Tag: ‘murica

White people know no bounds when it comes to wanting to be mad

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I was at the airport when I saw the yellow official Peachtree Road Race shirt for 2026.  I thought to myself, whoa cool, it’s yellow, seeing as how since Adidas took over the production of the shirts in like 2022, they’ve been peach, blue and red, so there really hasn’t been any hard rule on what color they were supposed to be.  And seeing as how I tend to favor the color yellow, mostly for ironic reasons, I looked forward to when I would get mine, since I’ve since been a mere virtual runner the last six years because no iota of my being wants to get up at 3:30 am to go wait at the Lenox mall parking lot to run the Peachtree in person anymore, when I can do it at my own leisure.

However, over the span of the last 24 hours, I’ve seen at least 5-6 posts fed to me from algorithm, of people I have no idea who they are, as well as local news outlets, all, for lack of a better term, talking or debating the yellow PTRR shirt.  Almost entirely fueled by hatred, by, unsurprisingly, white people who are completely bent out of shape over the fact that the shirt is yellow and not red, white and/or blue, primarily, in honor of the fact that this is the vaunted 250th anniversary of the United States of ‘Murica. 

The news outlets are obviously cleverly feeding off of this reaction, and are simply querying the masses, fully knowing that the negative engagement is still engagement all the same, and the comments sections that I can’t resist looking at, are almost entirely echo chambers of salty white people all saying the same nonsense about how it should be red, white or blue because 250, and a whole lot of people corroborating this opinion because most people with brains know better than to jump into these lions dens of poorly veiled racism and orange fuck supporters.

However, it’s to the point where I can’t just simply chalk it up as white people being salty and actively looking for reasons to be pissed off, but more that the reactions and opinions and choices of words seem to be so uniform, so echoed and so similar that I can’t help but wonder if these are all the actions of bots and AI, deployed by the types of farms that are designed and meant to incite and provoke, knowing that even negative engagement is still engagement, and engagement equals profit somewhere down a line.

All the same, if it really is that all these reactions and posts are genuine human beings, all consistently and collectively being mad over the fact that a run’s shirt is yellow, it goes back to the title of this post that white people truly know no boundaries when it comes to the innate desire to be mad about, anything at all.

It’s funny to me that this reaction did not happen when in 2023 the shirt was said to be peach, but is this weird sickly orange-y color that borderlines pink, but as long as it was called peach, it could be justified, seeing as how the name of the fucking race is called, The Peachtree.  But yellow probably makes the right white immediately think about the evil Chinese since yellow is the negatively connoted color associated to Asian people, despite the fact that yellow variations of popular ‘Murican muscle cars are oft-coveted, but it doesn’t matter because yellow = wrong.

All the same, I dig the yellow shirt, and I look forward to when I get mine.  The Adidas versions of the PTRR shirts over the last few years are all great, because they’re no longer cheap, Gildan-like cotton t-shirts that I wouldn’t really ever wear, but are mesh, workout-caliber shirts, that immediately go into my rotation of workout apparel, and get regularly worn.  The fact that simply wearing them on my own walks and runs is going to incite white people, will only be a cherry on top, aside from just liking the color and design in the first place.

Stay mad, white people, I look forward to observing what pisses y’all off next.

Anytime I read about the environmental effects of AI

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I think about this snippet from the epilogue of The Big Short detailing Michael Burry’s lone investing focus.  Back in 2015 when the film was released, I didn’t really think about what was really implied by Burry’s decision to start betting on water, but I could imagine reasons similar to what happened in Flint, Michigan, or the fact that in spite of the world being like 90% water, I don’t imagine even close to a tenth of that is drinkable water, and clean water is probably going to be a bigger commodity in the future than it really sounds like it should be.

But with all the chatter about the growth of AI, and how a single ChatGPT query results in the consumption of energy that is capable of requiring like a gallon of water to cool down some servers in a data center in the middle of bumfuck flyover America, this is what makes me wonder if Burry knew something was on the horizon or something a decade ago.

Either way, every time something comes out about the environmental ravaging AI is capable of, this is the image that comes directly to mind, and I find myself thinking about this more and more as AI is blabbed about more and moar.

lol MARTA #437

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

AJC: (Paywall, but headline tells the story) Days away from the start of the FIFA World Cup, the new, state-of-the-art MARTA trains of tomorrow have not passed mandatory safety tests, and remains possible that they will not be ready for the largest sporting event in the world

There’s really not a whole lot to add to this story.  I figure to most people who live in the Atlanta area and are familiar with MARTA’s history, this is pretty much the least surprising thing in the world that Atlanta and MARTA fumbled the bag and in all likelihood won’t be ready for the World Cup despite having years to get shit done.

Progress in Atlanta moves at a snail’s pace, and frankly the metaphor is an insult to the speed of snails across the planet, because Atlanta routinely falls short of expectations unless there are millions of dollars in a treasure chest at the end of a rainbow to incentivize expediency, like when they miraculously rebuild I-85 three weeks ahead of schedule, which was still about like six weeks slower than the time it took Fukuoka, Japan to repair a sinkhole the size of a crater in a weekend.

I vaguely remember a similar situation way back when the College Football National Championship was being hosted in Atlanta, the city really wanted to get the Atlanta Streetcar up and running, mostly for appearances on a national level, because the little ass street car wasn’t going to be realistically moving more than a few hundred people for an event the size of the Natty.

But they failed, and didn’t complete it on time, and when they did finally get it up and operational, nobody cared, nobody rode it, and it’s about as much of an afterthought to the city as much as the Dallas Austin-produced ATL Anthem that was supposed to be the city’s song, akin to Sinatra singing New York, New York, but still cost taxpayers around $5M to make.

So it’s not the surprise of the century that Atlanta and MARTA are on a one-way crash course to yet another failure, and more than likely won’t have the purported trains of the future ready in time for the World Cup.  And even if they did miraculously pull off the impossible, there’s no way that they would have passed the mandatory safety checks and requirements, and I could see a situation where a shiny new Cerberus-looking train car, packed to the gills full of Spaniards* and the motherfucker goes off the rails and causes some tragic accident.

*I double-checked Atlanta’s guaranteed match list, and holy fuck did we get the shaft on country draw, where Spain is pretty much the only powerhouse country playing here, with the rest of the field being Czechia, Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Haiti, Cabo Verde (?), and Congo; I didn’t even know many of these places even had national teams, much less ones good enough to qualify for the World Cup

Alternatively, once the festivities begin, futbol fans will be subjected to the old and busted, urine-smelling incumbent trains, where local bums and panhandlers are probably rubbing their hands together at the opportunity to grief and harass riders from various other parts of the world, who just want to get to Mercedes-Benz Arena (that’s not allowed to have their own logo in sight, lmao).

Either way, I heard that thanks to the political situation in ‘Murica, there was a lot of reconsideration of would-be fans, travelers and futbol enthusiasts, as far as hotels, tickets and the promised influx of money that an event the caliber of the World Cup is capable of bringing in, and I thought to myself, even if Korea isn’t going to get a match here, it might still be a cool thing to go to a World Cup match, and maybe even take my dad with me.  But then I discovered that the duration of the entire Group Stage, I will be out of the country, and by the time I get back, will be only critical knockout futbol matches, where the cost of those tickets will probably be back up to $FuckYou.99/each.

Perhaps I might luck into some watch events in Seoul for when Korea takes the pitch, I can’t imagine that even remote, they could be any less chaotically disorganized as Atlanta and MARTA are.  But thank goodness I won’t be around in the city for when the World Cup will inevitably be causing all sorts of chaos around town, and no thanks to MARTA.

I bet this never happens at a Canadian Timmy’s

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

NYPost: altercation at an Indiana Tim Horton’s over an argument about a drive-thru order results in a 75-year old woman dead

I’d be curious to know what exactly happened in this scenario to where things escalated to physical violence.  I’ve had my share of fast food fuckups, and even if I cared enough to expend the effort to try and get it rectified, I can’t say I’ve had a low success rate at some sort of resolution.

It’s like, just remaining calm and not being a dick seems to a good enough strategy at achieving some sort of recompense, so I can’t help but wonder what happened at this Indiana Tim Horton’s, where an irate 75-year old woman marched into the restaurant, got in the grill of a 17-year old drive thru worker before their 20-year old manager intervened, to where things escalated even further, to where it became physical.

Tim Horton’s iced capps are definitely on my Rushmore of fast food items, but fuck if I’m going to risk my life if someone there possibly fucked up my order.

Watching the video, it’s scary and unfortunate to see the escalation of a conflict get physical, and to the point where death entered the chat, because there is seldom anything funny about the loss of life.

In one hand, I can’t help but feel inclined to side with the restaurant, because the elderly woman did march in there and seem to aggress with minimal restraint.  And when things get physical, people have the right to defend themselves.  But in the other hand, it was a 75-year old woman; obviously most of us probably aren’t experts at hand-to-hand combat with 75-year olds, but how hard could she have hit to incense a 20-year old to fight back with such fierceness?

Either way, it’s a scenario where everyone involved loses.  A woman lost her life, the employee that fought her will probably need therapy for the rest of their life knowing that their actions contributed towards it, and Tim Horton’s name gets dragged down into the muck by having a customer death controversy tied to their brand.

Plus, the daughter of the deceased takes some shrapnel for getting quoted sounding like a dumbass:

You should not enter a coffee shop for a coffee and a doughnut and come out unalived. That is diabolical,”

Really, unalived?  I’d ask, what are they, 13?  But it’s the daughter of a 75-year old, so presumably someone closer to my age than someone who probably actually thinks unalived is a real word.

Like the title of this post says, I can’t imagine something like this ever happening up in Canada, because Canadians are typically way more well-mannered and not as violent as their southern neighbors, and hopefully incidents like this doesn’t inhibit the expansion of Timmy’s in the US, because we’ve finally got remotely accessible locations in Georgia, and I hope to always be able to get iced capps when I really am in the mood for them.

I’d be curious to see the venn diagram on this one

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

One of my current dad-related nonsensical missions is that I need to get him a Georgia driver’s license, or rather at this stage, state-issued identification because pffh ain’t no way he’s driving anymore in his current state.  Despite the fact that his current license is still valid until 2027, he’s been harping on me to get it changed over, as if there were some sort of threat of grievous harm if he doesn’t, naturally because it’s something one of his buddies said, and in true Korean parent fashion, what a buddy says >>> what your children says.

When I moved to Georgia in 2003, I remember going to a Department of Driver Services office, saying I needed to get a Georgia license, and basically the only things I needed were my current, Virginia license, and some sort of proof of address.  I did have to take the written test on the spot, but because I am not a halfwit, such was no problem, and I was in and out of the DMV in a reasonable amount of time without too much aggravation.

I took my dad to a DDS office, and because nothing with my dad is ever easy, naturally there was a line stretched all the way back to the door.  I had my dad go take a seat while I camped the line, and I had the positive wherewithal to look on my phone to make sure I had what I needed, lest we waste any further time to get up to the desk and be told we didn’t have sufficient materials.

In addition to his existing license, and proof of address, it turns out that the criteria for getting a Georgia identification from somewhere else now requires:

  • (At least) one more piece of mail to prove address
  • Social Security Card and/or tax return
  • Proof of US citizenship, such as US Passport, immigration card – existing drivers license not valid for this purpose

Seeing as how I did not have either of these bullet points, I immediately pulled got my dad and we left the DDS, explaining to him that shit’s changed, and this license mission isn’t going to get done today, and that we needed moar shit before coming back.

It’s apparent that the process has been deliberately made as hard as possible for immigrants to accomplish things by the book, but not at all surprising that things are the way they are like this.

Naturally, my dad has lost his current passport, despite the fact that he visited overseas as recently as 2022, however, I was able to find the last three passports he had previously, all expired, and one being his Republic of Korea passport.  And fuck if he knows where any documentation of his US citizenship certification or immigration card or his Social Security card is; and add insult to injury, I found the envelope that his original SSA card came in, but the card itself was removed from the perforated sheet, lost to the aether of age and neglect.

So, in order to get my dad’s Georgia identification, I will have to get him a replacement passport.  Thankfully, as I recently did my dad’s 2025 taxes, I have those to stand in place of his SSA card, and I have proof off address and his previous license that he’ll have to turn in.  But ironically hilariously, I still have to get him a new passport so he can get a driver’s license equivalent.  And obviously, anyone who’s ever had to get a passport before knows just how much of a pain in the ass that singular task is, but I have to go through it all in order to just get to the next step of a different pain in the ass task.

Regardless, moar bitching about my dad wasn’t what prompted me to start writing this post, but because it’s on the topic of passports, all this nonsensical shit poured out because it’s somewhat related.

But I was reading about how the Orange Administration is taking credit for a law that’s actually existed since 1996, about how those deadbeats in the country who are being on child support and alimony will have their passports revoked.  From what I understand, this policy has really existed since 1996, but the amendment that the Orange Party is taking credit for is that instead of waiting for passport holders to try to use their passports before getting rejected and revoked, they’re instead just going to preemptively revoke them through public records.

So in other words, a whole lot of nothing, in actuality.

But the funny thing is that I’d be curious to see the data of just how much impact this is actually going to have in the country, because I have a hard time imagining the types of deadbeats who fall tremendously behind on their child support are really the types to be having passports in the first place, so they can jettison away from the United States in the first place.

Same logic applies to the types of people who will be crawling all over themselves in order to get limited edition passport books with the baked potato’s disgusting mug on them, as part of the United States 250th birthday bullshit.

Yeah, the schmucks who are interested in limited edition passports with their god-king on it, or/and the types to be behind in child support, I can’t imagine there’s a big correlation with them having or even needing passports in the first place.

The funny thing is that in the grand spectrum of effectiveness of getting deadbeats to pay back child support, I feel like the states that have laws that are along the lines of those who owe, can’t get hunting and/or fishing licenses, probably have more success than any rules mandated by the stooges in DC.

As the subject says, I’d really be interested in seeing a bunch of venn diagrams to illustrate the effectiveness and correlations between shitheads who don’t pay child support, versus people who have/need passports and those who have/need licenses for redneck activities like fishing and hunting.

I’m willing to be the latter is better at getting people to catch up on their child support than penalizing passports is.

The craziest part about all these distractions

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

A little while ago as I was doomscrolling, I saw this one meme.  At this point, I can’t remember what it was about, whether it was Iran getting bombed, the rise of shitty gas prices (again), a bunch of dumb white guy CEOs biting into hamburgers, or whatever, but it went like, The craziest part about X is that [orange fuckface in the white house] is named in the Epstein Files over 3,000 times.

For whatever reason, this stuck with me, and I really began to actually think about recognize about all the shit going on in the country and across the world, that really are just a whole bunch of distractions to the fact that the sitting president of the United States has been named countless times in the Epstein Files.  And of course, not a single fucking soul is doing anything about it, and as much as I want to love my country of birth, I just end up hating it a little bit more each time I think about it and am reminded of such.

A few years ago, I felt like I had one of those life’s revelations that in spite of the constitutional right to have information, the media really does go out of their way to steer people away from thinking about bigger issues, and at the time, there was a big hullabaloo about the Washington Redskins finally agreeing to change their name, conveniently at a time where the country was in turmoil over coronavirus, Black Lives Matter demonstrations, and just the ‘usual’ state of civil unrest.

That was probably the first time I really noticed and recognized a scenario of mass distraction like that, and despite the fact that I was like 40 years old, it felt like one of those naïve moments of realizing that the world isn’t quite as innocent and altruistic as we might want to believe it is. 

We are truly never too old to learn and realize new things.

Either way, that’s kind of where I’m at these days, feeling frustrated, disappointed, and generally mad at my country for being so simple-minded and easily distracted to bigger things.  Obviously, I knew nothing major was really going to come out of the initial release of Epstein Files, because Washington is a spineless and gutless swamp full of people with all the cards who would absolutely not narc on each other, and would sooner eat their young than to act in a manner that positions themselves contrary to the mutation of whatever direction-wing that the right has transformed into these days.

It’s almost flabbergasting the lengths that the current administration has gone to in order to get people not talking about the Epstein Files, and that the actual president of the country is named literal thousands of times in it, which is absolutely not a good thing, considering the context of just about everything else in them.  Like, the United States basically started a war, with Iran, in order to get people to avert their eyes somewhere else.  And then predictably, war-like conditions always result in a spike of gas prices, and for the people lucky enough to remain blind to World War 3, they definitely wouldn’t miss the escalation of gas prices on the homefront, and then they’re busy being miserable about that.

But honestly, it’s the fucking noise about the McDonald’s CEO and the wimpy bite he did, and the ensuing chatter and bullshit that has emerged from that, that has me feeling the most enraged.  Because there’s literally an unearthed horrific global pedophilia ring that was just revealed, but people would rather expend their energy debating and analyzing some rich asshole taking a bite out of a hamburger.

As much as I loathe all of the fucks in Washington that are keeping our entire country as the cesspool it’s been downgraded to, I have just as much vitriol and disdain for all the people in the country that fall for such elementary distraction tactics.

I digress though.  This is a topic that I really didn’t want to expend any energy on, because politics are all shit and I hate them, but it’s like when I’m on social media, and I see things that I want to comment on, where I can utilize the template of “the craziest thing about X is that [orange fuckface] is in the Epstein Files,” but I don’t want to deal with the rebuttals and responses of anyone who does live on that side of the fence, because their stupidity would undoubtedly be detrimental to my general state of mental health.

So to my safe little brog that nobody reads, where I can pop off about whatever topic I want, without there being any real chance for any recourse, even ones as inflammatory as politics are.

Like sending gorillas to do custodial work

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

That’s the best analogy that comes to mind when I think about the bright idea to send ICE agents to Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson Intergalactic Spaceport, Nail Salon and Chicken Tender Museum in order to assist with crowd control and the nightmare scenario where the vast majority of TSA agents are no-showing because they’re not getting paid.  Sure, they’re marginally capable of perhaps doing some base job functions like staring at people menacingly while behind a gaiter and holding an automatic firearm so that people think twice about trying to cut any lines and shave an hour off their wait, but there’s a higher possibility that these ICE clowns make things worse, escalate a situation, and there’s probably going to be more arrests and possibly deaths, before any progress or civility is restored to the airport.

I’m just really glad that I don’t have any upcoming flight bookings coming up, because I’d probably punt on any airline travel I have coming up if it required me to go through ATL right now, because it doesn’t seem to matter when people are rolling up to the airport these days, the waits just seem to grow commensurate to how early people are showing up.

Mythical wife and I are current with The Pitt, and the most recent episode introduced a sub plot where two ICE agents bring a woman set to be detained to the ER, because she was most likely injured during a raid that they conducted.  And the presence of ICE in at the hospital passively makes all sorts of minority staff, patients and waiting patients to peace the fuck on out of the Pitt.

When Doctor Robbie tells them to stay the fuck to themselves and not be meandering around, they basically roid rage and attempt to interrupt the treatment of their detainee and send her to detention without treatment, with no regard for her injuries, and when an RN intervenes, he gets taken down and arrested as well, and in classic Pitt logic, there is no situation that cannot be made worse, somehow.

I feel like this is exactly what’s going to happen at ATL, with ICE wandering around the airport now.  All sorts of Hispanic and other minority would-be passengers will see them lurking around, and decide it’s not worth getting targeted and possibly detained and shipped off to a concentration camp detention center, and slip on out of the airport and ironically, ICE will have assisted in relieving the congestion of humanity at the airport, slightly, but seeing as how this was probably also the intention of the whole plan, it begins to grow the narrative that airline travel is becoming more of a white privilege than it already is.

Regardless, it’s just sad, laughable, and endlessly pathetic to see the state of, well, everything these days.  ICE agents trying to do TSA functions is like asking gorillas to do custodial work, at first they’d probably show remote capability of the bases of functions, but ultimately something is going to set them off, and ragey, power-tripping violence is going to be inevitable.

The craziest part about all these airport nightmares is that the guy sitting in the White House was named like 3,000+ times in the Epstein Files.