Former General Counsel, https://teapawt.net/t.co/UKdNEjJKDh, former SFU Visiting Law Prof, Retired Member of LSBC, SNPBC, CBA, BCNA R.I. Also at https://teapawt.net/t.co/9cBkPWtcF9
Vancouver B.C. Canada
Joined October 2008
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Ron Usher retweeted
Opinion: B.C.’s dirty money problem hasn’t gone away. It's time to act vancouversun.com/opinion/op-…
Ron Usher retweeted
@BCNotaries support a complete repeal of the Legal Professions Act (LPA) accompanied by immediate and meaningful amendments to modernize the Notaries Act. Please see our policy statement.
Ron Usher retweeted
Congratulations to BC Notaries on the milestone! For many homebuyers the notary is a friendly, trusted face at the closing table, and that guidance really matters.
Ron Usher retweeted
There's so much interesting new scholarship in the pseudolaw world. Here Lobbert explores the deep question of why someone would mimic being part of a fictitious state.
Why? Partially all states are fictions. But deeper, we need anchors.
Highly recommended.
journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pd…
Ron Usher retweeted
Thank you @PeterMilobar @Conservative_BC for the opportunity to learn more about early priorities for the new government. @BCNotaries look forward to future consultation opportunities.
Ron Usher retweeted
The deeper problem beyond the fact that Elizabeth Holmes is a pathological liar is that her victims succumbed to "Truth Default" theory:
Given limited time/access to fact check what people claim, most of us default to believing what we're told is true (e.g., someone tells me they are a Vietnam vet I have neither the time nor resources to check). Most of the time most people are relatively truthful, so Truth Default works as a cognitive heuristic (and liars can get away with lying some of the time).
HOWEVER: that doesn't apply to investors, who have a fiduciary responsibility ("due diligence") to fact check claimants before investing. That was not always done in the case of Holmes, in part because they were charmed by her youthful looks, sultry voice, Steve Jobs-wannabe turtlenecks, and her bold promises that Theranos would be The Next Big Thing that investors did not want to miss out on.
So while justice is rightly being served against Holmes, the victims of such scams carry some responsibility for letting themselves be fooled. No one held a gun to their head and made them invest. They chose to do so, and because our life outcomes are, in part, self-determined, victims must take some responsibility.
No, this is not "blaming the victim." Holmes committed a crime and is getting her just deserts. But neither are her victimized investors naifs.
Agreed, in a perfect utopian world no one would lie (or steal, rape, murder, etc.) But that is not the world in which we live. Yes, you should be free to walk around any part of any city anywhere in the world at any time of the night and not get mugged or robbed. But you're an idiot if you do that without taking precautions.
Reality matters.
Ron Usher retweeted
Longer, but not toooo long, on the Vienna housing model and its relevance to globe wide housing crisis:
Controlling Land Rent, Vienna Style
Max Schranz is 26 and working on a master’s degree. He lives in a bright fifth-floor, 54-square-metre two-bedroom in Vienna’s Theodor-Körner-Hof, a 1950s city-owned Gemeindebau ten minutes from the main station. He pays €596 a month, put down no deposit, and holds an unlimited contract he could, in theory, pass to a child or sibling.
“I’m aware it’s a pretty stress-free existence,” he said. “My friends in other European cities are a bit jealous.” On summer evenings he reads in the estate’s green courtyards. The city reached him through a programme for first-time tenants under thirty—something nearly impossible for a student in most other capitals. What looks like personal luck is simply how a large share of Vienna’s housing still works (The Guardian 2024).
Given the linked crises of unaffordable housing, rising inequality, and global speculation in urban land, successful models for systemically controlling housing market prices are scarce. After forty years of neoliberal privatizations, few developed-world cities offer attainable systems for supplying affordable housing that map easily onto Anglosphere political economies.
Singapore is often cited, yet its land—and thus its land Rents—is largely public. Shifting 100 trillion in urban land value from private to public hands seems politically improbable.
Under post WWII Social Democrat regimes, both The Netherlands and Sweden expanded public housing , but neoliberal policies have since shrunk the non-market share while land Rents rose.
Berlin was long praised for its large renter majority and protective laws. Massive transfers of public stock to private REITs produced a 50 percent rent rise and protests demanding the return of sold blocks (“Berlin Spends” 2019).
Only one liberal-democratic global city has largely solved housing precarity in a form practical for other cities to copy: Vienna. It did so by controlling land Rent through taxation and related policies rather than by either stimulating or crippling private housing markets.
The Vienna Model – The Beginning
In the last days of the Habsburgs, Vienna displayed wealth by attaching grand façades on overcrowded apartment blocks. Sadly, behind the elegant facades, workers crowded ten to a 300-square-foot flat. Many slept four to a bed; some rented beds in shifts. This was a landlords’ city. Fewer than 60,000 of over two million residents could vote. One-month leases were common; rents rose freely; evictions were immediate. In 1913, 461,472 people—one-quarter of the population, including about 29,000 children—lived in asylums (Reiss 2017).
Defeat in the First World War collapsed the monarchy and brought universal suffrage. The left governed from 1917 to 1934 (the “Red Vienna” period) until the fascist takeover put an end to non market housing programs. Unlike socialist governments elsewhere in Europe at the time, Vienna officials did not appropriate private land. They used taxation, not appropriation, as the policy tool to house their citizens.
The Strategy
Even before the Red Vienna period, strict rent control - initially imposed to protect war wives and never repealed - limited rent increases. This economic control had the initial effect of lowering highly inflated urban land values.
It should be mentioned here that In most Anglosphere cities, strong rent control is often blamed for reducing new rental housing supply. The Canadian government has spent billions in subsidies to induce market-rate rental construction in the hopes that new unregulated supply will lower costs (City of Vancouver 2022b). Rental housing starts rose dramatically, but costs did not fall (Anderson 2022). Advocates claimed that even though new stock was expensive, new stock would open up cheaper old stock through a process called “filtering.” Support for this thesis is extremely weak; research shows that financial effects are minimal at best, are glacially slow, and that new units can displace rather than supplement affordable stock (Rosenthal 2014; Nygaard, Galster, and Glackin 2022; McDonald 2021; Condon 2023).
Vienna’s approach differed. Strong rent control mitigated the market price for urban land while progressive taxes on expensive apartment units further undercut speculative land values. Development land prices fell while the city used new tax money to buy land at the new depressed price.
Henry George’s ideas on land tax were known, yet leaders avoided a pure single tax on land value, fearing backlash from small owners. Progressive taxation of buildings (rather than bare land) plus rent control achieved a similar result: lowered land Rents. It's important to underline that the Vienna precedent broadens the land tax toolkit beyond pure Georgism single tax on land. We provide other examples in later chapters
With urban land speculators driven out of the market, the city became the dominant catalyst for affordable housing construction. (Förster and Menking 2016). One-fifth of new housing produced was deeply subsidized social housing for the poor and disabled. However, most new housing went to average wage earners in the form of resident co-operatives or limited-profit housing associations that charge only cost-covering rents, reinvest profits, and limit equity returns (Marquardt and Glaser 2023; Mundt and Amann 2010).
In the late 1920s roughly 30 percent of the Vienna city budget bought land and financed construction, funded mainly by progressive property taxes—higher on the most valuable units. These measures stripped speculation from the market. Now over 50 percent of Vienna housing units are in the non market sector. Rents for both market and non-market units are now less than half those for comparable units in Paris or other major European cities. This is because the strong non-market sector has weakened speculative pressures on urban land, which in turn holds down market rents.
The Market Today
It's not wise to ignore that Vienna is not immune to more recent globe wide neoliberal pressures. Pure social housing for the poor largely stopped being built by the city in the early 2000s; limited-profit associations took over building, and built fewer units. 1990s laws allowed condo conversions of former rental properties and rent-to-buy options for former non-market units. Pre-1945 rent controls were relaxed. Homeownership rose from 16 to 21 percent in seven years (Gutheil-Knopp-Kirchwald and Kadi 2017). Home costs rose relative to wages (Kadi 2015).
Despite these shifts, Vienna still builds far more cooperative and limited-profit housing each year than most other European capitals. Roughly 40–43% of the stock is municipal or limited-profit, and when pre-1945 rent-controlled private units are included the share of residents shielded from full market pressures rises to around 60–65%. (City of Vienna, Housing market (socialhousing.wien))
This large protected base keeps market land rents lower; market rents and condo prices are typically 20–30% below those in Paris (Numbeo; City of Vienna / socialhousing.wien). The protected sector dampens speculative pressure on private land and the fear of missing out that inflates prices elsewhere. Advocates continue to worry about backsliding (Prager 2018; Verlič 2015), yet the system remains far more protective than most.
Grassroots Design
In contemporary practice, the city of Vienna acquires urban land, sets social and demographic goals, publishes subsidies, and lets stakeholder panels choose among competing nonprofit teams. Competition produces distinctive architecture rather than standardized mediocrity.
Conclusion
Vienna shows that land Rent can be effectively controlled through taxation and rent regulation without ending private land ownership or markets. The city successfully treated most of its land, over time, as a public asset; other cities can do the same. Housing only the poorest erodes political support for intervention, while including average wage earners sustains it. In Vienna, co-op rents cover costs and replacement and stay under 30 percent of average income. The result is a city that has largely tamed the force that elsewhere keeps turning housing into a speculative asset - and proved that land can still serve the people who live on it..
Ron Usher retweeted
Thoughts From The Campaign Trail!
As we look at election results from across the province, there is no doubt that voters have sent a message. I know there will be plenty of commentators offering their interpretations of what that message is. I wanted to share a few thoughts about what I believe voters are trying to tell us.
People are looking for competence from their government, not ideology.
Politics can sometimes attract people who are more motivated by a desire to reshape society in their own image than by the practical responsibilities of governing.
But I don’t believe that’s where most voters are.
First and foremost, people want government to do its job. They want it to deliver the basic services we all depend on, and to deliver them well.
At the municipal level, that means good recreation centres, clean parks, potholes filled, snow removed, safe neighbourhoods and responsible management of property taxes.
Getting the basics right has been my mantra since the day I walked into City Hall. And I believe the people of Port Coquitlam have responded to that approach.
Second, people want results they can actually see and feel.
That means being upfront, honest and realistic about what we can accomplish.
Increasingly, I see politicians making grandiose promises designed to capture attention and win votes, even when those promises are completely detached from reality.
And when those promises inevitably go unfulfilled, the damage goes well beyond the politician who made them. It erodes people’s trust and confidence in government itself.
That’s one of the reasons I place so much importance on delivering core public services exceptionally well.
It doesn’t mean government shouldn’t be ambitious. Quite the opposite. We should have big aspirations for our communities and our province. We should want to tackle difficult problems and make life better for people.
But we also have to be honest about what is possible, realistic about what it takes, and accountable for what we promise.
When government consistently gets the small things right, it earns the trust and confidence necessary to take on the bigger challenges.
Finally, I think people are looking for a return to some normalcy in our politics.
I think people are exhausted by politics built around division, hostility and the demonization of anyone who happens to see the world differently.
I can’t think of many other parts of our lives where we would consider that acceptable behaviour.
When I’m at the rink or the field watching my two boys, I talk with other parents who have all kinds of different opinions and perspectives. We don’t necessarily agree about politics or everything happening in the world.
But I can tell you one thing we do agree on. We all want our kids to be happy, healthy and have the best possible shot at a good life.
And I think that says something important about who we really are.
I don’t believe the public is nearly as divided as some politicians would have us believe.
I don’t believe we’re locked in some do-or-die struggle where one side has all the answers and everyone on the other side is beyond redemption.
That’s not how we behave in our families. It’s not how we behave at work. It’s not how we behave on teams. And it’s not how we should behave in our politics.
We can disagree without being enemies. We can have different beliefs without questioning one another’s character. And we can recognize that, despite our differences, most of us want many of the same things for ourselves, our families and our communities.
I believe there’s far more that brings us together than pulls us apart.
And I believe government works best when it focuses on those things we have in common, earns the public’s trust through actions and results (usually smaller, incremental ones), and stays firmly planted where the vast majority of normal people are.
Ron Usher retweeted
Landowners in Richmond BC were blindsided by the Cowichan ruling. How could BC's top court strip private property protections? After slogging through 12 years of court submissions, testimony and rulings, the answer emerged, but it's not good news for British Columbians. My investigation for @BeatNorthern:
northernbeat.ca/opinion/cowi…
Ron Usher retweeted
No adaptation without strategic foresight.
Either you choose to live in an artificial world created by Constructivists who tell you how to live & what to do, or you choose to live in the real world in all its beauty and terror and adapt to with by taking action & responsibility.
Ron Usher retweeted
The first time I heard John Prine I was living in an old farmhouse with two lesbians and a pot-bellied pig. One of them was my mother. The other had a copy of ‘The Missing Years’. I wore it out. Late to the party but suitably enlightened. Not a decade later, I found myself standing in front of John and Al Bunetta and Elvis Costello in the basement of the world famous Apollo Theater. An auspicious place to meet one of your heroes.
The last time I saw him was a year before he passed. Songwriters Hall of Fame. Had the honor of working with him once again, John called people by their first name. Even if he had just met you, if you’re a fan nothing quite prepares you for hearing your name come out his mouth. It felt like a gift and I have hunch he knew that. Prine was generous like that, there was a sparkle in his eye and it felt like he wanted to make sure you got a little of it too for your trouble.
At the end of a fine evening, I dropped him back at his hotel room, the amazing Fiona Prine came out into hall after I said goodbye (and graciously offered to come see my stand up if ever in Nashville) and said ‘John wanted you to have this’ and put a crisp c-note in my hand. I walked around with that bill in my wallet for the rest of the summer. Then spent it on a BBQ at the beach as I watched the sunset with people I cared about-and listened to ‘The Missing Years’.
Happy Birthday, John Prine.
Ron Usher retweeted
There’s a reason Lorne Doerkson is doing this behind closed doors. He knows British Columbians don’t want their car insurance rates to skyrocket.
Ron Usher retweeted
Did you know you can watch “How Buildings Learn,” the classic six-part BBC series (01997) completely free on YouTube? Scored by Brian Eno and based on Stewart Brand’s book of the same title, the series illustrates Brand’s thesis that buildings are living systems, evolving and changing over time.
Essential for any fan of architecture and Long Now lore. Find all the episodes here: na2.hubs.ly/H07xNq60
Ron Usher retweeted
Happy Meads v Meads day! 14 years!
From the CanLII website & my notes, the decision has been cited in 536 court judgments worldwide.
Not bad for a trial-level decision that, purportedly, is nothing but obiter.
Here's a link: canlii.ca/t/fsvjq (It's long...)
Ron Usher retweeted
Call it “vignettes from an invisible war”.
Written for interested laypersons, “Outlawed”, by Profs. Harry Hobbs (Australia UNSW) and Stephen Young (New Zealand UOtago), introduces pseudolaw, surveys its history, operation, and manifestations worldwide.
I recommend Outlawed to those who are curious about pseudolaw, pseudolaw’s origin and evolution, the weird persistence of these concepts in the face of inevitable failure. The authors are academics who have written extensively about pseudolaw, related litigation, and its host populations. These are well-informed subject experts.
Hobbs and Young provide probably the best summary I’ve ever read of pseudolaw’s multistage growth and incubation in dissident US political/cultural circles. The authors have expertly identified key characters like King of Hawaii and Judge Plenipotentiary David-Wynn: Miller and friend of elves and fairies Winston Shrout to illustrate how pseudolaw grew both as a nest of interwoven concepts and as a marketplace product. Other individual personalities and their activities that are explored in Outlawed were obviously selected to be interesting – or appalling – but these individuals usually are also fair representatives of the travelers in this strange shadow-world.
The text does not conduct a technical deep descent into the “law law” of this stuff. As the authors observe, you can go to academic texts and the famous Canadian Meads v Meads court judgment for that. But key points are covered, particularly Strawman Theory, the weird duality of flesh and something imaginary that is the hallmark of most pseudolaw schemes worldwide. More importantly, the “why” of these ideas and their appeal is an ongoing narrative thread. In doing that Hobbs and Young explore one of the critical mysteries of pseudolaw schemes, their promoters, and proponents. Why would you invest money and time to use something that never works? Outlawed explores a number of explanations:
-desperation with no apparent (legitimate) recourse
-alienation from state and (real) law
-political and religious ideology
-marginal and subcultural affiliations
-the drama and theater of pseudolaw
-a social sense of empowerment and resistance, but one with no real operational effect.
All these are valid. The one motivation that is not examined is quick and easy money – simple greed – but to be fair to the authors, the “mercenary” populations (my term) who operate in that manner are not well understood at present. Arguably, the mercenary subtypes are not really pseudolaw adherents. But now I’m meandering.
What matters is that Outlawed recognizes and digs deep into why there is no simple explanation or foundation for people adopting this weird not-law. Hobbs and Young correctly (in my opinion) conclude that with such a complex set of motivations and personalities there cannot be a quick and easy fix. Pseudolaw, as a mind-virus, is going to spread until it exhausts its potential hosts, and, even then, it won’t disappear. Believers get seriously invested. Some are probably too embedded in a conspiratorial and irrational zeitgeist to ever operate in a way most of us would consider “rational”.
Now that leads to a delicate point. Pseudolaw harms people. Pseudolaw leads to violence. Outlawed identifies and describes in sometimes quite graphic detail violence that has resulted from pseudolaw beliefs. That’s important. These are dangerous ideas. We should not minimize that fact, and the risks posed to state, court, and law enforcement actors. But Hobbs and Young also explore how pseudolaw harms its users. That’s a tricky balance. We are looking at a kind of conceptual pathogen, a memetic disease, that badly damages all those it contacts. That makes its users victims in a very meaningful sense. Those who propagate pseudolaw for profit warrant no such sympathy. But Outlawed walks a fine line between deserved denunciation, alarm at consequences, but also pointing to the wreckage left behind – all of it.
That’s critical, in my opinion. This arms-length perspective separates disease symptoms from the mind virus that caused those. It’s easy to make fun of these people – and sometimes they deserve it – but in a social, functional sense, it’d be better to find other ways to manage pseudolaw and its deleterious effects. We benefit little if we stand back and watch infected hosts hurl themselves into heaps of razor wire. And sometimes they drag us in with them.
Outlawed tries to propose solutions and mechanisms. However, the authors acknowledge there isn’t any simple answer. I agree.
Outlawed has certain weaker aspects. The authors focus mainly on pseudolaw’s manifestations in the US, which is important and necessary in a historical sense, and on the Australian and New Zealand branches, the authors’ regional domain of expertise. I do the same when I write on this subject. I know Canadian pseudolaw better than other alternatives, and so I draw many examples from that admittedly well-studied milieu.
But this focus means the reader will not fully experience the weird global complexity of pseudolaw phenomena. That’s not to say Outlawed doesn’t acknowledge and touch on the international nature and expansion of pseudolaw, but that’s secondary. The book’s jurisdictional focus is a comparatively minor issue. What would make an interesting deeper investigation is why pseudolaw’s manifestations in different jurisdictions are sometimes very different. For instance, pseudolaw has never really taken hold in Canada, at least compared to the US, Australia, and New Zealand. Nobody knows why, but when the authors discuss how to manage pseudolaw and its believers, the markedly different international outcomes are not addressed. To be fair, commenting on that would involve a lot of guessing and hypothesis. Inter-jurisdiction variation is an issue that will likely be the subject of much discussion in the emerging academic community of pseudolaw investigators.
Hobbs and Young are sharply critical of how the common law operates in an institutional sense. Law is oblique and overly complicated. Law uses opaque and cryptic language. In a practical sense law is more a playground for the wealthy than those who more often suffer its negative effects. Litigation is expensive – at least if you want a lawyer on your side. I don't disagree with that, but the authors use that as the foundation to argue for more access to legal professionals, for plain-language materials, for resources pulled out from behind paywalls, even judges taking on a more public role. I don’t think that’s wrong, but my perspective is skeptical at the institutional level. I very much doubt the common law tradition and its rules could ever be a functional apparatus. But then again, I’ve never believed in “the law” in the same sense as most who practice, teach, and judge in that domain. Just label me a heretic, but the result is I personally find those propositions somewhat quaint.
Instead, if you asked me what to do? Decapitation. No no no, I’m not saying capital punishment, I mean targeting key node individuals. In Canada pseudolaw populations suddenly turned belly up when their leader figures were the subject of criminal prosecution, so there’s a precedent.
These are comparatively minor concerns. I do not always agree with Hobbs and Young, but I did not at any point identify any errors in Outlawed. The citations I checked were accurate. The language is clean, accessible. The only jargon is the jargon of pseudolaw itself, and Outlawed usually digs down to explain that language when comprehension is relevant, rather than just a muttered “WTF?”
Outlawed introduces a world that is a weird and peculiar place. But then, that’s really what it’s like. If not even weirder than you would expect from this introduction.
It’s a pity the book is still pricy. With taxes this set me back $70 Canadian, ordering through Amazon and with import duties. I’d have thought a Penguin publication would be a little cheaper? Maybe subsequent regional editions? There should be local editions.
But it’s a good piece of work, and one I don't hesitate to recommend. There are no other publications in the marketplace that serve this niche. But that’s not a “win by default” conclusion. Outlawed is a solid, thought out, nuanced investigation. No special education or training is needed to make good use of Outlawed. I am already using it as a reference for my own writing in this subject area.
The authors should be commended. I expect Outlawed will stand as an authoritative important text, a milestone in commentary on this subject.
Author: Harry Hobbs, Stephen Young (@SteveIsInOtago)
Title: Outlawed: Responding to the Global Rise of Sovereign Citizens and Legal Conspiracies
Publisher: Penguin Australia
Publication date: August 18, 2026
261 pages, no illustrations
ISBN 978-1-76162-174-1
Ron Usher retweeted
96/100. The 4: ex parte, ex gratia, momento mori, ultra vire. Should have gotten momento mori.
Ron Usher retweeted
Hey, today is POSITIVE THINKING DAY!
So get yourselves over to ukulelesunanimous.com/
and learn something new 🎵
Happy Strumming 😊
#ukulele #positivevibes #funnymemes #music #education #ukulelesunanimous #ShareThisPost #photooftheday
Ron Usher retweeted
On the morning of September 11, 2001, NASA astronaut Frank Culbertson was floating two hundred and fifty miles above the planet as commander of Expedition 3 aboard the International Space Station. As the only American off the planet that day, his routine was shattered during a medical check-in when flight surgeon Steve Hart informed him from Mission Control Houston that terrible events were unfolding back home. Checking the station’s orbital tracking map, Culbertson realized their trajectory was about to carry them directly over New England and the mid-Atlantic coast within minutes.
Rushing to a window in the Russian segment with a video camera in hand, Culbertson peered down through the pristine void of space at the eastern seaboard. What he saw was a dark, massive plume of smoke billowing out from Lower Manhattan, fanning across the Atlantic Ocean. As he zoomed in, the haze enveloped the tip of the island, a silent, surreal sight marking the catastrophic collapse of the World Trade Center towers. Joined by his Russian crewmates, Vladimir Dezhurov and Mikhail Turin, Culbertson watched in solemn shock, capturing footage of his wounded homeland while traveling at seventeen thousand five hundred miles per hour.
The heartbreak deepened the following day when ground control delivered a devastating personal blow: Charles "Chic" Burlingame, Culbertson’s close friend and classmate from the U.S. Naval Academy, had been the captain of American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon. Cut off from the rest of humanity, the weight of isolation pressed heavily on the commander. To honor his fallen friend and the thousands who perished, Culbertson retrieved his trumpet, a instrument he had brought along for his months in orbit, and played "Taps" into the quiet solitude of the station, sending a final musical salute floating high above the Earth.
His Russian crewmates, Vladimir Dezhurov and Mikhail Tyurin, went to extraordinary lengths to support him through his isolation and grief. Beyond standing vigil with him at the windows, they continuously relayed every update they received from the Russian Mission Control Center, gave him absolute privacy when he needed to process the shock, and Tyurin even prepared a comforting hot bowl of borscht for Culbertson's dinner on the night of September 11 to help anchor him during an unimaginably surreal and lonely night.
#archaeohistories
Ron Usher retweeted
A Hero That Trusted His Intuition.
The problem wasn’t that Morgan Stanley didn’t believe him.
Rick Rescorla had already been right once. After the 1993 basement bombing of the World Trade Center, the firm’s security chief walked the towers, studied the site, and reached a conclusion most people preferred not to hear: the World Trade Center was still a target. Next time, he said, it would not be a truck. It would be an airplane.
An airplane. In a 1993 report.
Executives listened. Then they looked at the lease.
Morgan Stanley was the largest tenant in the complex—twenty-two floors of the South Tower, thousands of brokers, and a trading infrastructure that could not be packed into boxes and wheeled across the Hudson.
They literally made it a trading center.
The contract with the Port Authority ran until 2006. Walking away from premium Manhattan space of that scale would have meant penalties measured in the hundreds of millions, plus the operational chaos of relocating an entire downtown machine. So the company stayed.
Rescorla adjusted. If they could not leave the building, they would learn to escape it.
He built a protocol and treated it like doctrine. Unannounced drills. No exemptions. Brokers who billed by the minute were pulled off their desks and sent into the stairwells two by two, starting from the top floors, leaving a lane for firefighters coming the other way.
People complained. He did not care. Practice, he believed, was the only thing that would beat panic.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, American Airlines Flight 11 hit the North Tower. From the 44th floor of the South Tower, Rescorla could see the fire. Then the Port Authority came over the speakers: the South Tower was secure. Stay at your desks.
Rescorla grabbed a bullhorn and ignored them.
He started the drill his people already knew by heart. Floor by floor, two by two, down the stairs. He sang as he moved—Cornish songs from childhood, then “God Bless America”—keeping the line moving, refusing to let the stairwell become a stampede. Seventeen minutes later, the second plane struck the South Tower.
By then, most of Morgan Stanley was already on the way out.
Of the 2,687 employees in the building that morning, all but 13 survived.
It was stunning.
Rescorla could have been outside with them. He went back up instead. Colleagues told him to leave. He said he would, as soon as he was sure no one was left behind.
He was last seen around the 10th floor, heading higher.
The South Tower fell at 9:59 a.m. They never found him.
He was one of the 13.
He was a hero in every sense of the word.
Remember Rick Rescorla, he remembered for us.
Ron Usher retweeted
Several sailings between Nanaimo and Vancouver were cancelled Monday and Tuesday, due to mechanical issues on board one of BC Ferries' vessels.
RCMP attended Departure Bay terminal Monday evening, with several travelers left frustrated.
#Nanaimo
nanaimonewsnow.com/2026/08/3…
