MY USA TODAY COLUMN: A Pack, Not A Herd, Revisited.

Earlier observations here.

So the snipers that paralyzed and terrorized the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area are caught now. But it’s worth thinking about how they were caught. After repeatedly slipping through the fingers of law enforcement, John Muhammad and Lee Salvo were caught because leaked information about the suspects’ automobile and license number was picked up by members of the public, one of whom spotted the car within hours and alerted the authorities – blocking the exit from the rest area with his own vehicle to make sure they didn’t escape. “You can deputize a nation,” said one news official after the fact.

Yes. With proper information, the public can act against terrorists – often, as we found on September 11, faster and more effectively than the authorities. The key, as Jim Henley noted, is to “make us a pack, not a herd.”

The problem is that this goes against the very grain of intelligence agencies, law enforcement agencies, and so on. Within bureaucracies in general – and doubly within intelligence and law enforcement bureaucracies – information is power, and power isn’t something you want to share. And if you deputize a nation, doesn’t that make the official deputies just a little bit less special?

The problem with this mindset is that it’s all about bureaucratic turf, and not about getting the job done. Otherwise we’d have learned the lesson long ago.

And we still haven’t. Or maybe I should say, they still haven’t.

Plus: “In fact, it seems pretty clear that the authorities, overall, view the citizenry as a herd, not as a pack. They see ordinary people as sheep, with themselves in the role of shepherd. Without close supervision, they assume, people will erupt into mob violence, or scatter in fear. The evidence, however, doesn’t support this approach.”

Follow the link for a David Brin take, too. And read this as well.

UPDATE: I wish I’d know this before my column went to bed, but it certainly supports my thesis: American Professor Mark Moogalian ‘Rushed’ Train Gunman, Was Shot.

A French-American professor who was hailed by President Francois Hollande for his “courage” was shot while trying to to disarm a gunman wielding an AK-47 aboard a high-speed train, according to his wife.

Mark Moogalian, who is reportedly a 51-year-old academic originally from Midlothian, Virginia, spotted a suspicious passenger while traveling on the Amsterdam to Paris train Friday. “My husband told me that he had seen someone strange because he had entered the toilets with his suitcase and it lasted a long time,” Moogalian’s wife Isabelle told Europe1 radio Monday. “A little while later the guy came out and that’s when he saw that the guy was carrying a gun.”

Isabelle Moogalian, who was also aboard the train, said her husband spotted the gunman “being grabbed from behind by a different person” — thought to be a 29-year-old French banker who has chosen to stay anonymous. Mark Moogalian told his wife to “go” and then “rushed towards the gunman to remove … the Kalashnikov.”

She added: “I did not see my husband get shot, it happened too quickly and I was pretty much hiding behind seats. But I look at my husband through the seats at an angle and he looked straight at me and said, ‘I’m hit!’ … There was blood everywhere. I ran towards him and I could see that he a wound on his back, I then saw another wound by his neck.”

I hope he makes a full recovery.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 837.

PARTY OF THE RICH: Tech oligarchs tightening their grip on Democrats. “Overall, the hotbeds of the tech and information economies, including media, have become the financial bedrock of the Democratic Party. The 10 leading counties for Democratic fundraising in 2012 included, for the first time, Santa Clara, as well as San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York. Given their domination of the ranks of wealthy people under age 40, one can expect that this power will only increase in the years ahead. This suggests that the tech elite, far from deserting the Democratic Party, more likely will aim take to it over. They are doing this, as other industries have, by absorbing key party operatives. . . . Tech people certainly have no objection to joining the ranks of crony capitalists, notably when cloaked in environmentally green garb.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Millions A Year Behind On Student Loans.

Nearly 7 million Americans have gone at least a year without making a payment on their federal student loans, a high level of default that suggests a widening swath of households are unable or unwilling to pay back their school debt. As of July, 6.9 million Americans with student loans hadn’t sent a payment to the government in at least 360 days, quarterly data from the Education Department showed this past week. That was up 6%, or 400,000 borrowers, from a year earlier.

That translates into about 17% of all borrowers with federal loans being severely delinquent, a share that would be even higher if borrowers currently in school who aren’t yet required to repay were excluded. Millions of other borrowers are months behind but haven’t hit the 360-day threshold that the government defines as a default.

Severe delinquencies are rising despite the sharp drop in unemployment over the past year and a big push by the Obama administration to enroll borrowers in programs that lower their monthly payments.

Plus: “The education mess is a lot like the health care mess: the combination of federally mandated costs and controls, runaway cost inflation driven by insiders who keep jacking up the price, perverse market incentives in a warped marketplace, dysfunctional mandates, guild controls and crony regulations, all have produced a system in which costs are increasingly out of line with true value—and with society’s ability to pay.”

Who could have seen this coming?

THE 10 COMMANDMENTS FOR HUNTERS: DEALING WITH ANTI-HUNTING, DOE-EYED, TREE-HUMPERS: “Everyone else is ‘proud’ nowadays. Why shouldn’t you be? As a hunter/conservationist you have just cause to walk with your head held high.”

HOPEY CHANGEY: U.S. Housing Costs: Up, Up, Up, Up. “The rising cost of shelter has been attributed to low vacancy rates, meaning supply is low relative to demand. This is also affecting Americans’ ability to buy homes—as high rents make it hard for Americans to save up for a down payment. Homeownership is currently at a 48-year low. As my colleague Gillian White wrote, high rent isn’t just bad for the economy, it hurts those who can least afford it the most.”

But Obama’s Wall Street buddies are profiting. How convenient.

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: “Fear is contagious. So is courage.”

CHEER UP: MARKETS ARE TANKING AND THE WORLD IS ON FIRE, BUT WE’VE STILL GOT THIS: Gap is promising you cuter clothes by spring.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Who Could Have Seen This Coming? “The Education Department has grown into one of the biggest money lenders in the country, overseeing a $1.2 trillion portfolio of student debt rivaling the entire loan business of JPMorgan Chase with a staff roughly the size of the National Weather Service. But instead of fulfilling a presidential mission of remaking and simplifying a confusing and corrupt system that enriched financial firms at the expense of taxpayers — and ultimately the nation’s college students — serious problems have emerged.”

ACTUALLY, IT’S ‘ALL LIVES MATTER’ THAT RESONATES.

ROGER KIMBALL ON ELON MUSK: Crazy Like A Visionary.

HOLLYWOOD IS SO SEXIST: MSNBC weeps for poor Jennifer Lawrence, who only made $52 million last year.

Let’s all take a moment to shed a tear for poor, poor Jennifer Lawrence — the Hollywood actress only pulled in $52 million over the past 12 months.

Forget that Lawrence is the top-paid female actress in the world. Forget that she is the second-highest-paid actor overall. Forget that she makes approximately 2000 times the median U.S. salary.

No, MSNBC wants us all to focus on the travesty that she made $30 million less than the highest-paid actor in the world: Robert Downey Jr.

In the past 12 months (I’m actually going back further to include all of 2014), Lawrence has starred in three movies: “X-Men: Days of Future Past,” “Serena” and “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1.” Downey has starred in three as well: “Chef,” “The Judge” and “Avengers: Age of Ultron.”

If you want evidence that feminism is about the concerns of upper-class women, well. . . .

VDH ON ABSURD—AND NOT-SO ABSURD—IMMIGRATION: “Elites have branded Trump immigration proposals as absurd, especially the inflated rhetoric about a wall, and good and bad people,” Victor Davis Hanson writes. “His idea of mass deportations en masse is unworkable, but not an argument against weeding out criminals and those without work histories in the United States.”

Read the whole thing.

WAR ON WOMEN: Fiorina supporters slam ‘ludicrous’ CNN debate methodology.

Carly Fiorina supporters are criticizing CNN’s debate criteria that could prevent the former Hewlett-Packard CEO from grabbing a spot on the main stage at the second debate despite her surging poll numbers.

They say that CNN’s decision to include polls from before the first presidential debate will work against Fiorina, who didn’t make the main stage at the Aug. 6 Fox News debate in Cleveland but surged after a strong performance during the undercard debate.

“Ludicrous,” was how Katie Hughes, communications director for CARLY for America super-PAC supporting Fiorina’s campaign, termed it.

“The political class is *still* trying to keep her off the main debate stage, if you can believe that,” argued Sarah Isgur Flores, Fiorina’s deputy campaign manager, in a fundraising email to supporters on Friday.

A CNN spokesperson could not be reached for comment.

A cynic might conclude that this is CNN protecting Hillary. Hillary’s only claim to fame, after all, is that she has a vagina. To admit that there’s another woman in the race would undercut her.

STRANGERS ON A TRAIN: Roger Simon’s Amsterdam Diary continues with a look at how the New Yorker deigns to cover The Donald: “He refers to Trump as if it were indisputable that Donald was a racist and a sexist.  Oh, to live in the comfortable environs of political correctness.  You never have to look below the surface of anything. In fact, if you did, your audience would be offended.  You’d probably lose your column.”

Perhaps the New Yorker is simply trying to make amends with its rather parochial hometown audience after its highly problematic coverage of the 2008 campaign.

SOMEHOW, THIS HEADLINE PUT ME IN MIND OF WORMTONGUE: Left whispers to Warren: It’s not too late to run.

Liberal activists and strategists argue Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) would be beating Hillary Clinton in the polls by now if she had opted to run for president as a champion of Wall Street reform.

At a time when nervous Democrats are eyeing 72-year-old Vice President Biden and former Vice President Al Gore — who left office 15 years ago — as potential alternatives, some liberals say it’s not too late for Warren to jump in.

Related: Jerry Brown: I ‘don’t know’ if Hillary is nominee.

Come on, Jerry, jump in! There’s always room for another septuagenarian of pallor in today’s Democratic Party!

PAUL MIRENGOFF: Federal appeals court rips DOJ for misconduct in police prosecution.

After Louisiana prosecutors botched the case against the seven officers, producing a mistrial, the Holder Justice Department took over and obtained convictions. However, the Justice Department engaged in conduct so egregiously unethical that the district court overturned the convictions. And this week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit affirmed that ruling in stinging opinion condemning the DOJ prosecutors. . . .

What was the nature of the federal prosecutors’ misconduct? It began with a campaign to inflame potential jurors through the local media, including blogs.

Sal Perricone, a high-ranking prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, using a fake name, posted commentary on Nola.com, the website of the Times-Picayune, that (in the words of the Court of Appeals) “castigated the defendants and their lawyers and repeatedly chastised the New Orleans Police Department as a fish ‘rotten from the head down.’”

Perricone was joined in this outrageous misconduct by Jan Mann, the first assistant to the U.S. attorney.

Meanwhile, back in Washington, Karla Dobinski, a veteran of Holder’s Civil Rights Division, also posted inflammatory commentary under at least one assumed name. Ironically — appallingly — Dobinsky was part of the DOJ “taint team” in this case. As such, she was assigned to protect the civil rights of the indicted defendants.

The cover-up, we are often told, is usually worse than the crime. In this case, the cover-up gave the offense a good run for its money.

Fortunately, they’re Democrats, so the national media need pay no special attention.

CRAZY LIKE A VISIONARY: Elon Musk’s remarkable career reminds us that individuals matter, Roger Kimball writes at City Journal.

A little crony socialism doesn’t hurt, either.

GOOD: “Denver’s city attorney has directed the police and sheriff’s department to stop arresting people passing out jury nullification literature in front of the courthouse. The order was revealed Friday in U.S. District Court during a hearing involving a lawsuit against the city and Denver police chief Robert White. The lawsuit was filed earlier this month on behalf of activists who want to distribute jury nullification information outside the Lindsey-Flanigan courthouse. They sued after two others who were handing out pamphlets were charged with seven counts of jury tampering by District Attorney Mitch Morrissey. The lawsuit argues that the arrests are a violation of free speech rights and asks for a federal injunction against further arrests.”

I wrote a column about this case a couple of weeks ago.

THE WASHINGTON POST BLOWS THE DOG WHISTLE AT TRUMP AND HIS SUPPORTERS: An Insta-reader emails:

Never let it be said that media and leftists don’t use their own dog-whistles.  Check out the photographic and linguistic dog-whistles in the WaPo coverage of Trump’s Alabama speech.  I’m not a Trump supporter, but the press is doing it’s best to make me far more sympathetic than I was a month ago.

Trump pulls in a crowd around 40,000.  Wa-Po features a photo of two people in the stands.

Since we’re into the age of offense, Wa-Po uses an image of a flag-clothed man with a prosthetic limb to represent Trump’s supporters.  Isn’t this a dog-whistle to able-ism and anti-patriot bigots?

The article features references to a neo-Confederate activist, Lynyrd Skynyrd concerts, and the Daytona 500, all symbolic of leftist loathing of Southerners and the middle class.  The references to flash, showmanship, and celebrity were never seen on coverage of Obama.

Tell me again why we’re supposed to take WaPo seriously?

Note that the byline on the article is both Robert Costa and Dave Weigel, two young journalists who each kick-started their careers by posing as conservatives, before their worldviews “evolved,” in order to match the rest of their colleagues at the Post.

NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Smart DNA nanobots mount a deadly attack on cancer cells, First human trial this year. Faster, please.

IT’S NOT THE RESULTS, IT’S THE SMUG:Burning Down The Field in Order to Save It.  And You Cheered.