Joined June 2009
94 Photos and videos
Michael R. Brown retweeted
Europeans discovering America is some of the best content of the internet right now:
1,229
7,382
63,898
1,674,029
Michael R. Brown retweeted
Replying to @EdMarkey
5
24
415
4,595
Michael R. Brown retweeted
USA. A backyard. A man. A grill. Four hours. He never left it once. Everyone else drifted, drank, wandered, laughed. He stood before the flames, turning meat with a long fork, immovable. I knew him at once. The keeper of the sacred fire. I took my place beside him. I said nothing. This is the first rule. You do not speak first to the man at the grill. After a long while, he spoke. "Low and slow," he said, eyes never leaving the coals. "You can't rush it. Rush it, you ruin it." I bowed my head. A blade. A tea. A life. None can be rushed. I had crossed four thousand miles of ocean to hear my grandfather's words spoken by a man in a "KISS THE COOK" apron. "Everything worth doing is slow," I said. I have never cooked meat in my life. But I said it as if I had said it a thousand times before. He glanced at me. Something passed between us. A current older than language. His voice dropped, low, almost ashamed. "My wife says just use the oven." He shook his head at the fire. "She doesn't get it." "They never do," I said. And this is where the man transformed. For the first time in years, he had been understood. He rose to meet it. His back straightened. His shoulders set. His voice fell half an octave. A teenager reached for the grill. He lifted one hand without even looking. "Not yet." The boy retreated. He did not argue. He could not have argued. A woman asked when the food would be done. He told the flames, not her. "It's ready when it's ready." Three people approached. Three were turned away with a single word each. By the fourth hour, no one questioned him. The whole party had arranged itself around the man and his fire, the way a village arranges itself around a shrine. Then he turned to me. He held out the fork. "Watch it a sec. I gotta pee." I have stood at the gate of lords with a naked blade in my hand. Nothing has ever weighed as much as that fork. I did not move my eyes from the coals. I did not touch the meat. I did not know how. I would not learn. To learn would be to break the moment. When he returned, I handed back the fork without a word, as one returns a sword to its rightful master. He served everyone before himself. He ate last, standing, still watching the fire. We never traded names. We did not need to. He believed he had finally met a man who took grilling seriously. I believed I had finally met America's last samurai. Neither of us will correct the other. Not now. Not ever. So I have made a vow. Every summer of my life, I will return to this country. I will find a backyard. I will find a man at a grill. I will stand beside him and say nothing until he speaks. And when he says "low and slow," I will bow my head as if my grandfather had spoken. I will die before I tell him I do not know how to cook meat. "KISS THE COOK," his apron commanded. I have obeyed. I will obey again.
145
822
9,528
263,941
Michael R. Brown retweeted
Elon Musk, the world's first trillionaire, faces criticism from the left who demand he solve world hunger. His wealth is largely in stock valuations, not liquid cash. If you want to solve world hunger, build your own success. Otherwise, SHUT UP and work.
43
120
445
47,984
Michael R. Brown retweeted
(1) If you are obsessed with another person's wealth, you are a loser. (2) Do not spend time with people who think like that. Spend time with productive people whose brains never entertain such juvenile thoughts. (3) Instead, you should have a feeling of gratitude for what you do have, which would have astonished literally everyone who ever lived in every other time and place. (4) For one thing, for all the complaints we may have about our food supply, your diet is not limited to bread, porridge, cabbage, onions, and turnips, with very occasional meat. Instead, you have a varied and nourishing diet. You have citrus, too, and scurvy is unknown. You don't worry about seasonal starvation every year, or food spoilage. You can drink clean water instead of ale. You have fresh produce in winter. (5) Likewise, your child's life is not at risk if he breaks his leg or has a tooth abscess. For that matter, you don't have to endure medieval dentistry. (6) Transportation you can forget about. Before the market brought mass production to the population, you walked. You had no maps. Even our poorest people use modes of transportation that would have astonished people in previous ages. (7) You probably like having toilets rather than chamber pots and outhouses, not to mention showers, clean water, soap that doesn't burn, deodorant, and toothpaste. Even the poor have eyeglasses, beds with mattresses, lighting at night, heat at the turn of a dial, and instant communication. (8) You probably prefer not to have a single-room hut made of wattle and daub, with no insulation, no chimney (smoke escaped through a hole in the roof, slowly), an open hearth (which contributed to respiratory problems), a dirt floor, a thatched roof that often leaked and attracted vermin, and a shared sleeping space for everyone, often including livestock. (9) In the old days -- in other words, all of human history -- you would have had at most two outfits, you would have dealt with course wool and linen that were itchy, heavy, and hard to clean: laundry would have been done by hand with lye, which destroyed fabric (and wasn't good for the skin, either). For footwear you may have had wooden clogs but would sometimes have gone barefoot. (10) We can go on and on like this. Yes, of course we want even more wealth for everyone, and yes, we want to repeal everything the government and the Fed (socialists are weirdly quiet about the Fed, which is the actual exploiter they pretend capitalists are) are doing that makes housing and other things more expensive: economist Bryan Caplan says repeal of regulations alone would cut housing prices by half in many places. (11) But for heaven's sake, how deranged and psychotic and ungrateful for our ancestors and their institutions would we have to be when, living in a way that literally every single person (even kings and queens, who had to shit in a pot) who ever lived would have envied and scarcely even believed, we're instead concerned about some people having more? (12) The only thing -- the absolute only thing -- that makes this phenomenon possible, the only thing that allows us to live at this level and even conceive of improving it, is capital accumulation, the very thing "Diana Moreno" works day and night to undermine or destroy. (13) "Diana Moreno" thinks we should liquidate Elon's holdings and send everyone a check for $12. (14) She would look at a pile of seed corn and be furious that the capitalists didn't want to distribute it for consumption purposes. "I could feed lots of people with this seed corn," we can hear "Diana Moreno" saying as she destroys civilization. (15) Richard Tawney's description of Luther is apt here: "Confronted with the complexities of foreign trade and financial organizations, he is like a savage introduced to a dynamo or a steam engine."
Trillionaire shouldn’t exist. The term itself should not exist, the possibility should not exist. This level of inequality is simply incompatible with democracy and a sustainable planet. The reign of these parasitic psychopaths must end, or it ends us.
52
143
963
26,311
Michael R. Brown retweeted
I know how Elon Musk became a trillionaire, but I don't know how Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Nancy Pelosi became millionaires.
2,029
17,542
107,423
1,171,667
Michael R. Brown retweeted
USA. A breakfast counter. The waitress recommended the biscuits and gravy, and when the plate arrived, I thought something had gone wrong in the kitchen. I say this with shame. The dish looked like a construction site after rain. Pale mounds. Gray ladle-fall. Speckles I could not identify. In my land, the eye eats first. A meal is arranged like a garden. This meal was arranged like weather. "Is it… finished?" I asked, carefully. "Honey, that's what it looks like." The man beside me was already eating his. He did not look up. "Just try it." I am a man who has charged hillsides at dawn. I raised the fork. I tried it. I must now formally apologize to the biscuits, the gravy, the waitress, the kitchen, and the entire breakfast tradition of the American South. It was magnificent. Warm. Peppered. The biscuit drank the gravy the way a field drinks rain — THAT is why it is shaped like that, you fool — and every mound I had insulted was a soft fold of comfort that my homeland, in eight hundred years, never once thought to invent. "Well?" the waitress asked. "I judged it," I confessed. "By its appearance. I am ashamed." "Everybody does, hon." Everybody does. A national dish that forgives you for doubting it. It expects the doubt. It waits for you on the other side of it. Do not judge the gravy by its face. Judge yourself, for hesitating. I order it every Saturday now. I no longer see the construction site. I see only the garden. It was a garden the whole time. The eye must be trained.
963
4,359
44,619
2,486,321
Michael R. Brown retweeted
Another Marxist Parasite speaks 🙄
4
74
1,388
11,402
Michael R. Brown retweeted
Replying to @Amy_Siskind
25
318
7,500
81,666
Michael R. Brown retweeted
3
11
32
4,115
Michael R. Brown retweeted
75
195
2,999
127,018
Michael R. Brown retweeted
79
70
3,737
139,207
Michael R. Brown retweeted
70
189
3,537
149,759
Michael R. Brown retweeted
Jun 12
Society collectively needs to stop making excuses for awful behaviour. There are BILLIONS of people around the world who grew up in suboptimal conditions and they don't use it as an excuse to be a criminal or degenerate. Tolerance of evil isn't a virtue.
170
2,063
11,450
100,475
Michael R. Brown retweeted
Jun 10
38
774
8,830
104,037
Michael R. Brown retweeted
We Asked AI To Simulate What Would Happen If AOC Was Forced To Learn Economics Made with @grok.
1,063
3,533
28,735
23,433,609
Michael R. Brown retweeted
Michael Shermer at Galt's Gulch in San Diego
8
39
131
2,070
Michael R. Brown retweeted
Socialists claim the rich STEAL from us. But the opposite is true. @SteveForbesCEO of @Forbes explains: "Success comes from meeting the needs and wants of others.” Capitalism CREATES wealth. Here’s how:
40
311
1,502
66,363
Michael R. Brown retweeted
Decline is a choice. Remember that.

310
4,803
38,285
778,633