"Stop crying," he told her. "I have to get these people out safely. If something should happen to me, I want you to know I've never been happier. You made my life."

Susan cried even harder, gasping for breath. She felt a stab of fear, because the words sounded like those of someone who wasn't coming back. "No!" she cried, but then he said he had to go. Cell-phone use was being curtailed so as not to interfere with emergency communications.

From the World Trade Center, Rescorla again called Hill. He said he was taking some of his security men and making a final sweep, to make sure no one was left behind, injured, or lost. Then he would evacuate himself. "Call Susan and calm her down," he said. "She's panicking."

Hill reached Susan, who had just got off the phone with Sullivan. "Take it easy," he said, as she continued to sob. "He's been through tight spots before, a million times." Suddenly Susan screamed. Hill turned to look at his own television and saw the south tower collapse. He thought of the words Rescorla had so often used to comfort dying soldiers. "Susan, he'll be O.K.," he said gently. "Take deep breaths. Take it easy. If anyone will survive, Rick will survive."

When Hill hung up, he turned to his wife. Her face was ashen. "Shit," he said. "Rescorla is dead."

The rest of Rick Rescorla's morning is shrouded in some mystery. The tower went dark. Fire raged. Windows shattered. Rescorla headed upstairs before moving down; he helped evacuate several people above the 50th Floor. Stephan Newhouse, chairman of Morgan Stanley International, said at a memorial service in Hayle that Rescorla was spotted as high as the 72nd floor, then worked his way down, clearing floors as he went. He was telling people to stay calm, pace themselves, get off their cell phones, keep moving. At one point, he was so exhausted he had to sit for a few minutes, although he continued barking orders through his bullhorn. Morgan Stanley officials said he called headquarters shortly before the tower collapsed to say he was going back up to search for stragglers.

John Olson, a Morgan Stanley regional director, saw Rescorla reassuring colleagues in the 10th-floor stairwell. "Rick, you've got to get out, too," Olson told him. "As soon as I make sure everyone else is out," Rescorla replied.

Morgan Stanley officials say Rescorla also told employees that "today is a day to be proud to be American" and that "tomorrow, the whole world will be talking about you." They say he also sang "God Bless America" and Cornish folk tunes in the stairwells. Those reports could not be confirmed, although they don't sound out of character. He liked to sing in a crisis. But the documented truth is impressive enough. Morgan Stanley managing director Bob Sloss was the only employee who didn't evacuate the 66th floor after the first plane hit, pausing to call his family and several underlings, even taking a call from a Bloomberg News reporter. Then the second plane hit, and his office walls cracked, and he felt the tower wagging like a dog's tail. He clambered down to the 10th floor, and there was Rescorla, sweating through his suit in the heat, telling people they were almost out, making no move to leave himself.

Rick did not make it out. Neither did two of his security officers who were at his side. But only three other Morgan Stanley employees died when their building was obliterated.

Please do take the time to click here and read Blackfive's posting and follow the links.

R.I.P.

Rick Rescorla in the stairway barking orders on 09/11.

There can be no test by which we can discover what is “socially unjust” because there is no subject by which such an injustice can be committed . . .  ["Social justice"] does not belong to the category of error, but to that of nonsense . . .

What Hayek is saying is that “social justice” requires treating people as groups, rather than as individuals –  an error similar to the Jim Crow laws that the civil rights crusade sought to overturn. Indeed, with no intention to invoke Godwin’s Law, we might say that ”social justice” shares with Hitler’s categorical antagonism to the Jews this conception of people in terms of groups and not individuals.

The pursuit of “social justice” — accompanied by a rhetoric of “rights” misappropriated to describe what would be more accurately termed entitlements— inexorably leads down that same path that Hayek described as The Road to Serfdom. Only an extremely powerful government can apportion outcomes in the egalitarian manner intended by the phrase “social justice,” superintending the welfare of specially protected groups. As government power expands, individual liberty is eroded.

It doesn’t really matter how we categorize people for the purpose of allotting “social justice.” The Bolsheviks made revolution on behalf of the proletariat and the peasants, and slaughtered many millions of workers and peasants on behalf of their “humanitarian” goals. In America, “social justice” has been invoked not merely on behalf of blacks, but also women, homosexuals, psychiatric patients, prison inmates, drug addicts, HIV sufferers and alleged victims of “predatory lending,” among other categories of liberal victimhood. Every four years, the Democratic National Convention stage becomes a platform for a parade of aggrieved victims, blaming their own group victimhood on malevolent forces (e.g., “Corporate America”) against which the Democratic Party promises to fight in the name of “rights” and “social justice.”

This group conception of “rights” is fundamentally totalitarian, its premises aligned in a syllogism whose conclusion is less individual liberty and more government control. Ron Rosenbaum’s idealistic nostalgia for Dylan and Baez — who doesn’t fondly remember his own youth? — cannot justify the unthinking pursuit of “social justice,” an ideological abstraction that has wrought so much mischief and misery in American political life.

Copy those paragraphs, save them, and use them in anytime Lefty bleats any bromidic pablum about 'social justice'.

Please do take the time to click here and read the full essay.