Captain Rescorla in action at Ia Drang, Republic of Vietnam, 15 November 1965.
photograph: Peter Arnett/AP.

Born in Hayle, Cornwall, May 27, 1939, to a working-class family, Rescorla joined the British Army in 1957, serving three years in Cyprus. Still eager for adventure, after army service, Rescorla enlisted in the Northern Rhodesia Police.

Ultimately finding few prospects for advancement in Britain or her few remaining colonies, Rescorla moved to the United States, and joined the US Army in 1963. After graduating from Officers’ Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia in 1964, he was assigned as a platoon leader to Bravo Company of the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry, Third Brigade of the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile). Rescorla’s serious approach to training and his commitment to excellence led to his men to apply to him the nickname “Hard Corps.”

The 2nd Battalion of the 7th Cavalry was sent to Vietnam in 1965, where it soon engaged in the first major battle between American forces and the North Vietnamese Army at Ia Drang.

The photograph above was used on the cover of Colonel Harold Moore’s 1992 memoir We Were Soldiers Once… and Young, made into a film starring Mel Gibson in 2002. Rescorla was omitted from the cast of characters in the film, which nonetheless made prominent use of his actual exploits, including the capture of the French bugle and the elimination of a North Vietnamese machine gun using a grenade.

For his actions in Vietnam, Rescorla was awarded the Silver Star, the Bronze Star (twice), the Purple Heart, and the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry. After Vietnam, he continued to serve in the Army Reserve, rising to the rank of Colonel by the time of his retirement in 1990.

Rick Rescorla became a US citizen in 1967. He subsequently earned bachelor’s, master’s, and law degrees from the University of Oklahoma, and proceeded to teach criminal law at the University of South Carolina from 1972-1976, before he moved to Chicago to become Director of Security for Continental Illinois Bank and Trust.

In 1985, Rescorla moved to New York to become Director of Security for Dean Witter, supervising a staff of 200 protecting 40 floors in the South Tower of the World Trade Center. (Morgan Stanley and Dean Witter merged in 1997.) Rescorla produced a report addressed to New York’s Port Authority identifying the vulnerability of the Tower’s central load-bearing columns to attacks from the complex’s insecure underground levels, used for parking and deliveries. It was ignored.

On February 26, 1993, Islamic terrorists detonated a car bomb in the underground garage located below the North Tower. Six people were killed, and over a thousand injured. Rescorla took personal charge of the evacuation, and got everyone out of the building. After a final sweep to make certain that no one was left behind, Rick Rescorla was the last to step outside.

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Directing the evacuation on September 11th.
Security Guards Jorge Velasquez and Godwin Forde are on the right.
photograph: Eileen Mayer Hillock.

Rescorla was 62 years old, and suffering from prostate cancer on September 11, 2001. Nonetheless, he successfully evacuated all but 6 of Morgan Stanley’s 2800 employees. (Four of the six lost included Rescorla himself and three members of his own security staff, including both the two security guards who appear in the above photo and Vice President of Corporate Security Wesley Mercer, Rescorla’s deputy.) Rescorla travelled personally, bullhorn in hand, as low as the 10th floor and as high as the 78th floor, encouraging people to stay calm and make their way down the stairs in an orderly fashion. He is reported by many witnesses to have sung “God Bless America,” “Men of Harlech, ” and favorites from Gilbert & Sullivan operettas. “Today is a day to be proud to be an American,” he told evacuees.

A substantial portion of the South Tower’s workforce had already gotten out, thanks to Rescorla’s efforts, by the time the second plane, United Airlines Flight 175, struck the South Tower at 9:02:59 AM. Just under an hour later, as the stream of evacuees came to an end, Rescorla called his best friend Daniel Hill on his cell phone, and told him that he was going to make a final sweep. Then the South Tower collapsed.

Rescorla had observed a few months earlier to Hill, “Men like us shouldn’t go out like this.” (Referring to his cancer.) “We’re supposed to die in some desperate battle performing great deeds.” And he did.

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His hometown of Hayle in Cornwall has erected a memorial.

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2,996 was a project put together by blogger Dale Roe to honor each victim of the September 11, 2001 attacks. 3,061 blogs committed to posting tributes to each victim. Never Yet Melted’s tribute was to Rick Rescorla, and is republished annually.

Esquire’s Neil McRobert rates 75 (count ’em!) Stephen King titles.

I did not largely agree with him but, God knows, I haven’t read all 75 of them.

“[China’s Chairman Xi] combines the worst characteristics of Barack Obama and Donald Trump.”

Wikipedia in Peter Zeihan.

interesting stuff via Vanderleun.

Queen Elizabeth admires one of John Browning’s best inventions, the .50 machine gun, still in use over a century later.

The BC announces: Queen Elizabeth II, Britain’s longest serving monarch, has died.

HT: Vanderleun.

HT: Karen L. Myers.

Paul Tassi, writing in Forbes, notes the great discrepancy between the critics’ and the public’s reaction to Amazon’s billion-dollar take on Tolkien.

Amazon is not amused about the fanboy wars that have surrounded its billion dollar Lord of the Rings series, Rings of Power. Unlike its rival House of the Dragon, Rings of Power has become the latest front in the review bombing wars, the most recent since uh, She-Hulk. This happens a lot, okay?

The Rings of Power is getting slammed essentially everywhere that accepts fan reviews:

On Rotten Tomatoes, while its critics score is 84%, it has a 36% audience score.

On IMDB (which Amazon owns) it has a 6.2/10 with 25% of reviews being 1 star.

On Amazon itself, it has…nothing, because Amazon has disabled reviews of the series entirely. Normally when you watch an Amazon show or movie, whether it’s an original or not, it will have user star ratings there. But Rings of Power has zero reviews listed because Amazon didn’t want to be broadcasting its premiere with a low score right next to it, no doubt.

Why are fans mad this time? Take your pick of reasons. It’s a combination of racism, misogyny, and supposed unfaithfulness to Tolkien’s original work. Sometimes all three of these reasons are the same.

Among the reasons for the negative reviews:

Some fans are upset Galadriel is now a warrior instead of the sword-free sorceress she was in the LOTR trilogy. In general, the show has let its female characters slay out, including both Bronwyn and Galadriel.

There have been long, long running controversies about how the show has included black elves, dwarves and humans in this adaptation, as opposed to the overwhelmingly white original trilogy. Complaints are that this clashes with Tolkien’s original work and has led to debates about “whether dwarves can be black because they live underground.”

I read that the Harfoots having Irish/English country accents have offended some people in that region because they’re depicted as dirty, gypsy types.

Then just…take your pick of any number of things that die-hard Tolkien devotees see as the show departing from the source material, or skipping over parts that should have been adapted instead. The general idea is that Jackson’s trilogy was faithful to the work while this is not.

Again, I’m not saying any of this is correct, or even the majority opinion of fans, but all of it feeds into the reasons for the flood of low scores for the series.

RTWT

I found it interesting that Tassi had no difficulty identifying precisely what the enormous Tolkien fantasy readership base objected to, but had himself no such issues with what Amazon has done. His own god-like perspective as a card-carrying member of the PMC (Professional Managerial Class) elite immunizes him from any emotional attachment to the author and the author’s original vision and conceptions and his consequent inevitable consciousness of his own superiority naturally causes him to dismiss condescendingly those inferior members of the mass readership audience who do care about such things as “fanboys” motivated by “racism.” Naturally, the unworthy opinions of these people, the sort who would prioritize fidelity to an author’s vision and texts over Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, need to be censored and suppressed, coming from — what the generality of today’s journalists recognize as — “trolls.”

Robert Spencer reminds voters that Joe Biden has always been a skunk.

Back in the 90s, at the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the establishment media hammered home the proposition that the individual character of a chief executive didn’t matter. He could be a cheerful rogue and serial philanderer like Bill Clinton, but the Left insisted that was a private matter and that the only thing Americans should care about was that he was a competent and capable president (which he wasn’t, but that’s another story). These assertions have become the conventional wisdom since then, but Old Joe Biden is now putting them to the test.

On Tuesday, Fox News’ Lisa Boothe enunciated a simple truth that shows that this Lewinsky-era conventional wisdom is wrong and has always been wrong: “One of the biggest lies we were ever told is that Joe Biden is a good man. He is a terrible president. Even worse human being.”

Boothe was spot-on, and it has been clear not just since the beginning of Biden’s political career but also since he was caught plagiarizing back when he was in law school. Boothe added: “If you think about it, this is a guy who led two of the most terrible confirmation hearings in American history, where he smeared and slandered Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas when he was Senate Judiciary chairman.”

On Oct. 23, 1987, the Senate rejected Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court, largely because of a smear campaign and hysterical false charges that Biden had in great part engineered against the nominee. This was one day short of a month after Biden’s 1988 presidential campaign foundered on his own lies. Biden had delivered a speech full of what he claimed were his own family experiences. “Why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go to a university? Why is it that my wife…is the first in her family to ever go to college? Is it because our fathers and mothers were not bright?… Is it because they didn’t work hard? My ancestors, who worked in the coal mines of northeast Pennsylvania and would come after 12 hours and play football for four hours? It’s because they didn’t have a platform on which to stand.”

This was supposed to sound stirring and probably was to those who go in for class warfare rhetoric, but those weren’t really Biden’s family’s experiences at all. He had lifted it all from a speech by British Labour leader Neil Kinnock. Thirty-four years ago, that was enough to derail a presidential campaign; now the same liar is president, and does anyone actually think that between then and now Biden has become honest and trustworthy?

Robert Bork’s widow doesn’t. Mary Ellen Bork wrote in September 2020: “I was there during the four months of vicious political campaigning against this judicial nominee, my husband, and in the Senate hearing room as then-Sen. Biden presided over a rigged hearing full of an unprecedented level of lying and distortion of a man known for his integrity and judicial wisdom. We will all have tears in our eyes if Joe Biden is elected president.” And he was elected, allegedly, and is now president, allegedly, and there is nothing alleged about the tears in our eyes. They’re all too real.

RTWT

Bruh. pic.twitter.com/xqGepYfQCh

— (@RexHarrisonsHat) September 2, 2022