,” Oertle recalls of the looters. “They were going to set fire to the building like they did across the street from us, until the upstairs tenants in the apartments above us came running down the stairs and stopped them. They said, ‘We live here.’”

Despite the damage, the 71-year-old business owner says, he and his wife are among “the lucky ones.”

Theirs was the only building on the block standing after four days of riots that left millions of dollars in damage, two dead, several others wounded or injured, and Wisconsin’s fourth-largest city wondering how on earth it will heal from so much anger, so much rage, so much destruction.

B and L Office Furniture—looted and burned. Boost Mobile—the same. La Estrella Supermarket and Uptown Restaurant also were on the same business strip that went up in flames.

Gone, too, is the iconic Danish Brotherhood Lodge, a Kenosha fixture for more than a century. Famous for its Danish breakfasts, bingo nights, and Santa’s annual visits, the lodge was leveled by looters and flames.

Private property cost estimates have yet to be tallied, but damage to city property alone from the rioting was quickly approaching $2 million, city officials told the Kenosha News. President Donald Trump visited the city Tuesday, pledging millions of dollars in federal aid for Kenosha and law enforcement efforts statewide.

The stories of personal loss are heartbreaking.

Zaydi Tejada, the daughter of the owners of Uptown Restaurant and La Estrella Supermarket, says she and her family will have to start from scratch. “We love the community and are very devastated about this, we love serving you with great food and frankly cannot see our life without you guys in it,” Tejada wrote on a GoFundMe page.

‘They Lost Everything’

Alice Lee’s parents came to the United States from South Korea in the 1980s. Her father has owned Uptown Beauty, a beauty supply store, for 25 years. “He’s worked so hard to build it up—working on holidays, day in and day out, getting to know his customers and them calling him ‘Lee,’” she wrote on an online fundraising page. “He loved and cared for that store and I’m honestly so devastated, I know my parents must be, too.”

Then there are the many families displaced by the destruction. Kenosha resident Nicole Tomsich says the apartment where her granddaughters lived is part of the riot’s ruins.

“They lost everything, including their two kittens who unfortunately were unable to be saved,” Tomsich wrote on a GoFundMe page. “Among those displaced were my two grandchildren, their mother and father and their other grandmother.”

“They literally lost everything,” she added. “They will need to find a new home immediately and they need all the essentials. Furniture, bedding, a crib, beds, clothing, shoes, winter apparels, anything you could possibly think of.”

Diverse District

Left out of much of the reporting—between Black Lives Matter protesters’ cries of police brutality and racial injustice, the pandering of politicians, and the erosion of public safety—is the fact that Uptown long has been a diverse neighborhood. Its denizens are black, white, Hispanic, Asian. Its stores serve a lot of people who don’t have the means to travel elsewhere.

“This is where they come to shop,” Oertle, the computer store owner, says. “They have now lost all of their grocery stores, their clothing stores, their hairdresser. They’ve lost their bars, their restaurants. This business district is destroyed permanently.”

Across the street from Computer Adventure, the entire block of stores is gone. Beyond repair. The buildings will have to be demolished.

That’s what’s so hard for Oertle and others to understand: If black lives truly matter, why are some of those advocating that idea destroying black-owned businesses and the places where black people shop?

“They have destroyed black lives, Hispanic lives, white lives, in the name of what? In the name of justice? This is insanity,” Oertle says.

What may be a sliver of consolation is that many of those that did so much damage in Kenosha aren’t from Kenosha.

Police report that more than 100 of the 175 arrested in connection with the riots live outside the city. They say 69 arrests were for curfew violations, and another 34 were on charges such as carrying concealed weapons, possessing a controlled substance, and destroying property. Law enforcement also seized more than 20 weapons.

Among the arrests was Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old from Antioch, Illinois, who is charged with five felonies after police say he shot three men on the third night of the riots, two of them fatally.

Rittenhouse, who had dreams of being a cop, reportedly drove to nearby Kenosha, not far from the Illinois border, to help protect businesses.

The first people to help them clean up, Uptown merchants say, were the same ones who always have been there: their neighbors.

In the aftermath of this man-made disaster, a lot of questions remain.

Why did Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers initially reject President Donald Trump’s offer to send federal agents to help restore law and order to Kenosha?

Why didn’t the Democratic governor send in enough members of the Wisconsin Army National Guard help police secure the city?

Evers seemed to lay the blame on local officials.

“The people on the ground here in Kenosha asked us for x. We provided x. The next day they asked for y, and we provided y,” Evers said at a press conference in Kenosha four days after the riots began.

The governor’s critics, particularly members of Wisconsin’s Republican-led Legislature, blame him for firing off incendiary tweets attacking law enforcement soon after a Kenosha police officer fired seven times at Blake, seriously wounding him as he leaned inside the driver’s-side door of his sport utility vehicle.

Police said Blake resisted arrest multiple times before he began to get into the SUV, where three of his five children waited.

“Two people are dead. Another was shot. This violence could have been prevented,” state Sen. Van Wanggaard, R-Racine, wrote Wednesday in a letter to the governor.

“Last night, the Kenosha County Board of Supervisors asked for an additional 1,500 National Guard members for Kenosha tonight,” Wanggaard wrote. “I second that request and implore you to fulfill it. Without massive resources, violence will only escalate.”

Oertle says he blames Evers and Kenosha Mayor John Antaramian, also a Democrat, for failing to clearly and quickly address the city’s security needs.

“Neither one of them was doing their job, not even close,” the businessman says. “These are people that should not be in office.”

Starting Over

A week after the Kenosha riots, the city and its people are left to deal with the damage. Much work lies ahead.

The fear of more destruction still has many in Kenosha on edge. There’s a kind of paralysis that has set in, as business owners such as Oertle wait for the other shoe to drop.

“Until we know everything is settled down, we’re not going to start replacing glass. It would be ludicrous, knowing it come right back tomorrow,” he says. “It could be weeks, months before we feel safe enough to start.”

The damage is particularly daunting to those who have spent their lives building their businesses. What now, they ask?

“I’m 71 years old. My wife is 79,” Oertle says. “I’m going to have to start all over.”

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here.
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