This PERFECTLY explains the Capitalism vs Socialism argument for America “So now, Colombia rejected a socialist. Peru rejected a socialist. El Salvador, Chile, Honduras, Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina all rejected Marxist or socialist leadership. And Venezuela was destroyed by socialism. Latin Americans are rejecting socialism after having tried it. So why are Americans accepting socialism, having never tried it? Well, partially because most Americans don’t know what socialism is It’s not healthcare for all or affordable housing. Socialism isn’t a synonym for all the things I want, but I’m not getting in my capitalist country. It’s not a vibe. It’s an economic system characterized by collective or governmental ownership of the means of production. Means of production meaning infrastructure used to produce goods and services like factories, farms, and companies. Capitalism also isn’t a vibe. It’s not billionaires and corporations controlling politics. It’s not a synonym for all the things I hate about my country. It’s an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, AKA the means of production. Now, just like Mac versus Windows, there are different versions of capitalism and socialism. Finland, Norway, Denmark, and Sweden are less capitalistic than America, but they are still capitalist. Although they have a few exceptions to the rule, private companies own the means of production, not the government in those countries. Now, you might like certain programs that socialism promises, like universal healthcare, but those programs aren’t tied to a specific operating system. You can run Photoshop on Mac or Windows, just like you can have universal healthcare in socialism or capitalism. But it seems we as a people keep getting more confused about what socialism is. In 1949, 34% of Americans correctly identified socialism as government ownership of the economy. By 2018, only 17% did, and I suspect it’s even worse now. American politicians are confused, too. In 2015, Denmark’s prime minister had to correct Bernie Sanders and say, “Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy.” Zoran Mamdani is a democratic socialist. Democratic socialism is a version of socialism. Now, you could argue that socialism just hasn’t been done right yet. And when every socialist experiment at the national level in the 20th century failed, and every experiment in the 21st century is failing, maybe the problem isn’t that socialism hasn’t worked in practice, it, that it almost certainly can’t work in principle. And maybe the assertion that this time will be different isn’t optimism, it’s actually just unfalsifiability, where a theory cannot ever be contradicted by actual evidence. We have bugs in this version of capitalism that need to be fixed, principally that there is too much money in politics, that billions of dollars speak louder than millions of voices. And you know what? The socialists might create healthy pressure to fix those bugs. That’s good, but that’s different than changing the whole operating system. Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease. Because when there’s never been a successful socialist country in history, and the countries who have actually experimented with it are abandoning it, the results start to speak for themselves. And lately, they’re speaking Spanish.”
And just so we’re crystal clear, here are the stated goals of the Democratic Socialists of America in America
-Abolish the US Senate
– Replace the Presidency and Supreme Court
– Abolish the Electoral College
• Abolish police and the prison system
• Abolish ICE, grant amnesty to all immigrants and end visa restrictions
USA 2026 The teachers’ union does not exist to educate your children. It exists to extract wages, block accountability, and eliminate competition, and it does this through the oldest trick in the statist playbook: capturing the regulatory apparatus that controls entry into the market. School vouchers threaten this arrangement directly. When a family in Milwaukee receives a $8,000 voucher and walks it across the street to a private school, the public school loses that funding. The union loses dues from teachers that the school no longer needs to employ. You can see exactly why the National Education Association (NEA), alongside the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), has spent part of a combined $669.3 million since 2015 opposing school choice. The public school system is a state-enforced cartel. Funding flows in through compulsory taxation regardless of performance. Families cannot easily exit without paying twice, once in taxes and again in private tuition. This structure is intended. Monopolies do not emerge from free exchange; they require coercion to sustain themselves. Free market economists have long pointed out that competition disciplines producers by giving consumers exit options. Remove the exit option, and producers serve themselves. American public schools spend an average of $17,000 per pupil annually while countries like South Korea and Finland achieve superior results at lower costs in more competitive environments. The numbers do not flatter the monopoly. What the union calls “protecting public education” is protecting a captive market. Children in that market have no leverage, no exit, and no recourse when administrators fail them for the ninth consecutive year. The state compels your attendance, compels your funding, then tells you the resulting mediocrity is a public good worth defending.
by Handre on X @Handre “Spreading the radical ideas of the free market to 100m people before 2035. Let’s wipe collectivism from the face of the earth.”
Hayek and Keynes met in person, debated in print, and disagreed on nearly everything that matters in economics, and the consequences of that disagreement are still bleeding out of your tax bill today. The clash crystallized in 1931. Hayek arrived at the London School of Economics from Vienna, the University of London had just given him a visiting position, and his four-part review of Keynes’s Treatise on Money appeared in Economica. Keynes fired back. Both men were brilliant, both were prolific, and both understood that they were fighting over something fundamental: whether market prices carry real information, or whether a wise technocrat with a budget deficit can simply override them. Hayek said prices are signals produced by millions of individual decisions that no single mind can replicate. Keynes said the economy is a machine and the state can tune the throttle. One of these positions respects human knowledge. The other assumes the government knows your business better than you do. The irony Keynes fans never want to confront: Keynes himself, by 1946, was alarmed at where Keynesian policy was heading. He told Henry Clay at the Bank of England that he hoped markets would reassert themselves before his own ideas “did too much damage.” He died that April. His followers immediately ignored the warning and spent the next three decades engineering the stagflation of the 1970s, the Nixon wage-price controls of 1971, and the general wreckage that Hayek had predicted with embarrassing precision in 1931. Hayek won the Nobel in 1974. The prize committee gave it to him alongside Gunnar Myrdal, a committed social democrat, because they lacked the nerve to award a free market thinker alone. Even in Stockholm, the state needs a security blanket. The deeper issue is moral, not just technical. Every time a government “stimulates” the economy, it does so by extracting resources from producers through taxation or debasing the currency through credit expansion. The state is not a benevolent engineer: it is an institution that compels compliance at gunpoint, then calls the wealth they exctacted “revenue.” The pretense of knowledge is not merely an intellectual error, but the philosophical license for coercion. Every stimulus package passed since 2008 proves the lesson is still being refused.
Why Socialism Cannot Work. Ever. Mathematically.
Article 6/27 Vienna. 1919.
The Austro-Hungarian Empire has just collapsed. The war has been lost. The old order is gone, and what replaces it is not yet clear.
Hungary has already fallen to a communist revolution. Germany has seen one attempted. In Austria, socialist agitators are making their case in the streets while the government tries to hold the country together. Otto Neurath — philosopher, socialist, and true believer — has just published a pamphlet arguing that a centrally planned economy is not only possible but scientifically superior to the chaos of markets. The intellectual class is largely sympathetic. The historical moment feels decisive.
Ludwig von Mises, thirty-seven years old, veteran of the Eastern Front, economic adviser at the Vienna Chamber of Commerce, reads Neurath’s pamphlet. Then he sits down and writes the paper that should have stopped socialism in its tracks before it killed anyone.
He delivers it as a lecture in 1919. He publishes it in April 1920 in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaften. The title, translated: “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth.”
The argument is not ideological. It is not a defence of capitalism on moral grounds, not an appeal to freedom or tradition or the rights of property. It is a logical proof. Socialism, Mises argues, cannot work — not because the people running it are corrupt or incompetent, but because the information required to run it does not exist in any form a planner can access. The Soviet Union would spend the next seventy years trying to prove him wrong. It could not. The Proof, Explained Simply
Start with a question that sounds basic: how does a factory manager in a socialist economy decide whether to make chairs out of wood or steel?
In a market economy, the answer is straightforward. Wood has a price. Steel has a price. Labour has a price. The manager compares costs, weighs the alternatives against what customers will pay for the finished product, and makes the decision that produces a profit. The price system does the calculating. It aggregates the preferences of every buyer and seller of wood and steel and labour across the entire economy into a single number that the manager can use.
Now remove private ownership of the means of production. Wood is no longer bought and sold between competing owners — it is allocated by the planning bureau. Steel is allocated by the planning bureau. There are no market transactions in capital goods, because the state owns all of them. There are no prices for the inputs, because prices require exchange, and exchange requires private property.
Without prices for capital goods, the manager cannot calculate. He cannot determine whether wood or steel is the more economical choice, because “economical” has no meaning without a price relationship connecting inputs to outputs. He can produce chairs. He cannot know whether producing them is worth what it costs, because the cost cannot be expressed in any coherent unit.
Multiply this across an entire economy — millions of goods, billions of input combinations, constantly shifting supply and demand — and the impossibility becomes total. Rational economic planning without market prices is not merely difficult. The information simply does not exist. You cannot calculate with numbers that don’t exist.
Mises put it plainly: “Where there is no market, there is no price system, and where there is no price system, there can be no economic calculation.”
The Attempt at a Rebuttal
Sixteen years passed. Then, in 1936, Polish economist Oskar Lange published what became the mainstream economics establishment’s official answer to Mises.
Lange opened his paper with elaborate flattery. “Socialists have certainly good reason to be grateful to Professor Mises,” he wrote, “the great advocatus diaboli of their cause. For it was his powerful challenge that forced socialists to recognise the importance of an adequate system of economic accounting.” Then he proceeded to argue that a central planning board could simulate market prices through trial and error — observing shortages and surpluses, adjusting prices until they cleared, and thereby mimicking what markets do spontaneously.
The mainstream economics profession embraced this as a decisive rebuttal. The calculation debate, they declared, was over. Mises had raised a legitimate problem; Lange had solved it.
Hayek dismantled Lange’s response in a series of essays, most devastatingly in “The Use of Knowledge in Society” in 1945. The problem was not finding the right prices through trial and error, Hayek showed — it was that the information needed to set them is not available to any central authority in the first place. The knowledge is dispersed, local, tacit, and constantly changing. The market doesn’t just solve the calculation problem; it is the only mechanism capable of generating the information needed to solve it. No planning board, however sophisticated, can replicate what millions of individual buyers and sellers communicate to each other through price signals every second of every day.
The mainstream economics profession had heard Lange and declared victory. They had not heard Hayek. The USSR pressed ahead.
Lange’s Model, Applied
When Soviet-controlled communism was imposed on Poland after World War II, Oskar Lange returned from his comfortable position at the University of Chicago to help build the new socialist economy. The state planners did not use his trial-and-error model. They used Soviet-style central planning — arbitrary output targets, fixed prices, production quotas handed down from ministries with no feedback mechanism connecting them to actual human needs.
Lange’s theoretical system was never implemented anywhere it was actually supposed to be tested. The gap between what he had proposed in the 1936 paper and what actually happened in every socialist country that tried central planning tells you something important: even the socialists who theoretically defeated Mises couldn’t build what they claimed was possible. They defaulted, every time, to the cruder version — the one Mises had already shown was doomed.
The results were consistent across every country and every decade. Queues for basic goods. Chronic shortages alongside surpluses nobody wanted. Factories producing the wrong things in the wrong quantities. Agricultural sectors that couldn’t feed their own populations. The information that markets generate through prices — and that planning boards cannot generate through any other mechanism — was simply absent, and the absence was catastrophic. The Score, Settled
In 1991 the Soviet Union dissolved. Shortly before it did, Soviet economists and officials began admitting privately — and then publicly — that Mises had been right in 1920. The system had never been able to calculate rationally. Decades of apparent production had been mostly waste. The statistics had been falsified. The shortages had been real.
The mainstream economics profession, which had declared Lange the winner of the debate in the 1930s, did not issue a correction. The textbooks were not updated. The history of the debate was quietly buried. Most economics students today have never heard of it, let alone been taught that one side was definitively, empirically, catastrophically vindicated.
Mises published his proof in 1920 as a relatively young man, working in a government office while socialist revolutionaries tried to seize the streets below his window. The experiment he warned against ran for seventy years across a third of the world’s surface. When it ended, it confirmed everything he had said.
None of the people who ignored him apologised. Most of them are still in charge of economic education.
The calculation problem was only one of Mises’s contributions to economics. Having proved that socialism cannot calculate, he set out to build something far larger — a complete system of economic theory derived from first principles, with no assumptions borrowed from mathematics or historical data. That project, decades in the making, produced the most ambitious work in the history of the discipline.
“Rational economic activity is impossible in a socialist commonwealth.”— Ludwig von Mises, Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth, 1920
Murray Rothbard gave you the tools to dismantle the state in its own language, and he did it with a smile.
Consider his observation that “the State is a gang of thieves writ large.” Not inflammatory rhetoric: a precise description of an institution that extracts resources through threats of violence, then congratulates itself for providing “services” you never requested. Rothbard stripped the ceremonial robes off government and showed you the mugger underneath.
His insight on taxation cuts equally deep: “There can be no such thing as ‘fairness in taxation.’ Taxation is nothing but organized theft.” You feel the clarity immediately. Every politician who promises a “fairer tax code” is promising to redistribute your property more elegantly.
Rothbard also wrote, “Freedom of speech is meaningless unless it means the freedom of the person who thinks differently.” Civil liberties divorced from economic liberty collapse into performance.
He wrote prolifically from the 1950s until his death in January 1995, building an entire architecture of thought. The man never hedged, and that discipline produced ideas sharp enough to still cut through 2026’s consensus thinking without breaking a sweat.
Imprimis is free in hardcopy print form mailed to you or free online. Join me if you can in donating to support Hillsdale College and Imprimis.
On July 1, 2015, 32-year-old Kathryn “Kate” Steinle was killed while sightseeing in San Francisco with her father and a family friend. According to federal prosecutors, Steinle was walking on Pier 14, a popular tourist attraction in San Francisco’s Embarcadero area, when she was shot in the back by Jose Inez Garcia-Zarate, an illegal immigrant from Mexico with a lengthy criminal record.
It wasn’t Garcia-Zarate’s first illegal trip into the U.S. Federal immigration records show that he had been deported six times prior to Steinle’s killing: in 1994, 1997, twice in 1998, 2006, and 2009. And he had been arrested by San Francisco police in March 2015, four months before the murder, for an outstanding drug possession warrant.
Following his arrest, U.S. immigration officials lodged an immigration detainer on Garcia-Zarate—in other words, they requested that the police hold him for an additional 48 hours to allow them time to assume custody and deport him. Instead, San Francisco’s prosecutor, George Gascón, dropped the drug charges and the San Francisco police, as a matter of policy, disregarded the federal immigration detainer and released Garcia-Zarate on April 15. Less than three months later, Kate Steinle was dead.
Although it seems impossible, the story gets worse. Garcia-Zarate claimed that he had accidentally picked up and fired the pistol that killed Steinle, and a San Francisco jury found him innocent of murder. He was convicted on a minor charge of illegal possession of a firearm, but not even that held up. In 2019, a California appeals court tossed the conviction on the grounds that if Garcia-Zarate had only held the gun for a little while—even if it was just barely long enough to shoot and kill an innocent woman—the jury should have been given the option to acquit him on the grounds that he didn’t technically possess it. In the end, Garcia-Zarate was simply deported in 2024—three decades after his first of seven illegal incursions into the U.S. and nearly nine years after he killed Kate Steinle.
Such is life, death, and injustice in a so-called sanctuary city like San Francisco and a sanctuary state like California. How could this happen? How could a foreign national repeatedly enter our country, violate our laws, kill one of our fellow citizens, and never be held accountable? To answer this question, you have to understand the nature of the sanctuary movement in America and the threat it poses to the safety and security of Americans and to the rule of law.
***
Where does the word “sanctuary” come from? The Oxford English Dictionary tells us its first use in English dates back to the mid-14th century writings of Richard Rolle, a Christian hermit who translated large swathes of the Latin translation of the Old Testament into Old English and provided commentary on them. Rolle’s first use of the word in English unsurprisingly corresponds with the first use of the word in the Bible, in Exodus 15, when Moses praises the Lord for redeeming His people from Pharaoh and delivering them to safety: “You will bring [your people] in and plant them on your own mountain / the place, O Lord, which you have made for your abode / the sanctuary, O Lord, which your hands have established.”
In this context, sanctuary refers to a holy place where the Lord resides. It can also be a place of refuge. Following the exodus from Egypt, for example, God commanded His people to establish “cities of refuge” where those suspected of unintentional manslaughter could flee while awaiting trial. Murderers, on the other hand—those who killed intentionally out of enmity—were given no quarter.
If a man accused of manslaughter was tried by the people of the city where he sought refuge and was found guilty of murder, then he was to be punished for murder. If he was found to have committed manslaughter, he would be spared, but only as long as he remained in the city of refuge.
One sees in this arrangement the balance between justice and mercy, the benefits of separating victims and perpetrators in cases of accidental deaths, and the practical wisdom of preventing cycles of violence and retribution between aggrieved parties in close contact with one another. Avengers are not given carte blanche to wreak vengeance. Nor are perpetrators allowed to continue on as if nothing happened. Even the interplay between the words “refuge” and “fugitive,” which share the same root, suggests that the goal of the original sanctuary city was not a permanent escape from the consequences of criminal behavior but rather justice in accordance with the law.
***
The American sanctuary movement, by contrast, rewards criminality and endangers innocent citizens. Its history began in 1971 in Berkeley, California, at the height of the anti-Vietnam protests, when city officials passed a resolution declaring Berkeley a “City of Refuge” for draft dodgers. Eleven years later, Gus Schultz, a left-wing Berkeley pastor, expanded the idea by declaring his church a safe harbor for asylum seekers fleeing El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala.
In early 1985, the city of Berkeley passed the following resolution:
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that no employee of the City of Berkeley violate the established sanctuaries by assisting in investigations, public or clandestine, by engaging in or assisting with arrests for alleged violation of immigration laws by the refugees in the sanctuaries or by those offering sanctuary, or by refusing established public services to the established sanctuaries.
City councilors further resolved that the “sanctuary originally offered by the churches be expanded to include the entire city and that BERKELEY become a CITY OF REFUGE[.]” San Francisco, across the bay from Berkeley, followed suit in 1989, and the sanctuary city concept quickly spread across the country to Tucson, Seattle, Duluth, and Ithaca.
The actions of those offering sanctuary at the time violated U.S. immigration law, because the asylum claims being made by Latin American refugees were in almost every case rejected during the Reagan administration. The reasoning was that if the migrants were, as they claimed, fleeing violence in their home countries, they could flee to the nearest safe country—whether Mexico to the north or Venezuela or Colombia to the south—rather than to the U.S. Because they were not seeking refuge in the nearest safe country, they were determined by the U.S. government to be economic migrants, seeking economic opportunities in our country, rather than war refugees seeking an escape from violence. As such, they did not qualify for asylum.
Fast forward to 2021, when the Biden administration threw federal immigration law out the window. In effect, under the guise of granting asylum, it federalized and supercharged the sanctuary city efforts that began in the 1980s, erasing the border and inviting anyone into the U.S. who wished to come.
The U.S. Customs and Border Patrol estimated there were more than eight million encounters along the U.S.-Mexico border during the Biden years, with some estimates north of ten million. Migrants arrived from all over Latin America, often with the aid of drug cartel coyotes who were either paid by the job or expected services to be rendered once their charges reached the U.S. Coached by lawyers from so-called non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to make asylum claims, they were then released into the U.S. on their own recognizance and told to appear in court years later to have their asylum claims adjudicated. The Biden administration even arranged to have many of them flown—at the American taxpayer’s expense—to cities of their choice.
Thus what had started as a narrow effort to take care of a small number of needy refugees in a single city developed, after several decades, into a sprawling global industry involving national governments, NGOs, criminal syndicates, and hundreds of billions of American taxpayer dollars a year. Every institution involved had either a political or an economic incentive to ensure a never-ending flow of migrants into the U.S. Forget vetting. Forget filtering out criminals and drug traffickers. Forget ensuring that only those willing to assimilate into our culture should be admitted into our country. The illegal immigration-industrial complex had become a self-perpetuating machine.
Over the past year-and-a-half, the second Trump administration has reestablished secure borders—without which a country can hardly claim to be a country—and has attempted to begin deporting those who entered illegally during the previous four years. But its efforts have been met at every turn with opposition, often violent, even when it comes to deporting the most dangerous illegal immigrants. And much of this opposition is sanctioned by state and city officials enlisted in the sanctuary movement.
As of last year, the U.S. Department of Justice calculated that twelve states and the District of Columbia—nearly one-quarter of the country—had become sanctuaries for illegal immigration. In addition, many major cities outside of those states—including Albuquerque, Boston, New Orleans, Newark, and Philadelphia—had been designated as sanctuary cities. The Center for Immigration Studies counts the number of sanctuary cities or counties across the country at more than 200.
***
In a healthy country, the American experiment with the sanctuary movement would be widely recognized as a deadly failure. Sadly, stories like that of Kate Steinle have become commonplace. Not only does the sanctuary movement foment and incentivize illegal immigration, it also shields known violent predators from justice.
Philadelphia formally adopted sanctuary city policies in 2014. That same year, Juan Ramon-Vasquez, an illegal immigrant from Honduras who had been deported five years earlier, was taken into custody by the Philadelphia Department of Prisons. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) attempted to remove him, but he was shielded from deportation by local officials and released from jail, after which he went on to rape a young child repeatedly over a period of 18 months. “If the ICE detainer had been honored by local law enforcement,” said U.S. Attorney William McSwain,
this crime never would have happened, and the victim—an innocent child—would have been spared horrendous physical and mental trauma. Criminals like Ramon-Vasquez take note: my office will do everything in its power to find you, to protect our community, and to seek justice for your victims. Unlike the Philadelphia government, we are not on your side.
On February 27, 2024, Laken Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student at Augusta University in Athens, Georgia, went out for a jog and was abducted and brutally murdered by Jose Antonio Ibarra, an illegal immigrant from Venezuela with ties to the Tren de Aragua terrorist cartel. Ibarra had been caught illegally entering the U.S. near El Paso in 2022 but was released into the U.S. as part of the official policy of the Biden administration. He found his way to New York City where, according to The New York Times, he was put up at the Crowne Plaza hotel in Queens. He eventually made his way to a city-run migrant center at the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan and requested to be flown to Georgia, where his brother had told him he could find better work. U.S. taxpayers paid for his flight from New York to Georgia, and less than five months later, Laken Riley was dead.
On June 16, 2024, twelve-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray was kidnapped, sexually assaulted, and strangled to death in Houston, Texas. Two illegal immigrants from Venezuela, Johan Jose Martinez-Rangel and Franklin Jose Pena Ramos, are awaiting trial for these crimes. U.S. Border Patrol had apprehended Martinez-Rangel three months before Nungaray’s murder and Ramos less than a month before her murder. As part of the official policy of the Biden administration, rather than being deported, they were released into the U.S. with a notice to appear in court at a later date.
In Virginia in 2025, federal immigration authorities were able to detain and remove from the U.S. an illegal immigrant named Edwin Antonio Hernandez. A violent MS-13 gang member from El Salvador, Hernandez had entered the U.S. in 2015 at the age of 16. Arrested by Border Patrol in 2017, he confessed to five murders, including one by dismemberment. But he applied for asylum, and his deportation was delayed. Under the Biden administration, he was given a work permit. His 2025 capture and removal came only weeks before the inauguration of Virginia’s new governor, Abigail Spanberger, one of whose first acts was to implement what amounts to a sanctuary policy across her state. Under the current policy, this confessed murderer would have been set free to prey on innocent Virginians.
These are just a handful of examples that illustrate the deadly reality of sanctuary policies, which create massive incentives for foreign nationals, including violent criminals, to enter the U.S. illegally and hide behind what has effectively become a taxpayer-funded cloak of invisibility.
This system perverts and corrupts the design and purpose of the original cities of refuge as described in the Bible. Those cities were intended to provide a balance between instant justice and mercy by creating space between those responsible for death, possibly unintentional, and those left to suffer its consequences. They were never intended to give quarter to unrepentant lawbreakers.
Sanctuary as properly understood is not characterized by lawlessness, disorder, or misery, which are often the fruits of bad policy. Such is the case with modern sanctuary policies, which erase our borders, erode our culture, annul federal laws designed to protect us, and lead directly to needless death. It is not too much to say that they are an abomination and that no just nation should tolerate them.
“Fearless Felix” Baumgartner ascended to the stratosphere and stepped into the void from 24.2 miles above the Earth. His speed during the fall reached Mach 1.24, and the Austrian adventurer nailed the landing. October 14, 2012 Wired
Introduction Murry Salby is also totally committed to the atmosphere. He is a scientist with such deep and broad knowledge of atmospheric physics that he has written multiple textbooks on the subject. And yet he is not fearful for the future of our climate system, in contrast to many of his colleagues. By stepping away from “consensus” climate alarms, he has shown unusual courage by speaking plainly about the atmosphere and climate, despite attempts to silence him.
Dr. Salby’s latest textbook is entitled Physics of the Atmosphere and Climate(here). I got a copy and have been reading in it to understand where he comes down on various issues related to climate change. In particular I wanted to know what explains his divergence from IPCC climate scientists. H/T to Kenneth Richard and No Tricks Zone
Synopsis
In reading the textbook, I find two main reasons why Salby is skeptical of AGW (anthropogenic global warming) alarm. This knowledgeable book is an antidote to myopic and lop-sided understandings of our climate system.
CO2 Alarm is Myopic: Claiming CO2 causes dangerous global warming is too simplistic. CO2 is but one factor among many other forces and processes interacting to make weather and climate.
Myopia is a failure of perception by focusing on one near thing to the exclusion of the other realities present, thus missing the big picture. For example: “Not seeing the forest for the trees.” AKA “tunnel vision.”
2. CO2 Alarm is Lopsided: CO2 forcing is too small to have the overblown effect claimed for it. Other factors are orders of magnitude larger than the potential of CO2 to influence the climate system.
Lop-sided refers to a failure in judging values, whereby someone lacking in sense of proportion, places great weight on a factor which actually has a minor influence compared to other forces. For example: “Making a mountain out of a mole hill.”
Overview
Salby’s textbook presents all of the physical complexity of the climate system in contrast to simplistic global warming theory. And he provides his sense of the Scales of the various processes, balancing any lopsided overemphasis on CO2 effects.
From the Preface: Despite technological advances in observing the Earth-atmosphere system and in computing power, strides in predicting its evolution reliably – on climatic time scales and with regional detail – have been limited. The pace of progress reflects the interdisciplinary demands of the subject. Reliable simulation, adequate to reproduce the observed record of climate variation, requires a grasp of mechanisms from different disciplines and of how those mechanisms are interwoven in the Earth-atmosphere system.
What is today labeled climate science includes everything from archeology of the Earth to superficial statistics and a spate of social issues. Yet, many who embrace the label have little more than a veneer of insight into the physical processes that actually control the Earth-atmosphere system, let alone what is necessary to simulate its evolution reliably. Without such insight and its application to resolve major uncertainties, genuine progress is unlikely.
The atmosphere is the heart of the climate system, driven through interaction with the sun, continents, and ocean. It is the one component that is comprehensively observed. For this reason, the atmosphere is the central feature against which climate simulations must ultimately be validated.
The treatment focuses upon physical concepts, which are developed from first principles. It integrates five major themes: 1. Atmospheric Thermodynamics; 2. Hydrostatic Equilibrium and Stability; 3. Radiation, Cloud, and Aerosol; 4. Atmospheric Dynamics and the General Circulation; 5. Interaction with the Ocean and Stratosphere.
Lessons from Dr. Salby: Essential Elements of a Balanced Climate Understanding
Below I show some of the written statements from the textbook to illustrate how his knowledge counteracts myopic and lopsided thinking.
Focusing on CO2 from burning fossil fuels is myopic: A multitude of natural sources drive atmospheric concentrations.
Plate 24 Estimated global carbon cycle, illustrating stores of carbon, in GtC, and transfers in GtC/yr, where 1 GtC=109 tons of carbon. Source: Design by Philippe Rekacewicz, UNEP/GRID-Arendal (11.07.10).
Pg.545-6 The storage of CO2 is illustrated in Fig. 17.11. Except for deep sedimentary rock, which is sequestered, most of the carbon is stored in the ocean. It accounts for some 40,000 gigatons (1012 kg) of carbon (GtC), in the form of dissolved CO2 and organic matter. Most resides in the deep ocean, where cold water supports the greatest observed concentrations. There, dissolved CO2 is controlled by the thermohaline circulation. Land and the adjoining biosphere account for only about 2000 GtC. The atmosphere contains less than 1000 GtC, concentrated in CO2. Hence, the store of carbon in the ocean is two orders of magnitude greater than the store in the atmosphere.
Equally significant are transfers of carbon into and out of the ocean. Of order 100 GtC/yr, they exceed those into and out of land. Together, emission from ocean and land sources (∼150 GtC/yr) is two orders of magnitude greater than CO2 emission from combustion of fossil fuel. These natural sources are offset by natural sinks, of comparable strength. However, because they are so much stronger, even a minor imbalance between natural sources and sinks can overshadow the anthropogenic component of CO2 emission (cf Secs 1.6.2, 8.7.1).
The values in Fig. 17.11 can be used to estimate the effective turnover time of atmospheric CO2. At an absorption rate of 100 GtC/yr, the ocean will absorb the atmospheric store of CO2 of 1000 GtC in about a decade. That absorption of CO2, which is concentrated in cold SST at polar latitudes, is nearly offset by emission of CO2 from warm SST at tropical latitudes. Warming of SST (by any mechanism) will increase the outgassing of CO2 while reducing its absorption. Owing to the magnitude of transfers with the ocean, even a minor increase of SST can lead to increased emission of CO2 that rivals other sources (Sec. 8.7.1). Further, if the increase of SST involves heat transfer with the deep ocean, the time for equilibrium to be reestablished would be centuries (Sec. 17.1.2).
Attributing rising temperatures to fossil fuels is lop-sided: Natural sinks respond to warming by releasing CO2 in far greater quantities.
Net emission rate of CO2, r˙ CO2 = d dt rCO2 (ppmv/yr), derived from the Mauna Loa record (Fig. 1.15), lowpass filtered to changes that occur on time scales longer than 2 years (solid). Superimposed is the satellite record of anomalous Global Mean Temperature (Fig. 1.39), lowpass filtered likewise and scaled by 0.225 (dashed). Trend in GMT over 1979–2009 (not included) is ∼0.125 K/decade.
Pg.65ff Net emission of CO2 closely tracks the evolution of GMT. Achieving a correlation of 0.80, the variation of GMT accounts for most of the variance in CO2 emission.
Plotted in Fig. 1.43b is the rate of change in isotopic composition, d dt δ13C = ˙ δ13C (solid).12 Its mean is negative, consistent with the long-term decline of δ13C in ice cores (Fig. 1.14). However, like emission of CO2, differential emission of 13CO2 varies substantially from one year to the next. It too tracks the evolution of GMT – just out of phase. When GMT increases, emission of 13CO2 decreases and vice versa. The records achieve a correlation of −0.86. Hence the variation of GMT, which accounts for most of the variance in emission of CO2, also accounts for most of the variance in differential emission of 13CO2.
The out-of-phase relationship between rCO2 and δ13C in the instrumental record (Fig. 1.43) is the same one evidenced on longer time scales by ice cores (Fig. 1.14). The out-of-phase relationship in ice cores is regarded as a signature of anthropogenic emission, subject to uncertainties (Sec. 1.2.4). The out-of-phase relationship in the instrumental record, however, is clearly not anthropogenic. Swings of GMT following the eruption of Pinatubo and during the 1997–1998 El Nino were introduced through natural mechanisms (cf. Figs 1.27; 17.19, 17.20). Changes in Fig. 1.43 reveal that net emission of CO2, although 13C lean, is accelerated by increased surface temperature. Outgassing from ocean, which increases with temperature (Sec. 17.3), is consistent with the observed relationship – if the source region has anomalously low δ13C. So is the decomposition of organic matter derived from vegetation. Having δ13C comparable to that of fossil fuel, its decomposition is likewise accelerated by increased surface temperature.
Focusing on CO2 as the greenhouse gas of concern is both myopic and lop-sided: H20 makes 98% of the IR radiative activity in the atmosphere.
Pg. 47 The radiative-equilibrium surface temperature Ts is significantly warmer than that in the absence of an atmosphere.
The discrepancy between Ts and Te follows from the different ways the atmosphere processes SW and LW radiation. Although nearly transparent to SW radiation (wavelengths λ ∼ 0.5 μm), the atmosphere is almost opaque to LW radiation (λ ∼ 10 μm) that is re-emitted by the Earth’s surface. For this reason, SW radiation passes relatively freely to the Earth’s surface, where it can be absorbed. However, LW radiation emitted by the Earth’s surface is captured by the overlying air, chiefly by the major LW absorbers: water vapor and cloud. Energy absorbed in an atmospheric layer is reemitted, half upward and half back downward. The upwelling re-emitted radiation is absorbed again in overlying layers, which subsequently re-emit that energy in similar fashion. This process is repeated until LW energy is eventually radiated beyond all absorbing components of the atmosphere and rejected to space. By inhibiting the transfer of energy from the Earth’s surface, repeated absorption and emission by intermediate layers of the atmosphere traps LW energy, elevating surface temperature over what it would be in the absence of an atmosphere.
Pg. 247ff The residual, +1.5 Wm−2, represents net warming. It is about 0.5% of the 327 Wm−2 of overall downwelling LW radiation that warms the Earth’s surface (Fig. 1.32). The vast majority of that warming is contributed by water vapor. Together with cloud, it accounts for 98% of the greenhouse effect. How water vapor has changed in relation to changes of the comparatively minor anthropogenic species (Fig. 8.30) is not known. The additional surface warming introduced by anthropogenic increases in greenhouse gases amounts to about 75% of that which would be introduced by a doubling of CO2. Arrhenius’ estimate of 5–6◦ K for the accompanying increase of surface temperature (Sec. 1.2.4) then translates into ∼4◦ K. Yet, the observed change of global-mean temperature since the mid nineteenth century is only about 1◦ K (Sec. 1.6.1). The discrepancy points to changes of the Earth-atmosphere system (notably, involving the major absorbers, water vapor and cloud) that develop in response to imposed perturbations, like anthropogenic emission of CO2.
Focusing on CO2 radiative activity is myopic: The tropospheric heat engine comprises many powerful heat transfer processes.
Figure 9.40 Cloud radiative forcing during northern winter derived from ERBE measurements on board the satellites ERBS and NOAA-9 for the (a) LW energy budget, (b) SW energy budget, and (c) net radiative energy budget. Courtesy of D. Hartmann (U. Washington).
Pg. 318ff A quantitative description of how cloud figures in the global energy budget is complicated by its dependence on microphysical properties and interactions with the surface. These complications are circumvented by comparing radiative fluxes at TOA under cloudy vs clear-sky conditions. Over a given region, the column-integrated radiative heating rate must equal the difference between the energy flux absorbed and that emitted to space.
The components of cloud forcing (9.53) can be evaluated directly from broadband fluxes of outgoing LW and SW radiation that are measured by satellite. Figure 9.40 shows time-averaged distributions of CSW , CLW , and C. Longwave forcing (Fig. 9.40a) is large in centers of deep convection over tropical Africa, South America, and the maritime continent, where CLW approaches 100 W m−2 (cf. Fig. 1.30b). Secondary maxima appear in the maritime ITCZ and in the North Pacific and North Atlantic storm tracks (Sec. 1.2.5). Shortwave forcing (Fig. 9.40b) is strong in the same regions, where CSW < −100 W m−2. Negative SW forcing is also strong over extensive marine stratocumulus in the eastern oceans and over the Southern Ocean, coincident with the storm track of the Southern Hemisphere. Inside the centers of deep tropical convection, SW and LW cloud forcing nearly cancel. They leave small values of C throughout the tropics (Fig. 9.40c). Negative CSW in the storm tracks and over marine stratocumulus then dominates positive CLW , especially over the Southern Ocean. It prevails in the global-mean cloud forcing. Globally averaged values of CLW and CSW are about 30 and −45 W m−2, respectively.
Net cloud forcing is then −15 W m−2. It represents radiative cooling of the Earth-atmosphere system. This is four times as great as the additional warming of the Earth’s surface that would be introduced by a doubling of CO2. Latent heat transfer to the atmosphere (Fig. 1.32) is 90 W m−2. It is an order of magnitude greater. Consequently, the direct radiative effect of increased CO2 would be overshadowed by even a small adjustment of convection (Sec. 8.7).
Trusting climate models driven by CO2 sensitivity is lop-sided: Natural climate factors are poorly quantified but are orders of magnitude larger than estimated CO2 effects.
Pg. 260 Global climate models are sophisticated extensions of the idealized models considered above. Treatments of climate properties in different GCMs are as varied as they are complex. For some properties, like cloud cover, ice, and vegetation, they must resort to empirical relationships or simply ad hoc parameterization. For others, the governing equations cannot even be defined. Together with the ocean simulation, these limitations introduce errors, which can be substantial. Along with discrepancies between GCMs, they leave in question how faithfully climate feedbacks are represented (see, e.g., Tsushima and Manabe, 2001; Lindzen and Choi, 2009).
The accuracy of GCMs is reflected in the skill with which they simulate the TOA energy budget: the driver of climate. By construction, GCMs achieve global-mean energy balance. How faithfully the energy budget is represented locally, however, is another matter. The local energy budget forces regional climate, along with the gamut of weather phenomena that derive from it. This driver of regional conditions is determined internally – through the simulation of local heat flux, water vapor, and cloud. Symbolizing the local energy budget is net radiation (Fig. 1.34c), which represents the local imbalance between the SW and LW fluxes F0 and F ↑(0) in the TOA energy budget (8.82). Local values of those fluxes have been measured around the Earth by the three satellites of ERBE. The observed fluxes, averaged over time, have then been compared against coincident fluxes from climate simulations, likewise averaged. Figure 8.34 plots, for several GCMs, the rms error in simulated fluxes, which have been referenced against those observed by ERBE.
Values represent the regional error in the (time-mean) TOA energy budget. The error in reflected SW flux, Fs 4 − F0 in the global mean (8.82), is of order 20 Wm−2 (Fig. 8.34a). Such error prevails at most latitudes. Differences in error between models (an indication of intermodel discrepancies) are almost as large, 10–20 Wm−2. The picture is much the same for outgoing LW flux (Fig. 8.34b). For F ↑(0), the rms error is of order 10–15 Wm−2. It is larger for all models in the tropics, where the error exceeds 20 Wm−2.
The significance of these discrepancies depends on application. Overall fluxes at TOA are controlled by water vapor and cloud (Fig. 1.32) – the major absorbers that account for the preponderance of downwelling LW flux to the Earth’s surface. Relative to those fluxes, the errors in Fig. 8.34 are manageable: Of order 10% for outgoing LW and 20% for reflected SW. Relative to minor absorbers, however, this is not the case. The entire contribution to the energy budget from CO2 is about 4 Wm−2. Errors in Fig. 8.34 are an order of magnitude greater. Consequently, the simulated change introduced by increased CO2 (2–4 Wm−2), even inclusive of feedback, is overshadowed by error in the simulated change of major absorbers.
Conclusion:
Pg. 262 Discrepancies between GCMs arise from inaccuracies in climate properties and from differences in how those properties are represented. Much of the discrepancy surrounds the representation of convection and its influence on water vapor and cloud, the absorbers that account for most of the downwelling LW flux to the Earth’s surface. The involvement of convection is strongly suggested by models of radiative-convective equilibrium. Those simulations are inherently sensitive to how convection and cloud are prescribed. Cloud is especially significant to radiative considerations because it sharply modifies the atmosphere’s scattering characteristics, which determine albedo, and its absorption characteristics, which determine optical depth.
Footnote:
Best wishes to Dr. Salby and much appreciation for telling it like it is. May you also nail your landing as did Fearless Felix.
The data show that dismantling USAID did not result in ANY increase in African mortality much less the four million Democrats claim Elon Musk is responsible for killing. It was all a lie. In fact, the UNAIDS/SAMRC data show that mortality declined after.
“Today, on my final day as Director of National Intelligence, I’m releasing never-before-seen communications and documents exposing how Dr. Fauci provided millions in US taxpayer dollars to fund dangerous gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab, worked with politicized elements within the Intelligence Community to suppress the truth about his actions and hide the virus’ lab-leak origins, and lied to Congress while under oath in 2024. It’s time you know the truth.”
There are many posts on my blog about the plandemic, the fraud, Fauci, U.S. government patents on virus, shots, PCR tests, and results of injections.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE ODNI News Release No. 11-26 June 18, 2026
Fauci Funded Wuhan Lab Research That Sparked COVID New Evidence Fauci Manipulated Intelligence and Lied to Congress
WASHINGTON D.C. — Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Anthony Fauci, as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), provided millions in US taxpayer dollars to fund dangerous gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV)—work which is now widely viewed as the source of the unintentional lab leak that sparked the pandemic.
Today, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is releasing never-before-seen communications and documents exposing how Fauci worked with politicized career leadership in the Intelligence Community (IC) to suppress the truth about his actions, the virus’ lab-leak origins, and his role in directing U.S. funding for this dangerous research that caused immeasurable harm and countless lost lives. These documents expose Fauci’s direct role in influencing and manipulating IC assessments on COVID-19, and how Fauci lied to Congress in 2024, when under oath he denied knowledge of or participation in discussions with intelligence officials about viral research.
You can view the communications and documents HERE.
“The COVID-19 pandemic caused tremendous hardship and pain for millions of our fellow Americans and for countless people around the world. After years of lies, censorship, and cover ups, the American people deserve transparency, truth, and accountability,” DNI Gabbard said. “The tactics used to hide the truth are straight from the deep state playbook: politicized self-serving leaders like Dr. Fauci covered up their own wrongdoing and abuses of power, manipulated intelligence, lied to Congress, and undermined a duly elected President by restricting his access to vital facts needed to keep the country safe. It’s time the American people learn the real story.”
The materials released today are a result of DNI Gabbard’s yearlong declassification review in support of President Trump’s maximum transparency mandate. During this process, ODNI officials gathered testimony from multiple IC whistleblowers who reported retaliation for challenging the IC’s manipulation of intelligence on the virus’ origins. This unveiled a clear pattern of suppressing dissent, silencing critics, and burying evidence that undermined IC integrity and disserved the American people.
Fauci’s close IC relationships enabled him to assume three key roles during the pandemic that shielded him from scrutiny as he wielded outsized influence.
Fauci funded risky coronavirus research linked to big pharma and the pursuit of “universal vaccines” worth trillions of dollars.
Fauci was the behind-the-scenes advisor who, with his hand-picked experts, pushed the IC to endorse a natural, animal origin to hide his dangerous research.
Fauci became the nation’s pandemic “pundit” and publicly pushed lies, disinformation, and censorship.
Fauci’s Relationship With The Intelligence Community Drove Intelligence & Public Narratives
Throughout the pandemic, Fauci and politicized leaders within the IC created a self-serving circular reporting loop. He provided hand-picked NIAID-funded scientists to advise the IC. This input shaped official intelligence assessments, which were then publicly cited as scientific consensus to refute the lab-leak theory.
According to hundreds of reviewed emails, the IC almost always incorporated his recommendations. Fauci promoted a fraudulent paper, whose publication he helped prompt, as legitimate information for Intelligence Community consideration. Senior analysts praised Fauci not as a “policymaker,” but as an unbiased guide to “the real coronavirus experts”—while ignoring experts who might dissent from Fauci’s narratives.
Fauci Lied to Congress
The correspondence released today directly contradicts Fauci’s 2024 testimony to the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. In that hearing, while under oath, Fauci was repeatedly asked whether he spoke to “FBI, CIA, DIA or any U.S. intelligence agency concerning viral research” before, during, or after the pandemic. Fauci repeatedly dodged the questions, before falsely stating, “not to my knowledge about COVID.”
Retaliation Against Truth-Seekers
Testimony from multiple whistleblowers reveals intelligence analysts who challenged Fauci’s COVID-origin conclusions faced threat of retaliation, were marginalized, and often suffered career setbacks. This silenced dissent and fostered a culture where truth was sacrificed to conformity and credible evidence was buried.
The following are examples from whistleblower accounts that Director Gabbard has referred to the Intelligence Community’s Inspector General.
A contractor was terminated just days after coming forward to ODNI as a whistleblower.
Managers reminded analysts who advocated for the lab-leak hypothesis that leadership would determine which analysts would be promoted. The message was clear: disagreement with the manipulated finding would derail careers.
Senior leaders allegedly set up roadblocks for whistleblowers, removing anonymity from the complaint process by insisting managers or attorneys be present at ODNI meetings, creating an atmosphere of intimidation.
And Del Bigtree and Dr. Marcus Zervos. Short video link below.
In 2016, Del Bigtree convinced a top infectious disease doctor to do something public health has avoided for decades: conduct a study comparing the health outcomes of vaxxed vs. unvaxxed children.
Dr. Marcus Zervos vowed to publish the results no matter what.
The results were devastating for the vaccinated, and Dr. Zervos ultimately chose not to publish the study.
When confronted about it, he said bluntly: “Publishing something like that, I might as well retire. I’d be finished.”
Here’s what the study revealed:
Vaccinated children were 4.29 times more likely to have asthma.
Three times higher risk for atopic diseases (like eczema).
Nearly six times higher risk for autoimmune disorders, a category that includes more than 80 different diseases.
5.5 times higher risk for neurodevelopmental disorders.
2.9 times more motor disabilities.
4.5 times more speech disorders.
Three times more developmental delays.
Six times more acute and chronic ear infections.
Among nearly 2,000 unvaccinated children, there were zero cases of ADHD, diabetes, behavioral problems, learning disabilities, intellectual disabilities, tics, or other psychological disorders.
The study’s conclusion was equally striking. It states: “[I]n contrast to our expectations, we found that exposure to vaccination was independently associated with an overall 2.5-fold INCREASE in the likelihood of developing a chronic health condition when compared to children unexposed to vaccination.”
When science uncovers an inconvenient result, it often gets buried, or the data is twisted until it produces the outcome “The Science” wants.
How do you think Vioxx, a migraine and arthritis pain drug, made it to market?
An estimated 100,000 people died before the manufacturer (Merck) finally decided it was too dangerous to keep prescribing.
And Vioxx wasn’t an isolated case.
Roughly 1 in 3 drugs approved by the FDA get pulled or receive a major safety warning LONG AFTER they get prescribed to millions of people.
If Vioxx could be approved without the danger being flagged during trials, what else is on the market today that people assume is safe?
Perhaps the most important question is: how do they get away with rigging these trials in the first place?
budbromley 
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