This is how good Steven Den Beste’s USS Clueless weblog is — every morning I turn on CNN to find out the latest news in the war against Afghanistan. Then I bring up Den Beste’s site to find out everything CNN left out or got wrong.

If there is a more comprehensive, insightful look at the events taking place in Afghanistan, I have yet to find it. As far as I’m concerned, USS Clueless is required reading for anyone who wants to closely follow the war on terrorism.

Okay, I spent way too much time as a teenager playing Steve Jackson Games’ excellent Car Wars — a board game in which the goal is to outfit cars with all sorts of weapons and then blow away your friends (and it is a travesty that there has never been a computer car fighting game as cool as this board game).

Anyway, Steve Jackson Games is getting ready to release an updated, streamlined version of the game and just by coincidence the U.S. Army is working on an SUV that contains most of the elements of the erstwhile fictional game.

They’re calling the behemoth SmarTruck, and this thing is loaded with all the options:

Packed with more gadgets than a Swiss army knife, the vehicle’s Ford F-350 chassis boasts a remote-controlled, laser-sighted machine gun, a grenade launcher, night vision, bulletproof glass, Kevlar armor, a GPS locator, electrified door handles, and blinding lights.

To elude pursuers, the truck can cover the road behind it with an oil slick, a smoke screen or sharp tacks to puncture enemy vehicle’s tires. It can prevent attempts to latch explosive booby traps onto it and clear mine fields.

Even James Bond never had a vehicle that cool.

Via Poliglut come two separate theories about why the WTC Towers collapsed so quickly.

In this corner we have chemistry professor Art Robinson. Robinson told World Net Daily that he believes the towers came down quickly because of New York’s 1971 ban on asbestos.

When the towers were originally designed, the columns were to be coated in a foam spray made from asbestos. Before the towers were completed, however, New York banned asbestos and the upper floors used an alternative insulation. Robinson says that Herbert Levine, who invented the asbetos foam spray that was to be used, said that, “If a fire breaks out above the 64th floor, that building will fall down.”

I’m extremely skeptical of this particular theory. Robinson makes much of Levine’s comment without even bothering to note that it is incredibly self-serving. Also this particular explanation is too reminiscent of the myth that the Space Shuttle disaster was the result of an asbestos ban (asbestos should not have been banned, but lets not try to blame every disaster on the irrational fear of asbestos).

In the other corner is G. Charles Clifton of the New Zealand Heavy Engineering Research Assocation who argues that it was the force exerted by the impact of the planes which ultimately doomed the towers. Clifton argues that the plane that hit the North Tower almost certainly took out the core supporting structures of at least three floors, causing the floors above them to sag. As the fire weakened the supporting columns, this effect would have become more exaggerated until the floors collapsed on top of each other pancake-style.

Clifton’s hypothesis also would explain why the South tower collapsed so much more quickly than did the North tower. Based on the videotape of the collision, Clifton notes that the plane that hit the South tower probably took out all of the core supports for at least 4 and probably 6 floors, as well as severely weakening the southeast corner of the building.

In both cases, Clifton argues that any resulting fire was not, in and of itself, enough to bring down the towers. In fact, he notes that the available evidence is inconsistent with a raging 700 degree fire that has been frequently hypothesized as the cause of the collapse (Clifton argues that if that scenario occurred, the towers wouldn’t have lasted nearly as long as they did).

The support folks at Google sent me a very nice message today answering my questions about why my web site seemed to periodically disappear from their index.

We update our index every four weeks. Each time we update our index we find new sites, lose some sites and sites shift in their ranking. If you happen to enter the same query while we are in the process of posting the index at our various data centers around the country it might seem like you are seeing inconsistent results from Google. What is actually happening is that you are seeing a result from an “old” version of our index one time and a result from a “new” version the next. Due to the size of our index, we can not simultaneously post a new index at all of our data centers, which may result in the behavior for a short period of time.

I still haven’t changed my opposition to capital punishment, but sometimes it is very difficult to hold that view.