I see that, now that the enemy has collapsed, the French have finally decided to send some troops to central Asia. Maybe they want to swap tips with the Taliban on surrender techniques?

This is kind of cool. The Pentagon has released photos of US Special Forces on horseback with the Northern Alliance.

But wait–I thought that this was an ineffective and outmoded means of warfare. That’s what the press was telling us last week. That was why the Northern Alliance could never defeat the Talib…

Oh. Never mind.

For those reading Instapundit this morning, I don’t really think that Professor Reynolds is singlehandedly responsible for global warming. In fact, I’m not entirely sure that such a phenomenon exists, or that if it does, that it’s not a feature, rather than a bug, as the hysterical media paint it.

But as he was heavily involved in policy at the National Space Society in the 1980’s, I do wish he could have more effectively used whatever meager influence he might have had over Rick Berman to fend off Star Trek Voyager. But he’s forgiven–I’m sure that, as always, he did his best…

In noting James Lileks’ excellent commentary concerning leftist angst about American success, which exposes the anti-war types as actually just anti-American types (apparently they’re also upset that we’re achieving arms control greater than they ever could have fantasized, but it doesn’t count, because it’s part of our actual successful defense strategy, instead of an “arms control process”), Professor Reynolds makes an interesting point this morning.

This hostility to American success also explains why the same kinds of people were so viscerally hostile to the space program. As Norman Mailer famously observed, it showed them up. They were blathering on about changing the world, while a bunch of flat-topped nerds with slide rules actually went and did it. Naturally, the left has never forgiven them.

As a recovering aerospace engineer, I’ve noticed this as well. And this is as good a time as any to make a confession.

Once upon a time, in Flint, Michigan, when I was young and impressionable, I was a campus radical, and even a member of SDS (though I don’t think they ever had any cards to carry, and I don’t recall any dues). I should note, for those Gen X and Y’ers not up on their ancient history (i.e., the late sixties and early seventies), that this was Students for a Democratic Society, which was actually founded about sixty miles east of Flint, in Port Huron.

Now, so-called “progressive” groups have never worried overmuch about truth in advertising (as the self-labeling with the word “progressive” implies), or truth in general, for that matter. The Bolsheviks didn’t call themselves that because they were really a majority–they were just after kind of a bandwagon effect. So it seemed like a good thing to me. After all, I was a “Student” (albeit a junior-high-school student). And “Democratic”–who could argue with that? And “Society”? Well, there’s the National Geographic Society–they seemed to be OK. So, as a naive fourteen-year old, I joined up.

I joined up mainly because I thought they were against the war in Vietnam, and I also (even though I had models of various fighter aircraft, and dreams of being an Air Force pilot, aborted by my near-sightedness) thought I was against the war. I wasn’t against war in general, but this one seemed to be problematic, even though I was three or four years shy of draft age…

The actual detailed history of my brief foray into leftist (high-school) campus politics is not so much interesting as it is long, so I’ll instead make it short and simply say that, after a few weeks of organizing sit-ins over dress codes (the girls wanted the right to wear cullotes, as I recall, and we guys were willing to go to the barricades for them), and publishing an underground student newspaper on mimeograph (another technology with which students today are utterly innocent), and actually attending an anti-war rally sponsored at the local branch of the University of Michigan, I was invited to attend a meeting at the grownups’ (i.e., local college students) SDS.

I went to the meeting, held in a classroom at night at the local U of M. The highlight (or for me, lowlight) of the evening was a film that we had to endure, that showed the joys of going down to Cuba and helping cut sugar cane por Fidel y la Revolucion.

At that moment, I had an epiphany. These people were socialists, if not communists! Being an Ayn Rand devotee at the time (and not just because she had a cool last name), I was shocked.

After the movie ended, I mentally tore up my imaginary SDS card into little fanciful pieces, walked out, and dabbled with leftist politics no more. But I did start to give some thought to the nature of societal change, and evolution, and revolution, and I started to read some history.

And in so doing, I came to realize that the true revolutionaries were not people marching to the barricades, or theorizing about social philosophies in Ann Arbor or Berkeley or Paris cafes, or even the small subset of such people who actually somehow came to political power. The true revolutionaries were the technologists–those who solved societal needs not by attempting to forcibly rearrange society, but rather by giving individuals new tools that allowed them to reorder their own lives.

Gutenberg almost single-handedly (and probably unintentionally) overthrew much of the power structure of his time. Mssrs. Winchester and Colt, and the fellow who invented barbed wire, had as great an impact on the American West as Thomas Jefferson, and more than any politician from the region. Arguably, few politicians had as much impact on the twentieth century as Henry Ford, or Orville and Wilbur Wright, or Armstrong, prolific inventor of the modern radio, or Turing and von Neumann and Noyce and Jobs and Gates, and all the others who gave us the modern information revolution.

When a history of the late twentieth century is written decades or centuries from now, it seems likely to me that John F. Kennedy will be noted as “a minor politician during the era of von Braun.” His “we choose to go to the Moon and do the other things because they are hard” speech at Rice will probably be remembered, but as more information comes out about him, and his Presidency is put into perspective by historians not blinded by the Camelot myth, it will likely also be parodied (“I choose to do Marilyn Monroe, and Judith Exner, and the other women, not because they are easy, but because I am haaaarrrrd…”)

And as part of that insight, a few years later, I did head off to Ann Arbor, but not to hang out with the cool campus radicals, but rather, to attend engineering school.

Anyway, I think that Glenn is right. At some level, the left realize this as well, and it really pisses them off. This, to a large degree, is probably the source of much of their opposition to new (and even old) technology–it changes the world in dramatic and unpredictable ways, and disrupts their ongoing plans to impose upon us dystopias, and their latte philosophizing and teach-ins (and their own bombings) just can’t keep up.

In fact, I think that this is why some of them are still unable to bring themselves to support the war. In their hearts, though they don’t necessarily agree with the specifics of bin Laden’s goals, they feel a sympathy for his methods of lashing out at the otherwise impregnable Kapitalist Amerikan Tekno-Empire, and perhaps even admire and envy his ability to carry them out, in a way that they never competently could, though they’d never admit it. Bill Ayers was a piker compared to Osama. The enemy of their enemy is their friend.

And now that the Soviet Union has collapsed, and socialism has been shown to be the fraud that it is, they are infiltrating instead the environmental movement. In so doing, they are further infusing anti-technology attitudes there, depriving true environmentalists (as opposed to the green-on-the-outside, red-on-the-inside “watermelon” socialist environmentalists) of many of the technology solutions that could actually solve their problems, including space technology. But that’s a subject for another day.

I don’t have a lot of commentary on this piece, except to urge that it be read. It’s just damn good journalism, by Elizabeth Rubin, a woman at the front lines of a war in which the status of women is one of the fundamental issues..

By midday the Northern Alliance commanders were in the city. Gul Haider, a well-known, wooden-legged commander who has been fighting since the days of the Russians, had occupied an Arab and Pakistani military compound. A security guard with the Northern Alliance showed us an address book he’d found with numbers abroad to contact Osama bin Laden. At the Ministry for the Suppression of Vice and the Promotion of Virtue, books and papers written in Arabic littered the floors and desks and cabinets, along with piles of the infamous leather whips made in Pakistan and used by the religious police. One rolled-up edict read: “Three cooks didn’t pray in the evening and were given seven hundred whacks with the cable. In the morning four men left the house without saying prayers and were given seven hundred whacks with the cable.”

A poster-sized statement, drafted by the mullahs here, attempted to lay out all the Koranic justifications for closing down the girls’ schools–namely, because they need to be covered in chadors and separated from men. A bundle of Bibles written in Hebrew along with letters to Israel were bound up in a green bag, most likely confiscated from Jewish Afghans. The man guarding the old ministry shuddered when he saw a pile of turbans on a windowsill. He’d been thrown in prison by the religious police numerous times–because his beard was too short, because he was Tajik, because he was a man from the Panjshir Valley selling rugs.

Perhaps the greatest signs of freedom in Kabul today were the clumps of hair gathering on the barbershop floors, and the children sailing their multicolored kites over every city neighborhood–a pastime forbidden here for the last five years. The barbers, many of whom were arrested eight months ago for giving “Titanic-style” haircuts–combed straight, with a part down the center, and too Western–were celebrating the Taliban defeat by cutting their customers’ beards for free. I met a woman doctor, a cousin of Ahmed Shah Massoud, who held the rank of general in the military for nearly 20 years but was confined to practicing medicine on Taliban wives just once a month at the military hospital. “Tomorrow,” she told me, “they must announce on the radio that we can take off these chadris. And then I’ll put back on my general’s uniform and walk the streets with my face to the air.”

I’ll try to get more details, and I will have some more thoughts up a little later, but Max was father of the Thor missile, which later became the Delta launch vehicle. He was instrumental in getting Reagan and Weinberger to commit to missile defense, and, keeping up with the times, he was equally instrumental in briefing Dan Quayle and initiating what became the DC-X program. His thinking was always fresh, and that we aren’t farther along in space is to a large degree because his wisdom generally went unheeded.

Ad Astra, Maxwell.

Professor Reynolds got sufficiently amusing responses to his contest to come up with the words for “If I Were A Taliban” (to the tune of “If I Were A Rich Man”), that I thought I’d give it a whirl.

Anyone have some lyrics to “Taliban On The Run” (to be sung to the tune of McCartney’s “Band On The Run”)?

Best ones will be posted.