Greetings all,
 After finding in a previous diary that McCain was the best chance the Republicans had I thought some about what would kill them.  Don't worry.  This won't be a new theory for the GOP freaks in charge of GOTV.  What we need is for the Ron Paul mania to spin out of control and lead him to run as a Liberitarian.  Once again I am looking at ways we could influence the opposition but rather than looking at their best chance and our least painful potential loss, I wanted to think of the nail that would kill them.  Imagine that?  Ron Paul back as a Liberitarian, running as a third pary candidate and becoming the new Green party equivalent to kill the Republican's chances.

 So why would a Democrat be pulling for a republican to get the nomination who could possibly win the general election?  I will go over a few reasons but mainly it comes down to one word ... Torture.
 As many have commented to me for themselves, I feel that I could be happy with about any of the Democratic candidates.  Obama is a competent and inspiring leader, Edwards deserves more credit than I usually give him, and Clinton is not as awful as some people make her out to be.
 What about the awful republican field though?  It gives me the creeps to think the top three polling Republicans could get the nomination.  Giuliani is a fascist in the worst sense.  He initially refused to leave office when his term was up.  Enough said.  Except that he might be the best candidate for us to run against.
 Hucabee and Romney are both my worst nightmare, next to the current miserable administration.  To put a religious frame on it, they are true believers aspiring to become instruments of Satan.

Hi all,
I am happy to announce to my 100,000 friends at DailyKos that I will be defending my thesis tomorrow. Hopefully this won't cause a media frenzy! ;-) I invited about 50 people and at the last minute they tried to change it to a room that holds about 15.

I am confident that I will pass, though they may ask me to make lots of changes and additions to the text.  Some of you may remember my diary on water dimer. That is about a third of the defense. I am also discussing a new way to measure NO2 and some particle composition studies I did that found large amounts of acyl peroxynitrates (PANs) in the particles in Riverside. (Riverside, CA is a great place to study pollution. It is so easy to measure here.)

Hi all,
 You may or may not have seen the water dimer diary I did that remarkably went to the top of the list.  Well, here is an update.  The reason I am posting about water dimer is that it is a little known component of global warming that may have a big effect.  It is not the dihydrogen monoxide pollutant that was meant to be banned in a petition that once went around.  H2O is real and so is (H2O)2. For every 1000 molecules of water in the air there is about 1 pair of water molecules stuck together in what is called water dimer.  One of the things I did in my paper is measure that relationship. The other is that I measured the strength of the absorption and it is 1000 times stronger than the best calculations predict.  Maybe that means it is a mistake, but I did careful measurements and I am confident that other researchers will measure water dimer with visible light when they try.

My paper is now online at

Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions

I have been wanting to write a diary on this topic for some time, but did not want to jeopardize my publication by providing 'prior publication'. My paper is in press now at the Journal of Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics. I wanted to discuss it here with the people who get things going and make a difference... you.

The problem is that temperatures might go up 7 deg F instead of 3 deg F in the next 20 years due to a curious pairing of water molecules called water dimer. Water dimer or some related continuum absorption was predicted by Albert Arking to absorb red and infrared wavelengths in significant amounts based on his climate models in 1996 in Science. In 1999 he published in Geophysical Research Letters his measurements between aircraft and found that there was some significant absorption. He couldn't tell which wavelengths it was with his instruments.

He calculated that there would be an additional 2 deg C rise in the average temperature in 20 years over the 1.7 deg C that was currently accepted. Reports are starting to come in of temperatures exceeding the models.  For the sake of all us Americans understanding that is almost 7 deg F of warming, and that is just the average temperature. The highs could be worse.

As many of you agree, impeachment should be on the table, or rather, it should have happened already.  To say that impeachment is off the table and leave it at that sends the message that the speaker of the house has abdicated her duty to check the administration in the event that high crimes and misdemeanors are uncovered.  Unless it is made clear that congress will persue every avenue to deal with this rogue administration, with the endless list of high crimes that are repeatedly uncovered, our speaker has not accepted the job her colleagues have given her.

I am sure this has been covered, but perhaps it is worth going over repeatedly.  With all the scandals that are coming out it is hard to decide who is to blame.  We were planning a letter writing campaign last night and we couldn't decide whether to push Cheney impeachment or Cheney and Bush together.  Certainly they both deserve it.  It was pointed out that advocating impeaching both the president and vice president at the same time seems almost nutball, but isn't Bush responsible for Cheney's antics too?  And now we have the AG to consider. Maybe if we forced an honest AG into office we would have better behavior and accountability.

Many people don't seem to realize that Homosexuality is a form of love.  Whether you love someone of the opposite sex as I do or love someone of the same sex is irrelevant.  People need to be encouraged to love and find love.

When airplane pilots find themselves in trouble they are encouraged to follow the 4 C's:

1. Climb

2. Communicate

3. Confess

4. Comply

Item 1 Climb: enables you to have the greatest chance of making it safely to an airport and the best chance of getting a good signal for #2.  With regard to Iraq and Iran we must get our troups into the safest configuration we can to prepare to get out.

Item 2 Communicate:  We must tell congress and the United Nations what is going on and to what extent we are in trouble by allowing this pseudo texas cowboy to run the show for too long.

 It occurs to me that with the widespread application of "stress positions" and other inhumane treatment as possibly used on Jose Padilla as noted here and possibly many other even less important "targets" of the US military that we should collectively provide some sort of remedy for people who have been harmed by these actions.  More to the point...

Perhaps you have heard of the recent turnover at the LA Times over whether the publisher was willing to lay off massive numbers of employees.  Now we find that under the new publisher they are endorsing Scwarzenegger and publishing pro-republican articles...

Yes, not only have I met Arnold S. (Click my name to see his diary) but I have met Ken Calvert as well, only more recently.  I am working on my thesis at U. C. Riverside and met Calvert some months ago in the hallway, and he had me concerned...

People are starting to accept that global warming is a reality, but they are often frustrated because they ask, "Ok so we are all going to die?  What can I do about it?" Well, we haven't all died yet, and there is plenty to do.

In this diary I will present a brief summary of what we know, some of which you may not know, and attempt to answer that burning question... What can we do?  It is true that we can't just go and force the auto makers to produce cars with higher mileage or shut down sections of the power grid.  There are some things we can do and they are not as hard as you might think.

Yes, I was introduced to Arnold by my uncle in Venice.  It was almost 30 years ago and I was about 10 years old.  As I approached him on the boardwalk and asked how I could get muscles like his he said...

"Go away from me! You look like a little girl. You will never be as big or as important as me!"

Last night our friend Louis bit the bullet and generated some campaign funds by hosting an art showing by Joel Peletier.  American Fundamentalists is a striking large painting depicting the players that combined political, religious, and economic fundamentalism to gain power in America.

Joel and Louis' websites are below the fold...

The call to get out of Iraq has been heartfelt and meaningful, but to me it seems that we do need to fix what is broken, and our US leadership is not the answer.  From the beginning of the war UN involvement has been lacking and sorely needed.  What we need to be calling for now is to go to the UN and give them the leadership position on this mess that they should have had to begin with.