Hat tip to Walter Olson.

Imagined reconstruction of Heidentor (“Heathen’s Gate”), the most impressive surviving Roman monument in Austria.

Carutum web-site:

All that remains now of the former splendid edifice is the famous archway. Latest scientific investigations clearly prove that it was originally erected as a quadrifrons (Greek tetrapylon), a monument with pillars and four archways, which was built from 354 to 361 AD as a triumphal arch in honour of Emperor Constantius II and which rose protectively over the statue of the Emperor.

The name ‘Heidentor’ dates from the Middle Ages when the archway was thought to have been erected by non-Christians and was therefore called ‘heydnisch Tor’ (heathen gate).

Barack Obama, in a statement to an audience in Roanoke, Virginia, gave one of the all-time classic statements of collectivist denial of individual achievement. He said: “If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”

An English professor I know was moved to quote William Butler Yeats in response to the president.

Come let us mock at the great
That had such burdens on the mind
And toiled so hard and late
To leave some monument behind,
Nor thought of the levelling wind.

NY Daily News:

A photo of a gun-wielding, bikini-clad woman standing on a crowded Tel Aviv beach has become an Internet sensation, with thousands of viewers curious about whether the brunette beauty is part of Israel’s military and why she wasn’t in uniform with her weapon in tow.

The young woman, dressed only in a black-and-white string bikini, was captured chatting with a friend, rifle (with its magazine removed) slung casually behind her back. Though there’s no uniform to identify her, the woman appears to be part of the Israel Defense Forces. Two years of IDF service is mandatory for most Israeli women at age 18. Men serve three years.

The photo was viewed 650,000 times in one day and was posted on sites including Facebook, Reddit and Gizmodo under titles like “Only in Israel,” and “Badass Chicks in Israel Don’t Go To the Beach Without Their Assault Rifles.” It garnered a series of lascivious comments from male admirers but almost as many questions about the IDF’s weapons policy for off-duty soldiers.

Via American Power.

The slain Grand Master Ulrich von Jungingen at the base of the Grunwald monument in Cracow.

On July 15, 1410, the allied forces of Poland and Lithuania decisively defeated the Order of Teutonic Knights in one of the greatest battles of the Middle Ages at Grunwald. The victory put a stop to the German Drang noch Osten for nearly four centuries.

Polish director Aleksander Ford depicted the climax of the battle in his 1960 film Krzyzacy [The Teutonic Knights].

“There is no official list, but [Tarek] Omar [a local diver who recovers bodies] estimates that more than 130 divers have lost their lives in the hole in the last 15 years. He compares what is happening in the Blue Hole to the madness on Mount Everest.”

Spiegel profiles Egypt’s Gulf of Aqaba Blue Hole:

There are more attractive dive sites than the Blue Hole of Dahab, with more colorful corals, and more fish, shipwrecks, channels and caves. But the Blue Hole is considered to be most famous diving spot in the world — because it’s the most dangerous. …

The Blue Hole is easy to reach. It doesn’t take a boat to get there, and you don’t even have to swim out to it. You just hop in. It’s about 10 meters from a beach chair to the Blue Hole. The water is warm, there is no current and visibility is good.

Photo Gallery: “Compressed air can only be used to a depth of 56 meters. The tunnel’s exit is one meter lower than that.”

David Brooks is just one of several writers recently identifying the character of our contemporary elite as a grave problem, and he has a theory about the source of members of the modern meritocratic elite’s extreme sense of self-entitlement and personal exemption from any and all rules and standards.

The corruption that has now crept into the world of finance and the other professions is not endemic to meritocracy but to the specific culture of our meritocracy. The problem is that today’s meritocratic elites cannot admit to themselves that they are elites.

Everybody thinks they are countercultural rebels, insurgents against the true establishment, which is always somewhere else. This attitude prevails in the Ivy League, in the corporate boardrooms and even at television studios where hosts from Harvard, Stanford and Brown rail against the establishment.

As a result, today’s elite lacks the self-conscious leadership ethos that the racist, sexist and anti-Semitic old boys’ network did possess. If you went to Groton a century ago, you knew you were privileged. You were taught how morally precarious privilege was and how much responsibility it entailed. You were housed in a spartan 6-foot-by-9-foot cubicle to prepare you for the rigors of leadership.

The best of the WASP elites had a stewardship mentality, that they were temporary caretakers of institutions that would span generations. They cruelly ostracized people who did not live up to their codes of gentlemanly conduct and scrupulosity. They were insular and struggled with intimacy, but they did believe in restraint, reticence and service.

Today’s elite is more talented and open but lacks a self-conscious leadership code. The language of meritocracy (how to succeed) has eclipsed the language of morality (how to be virtuous). Wall Street firms, for example, now hire on the basis of youth and brains, not experience and character. Most of their problems can be traced to this.

If you read the e-mails from the Libor scandal you get the same sensation you get from reading the e-mails in so many recent scandals: these people are brats; they have no sense that they are guardians for an institution the world depends on; they have no consciousness of their larger social role.

This Model 1911 Colt .45 was found in the waistband of Clyde Barrow’s trousers by Texas Ranger Frank Hamer who brought the outlaws to justice via a high firepower ambush on a rural Louisiana road on May 23, 1934.

A breakout raid on a Texas prison farm by the Barrow gang in which two guards were shot (one of whom died) infuriated Texas state officials, who responded by hiring retired Ranger Captain Frank Hamer, a veteran of a hundred gun fights who had been shot 17 times and who had reputedly killed between 50 and 70 men, to track down the Barrow gang and out an end to their criminal careers.

Hamer’s commission was to deliver justice, not bring them back alive. He was encouraged to trap the gang, making sure the correctness of his identification of the suspects, and then to just “shoot everybody in sight.” Part of Hamer’s compensation for the manhunt included authorization to appropriate as trophies the weapons and personal effects of the criminals.

Hamer caught up with Bonnie and Clyde on a rural highway in Louisiana with an ambush by six lawmen, armed with a Browning Automatic Rifle, Winchesters, and two Remington semiautomatic rifles. The outlaws’ car was riddled with bullets before either had a chance to shoot back.

RR Auctions of New Hampshire is offering for sale next September 30, with documented provenance going back to Frank Hamer, two pistols found on the bodies of the deceased bandits, Bonnie Parker’s cosmetics case, and Clyde Barrow’s Elgin pocket watch.

News service story

RR Auction lots preview

This Colt Detective Special .38 was found by Hamer taped to Bonnie Parker’s inner thigh.

Via Unaussprechlichen Andrew.

Red Herring:

The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in “Metcalfe’s law“–which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants–becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.

Hat tip to Walter Olson.