News and notes from around the interweb:
- Should Afghanistan be on your tourism bucket list?
A controversial Taliban tourism video has gone viral, leaving people around the world stunned and confused. The clip, widely shared on social media, shows graphic footage that resembles beheading scenes, fighters holding Kalashnikovs, and military-style parades—all under the banner of promoting tourism in Afghanistan.
شاهد الرسالة القوية التي وجّهها شباب أفغانستان إلى الولايات المتحدة!#أفغانستان_بالعربي#افغانستان pic.twitter.com/W3LrrNJy88
— أفغانستان بالعربي (@afghanarabc) July 5, 2025
- Singapore Airlines first and business class passengers can use the Capital One lounge at New York JFK note though that the airline’s passengers do not get entrance priority over the bank’s cardmembers. First class passengers can also use the Virgin Clubhouse.
- How Hampton Inn became a Hilton cash cow.
- If you order a replacement card, it comes in the new design.
Ordering a replacement does get you the new design
byu/MrNewking inChaseSapphire - I like that Chase authorized user cards have had the same card number as the primary account, but others fine it easier to differentiate transactions with different card numbers. Chase is now assigning different numbers to authorized users, at least for Sapphire Reserve:
Authorized users get unique card numbers
byu/F1_Brooklyn inChaseSapphire - Passengers bring bugs onto planes. Fumigation efforts are significant across airlines. Widebody aircraft departing from far flung destinations are especially vulnerable, though this was a Salt Lake City – Miami flight:
At some point during the flight I felt something crawling on my foot (since I was wearing sandals) when I looked up, to my absolute horror I saw two cockroaches directly in front of me. I managed to catch one of them just in time before disappearing into the person’s headrest of front of me.
Roaches on my red eye flight
byu/Straight_Ad_5935 inamericanairlinesHardly limited to American!
Cleanliness?? See insect bites (Doctor has insect bite diagnosis) -during UA082-Dreamliner Newark -> DEL
disrupting my trip @kirbylivestock pic.twitter.com/bjRa2winTE— Sanjiv Kapoor (@sanjivk1) July 8, 2025
Bucket list? Your head might end up in a bucket if you dare to go there under the rule of these animals. And I mean this in the most literal way.
A few actually go there (some are spies of course). It’s a game of roulette. If they suspect you for something, or if you cross the wrong person, you might very well be put in that bucket.
Hard to tell if that was a Taliban compound or an ICE detention camp.
What’s so different from Taliban tourism and Delta Airlines plans of expanding into one of the most oppressive human rights regimes of Saudi Arabia (let’s not forget where the highjackers of 9/11 came from). Everyone is hailing Delta’s decision to sponsor a terrorist country through the economic gain of a new market, but now you seem outraged by Afghanistan. Try talking with a consistent voice regarding tourism to places where Americans, and the free world, should avoid travelling to at all costs.
Well it was a nice country once. In the early ’70s I enjoyed going all through it on the overland “Hippie Trail” from France to Nepal. But my two takeaways were: 1) This is an incredibly rough country, don’t imagine you can ever conquer it, and 2) Don’t ever mess with these people. They are very serious about their religion, like their country and know their long and violent history very well. After all, in the 1840s the British sent 15,000 people in to conquer it…and one staggered out. Of course both the Soviets and the U.S. thought “this time it will be different”, and we know the results. But as for this ad, I think it’s a slick fake.
I’ve been to Afghanistan, but not because it was on my bucket list. Pretty crappy place in my book, I don’t know why anyone would voluntarily choose to go there.
I’mm’a go with Randy Jackson on this one: “That’s a nope for me, dawg!”
If you’re dumb enough to go to Afghanistan for tourism, you deserve whatever happens to you.