Are you talking about the Global Entry card that gets you fast-tracked through Customs, or is there now an actual passport card? How would places like China (which used up 4 of my passport pages with stupid large Visas before I had to get a new one) stamp a card?
i have Global Entry (GOES) and TSA PreCheck is thrown in for free - both for 5 years at a time. Not a bad deal. I did travel internationally for work for about 15 years though. We had a "question of the day" on Teams at work the other day. They asked how many countries we've been to so far and my number was 27. The closest anyone got to me was 18, and most of those were on cruises. I hate cruising but one of the countries I visited was on my first (and last) cruise. I was shocked at the number of countries I've been to, but I was used to it. I won't do that again though - too much time on the road.
Thanks for the great advice. I will figure out how to ask the VA dentists for another referral (they only do the first exam to establish what care we will need and then refer us out), and also look into a temp night guard. Most VA hospitals/clinics are short on any doctors/dentists/specialists so these days they pretty much have to offer community care. I'm sure the civilian dentist wouldn't advocate to move me somewhere else. He might not get enough money for his next golf club membership. We do have a prosthodontist right down the road from us. There are also at least 3 dental offices within 5-10 miles of me, but I was sent to a dentist 40 minutes away. They do have a good relationship with the VA here, and the dentist is good, but so is the one 5 miles away.
Just this afternoon the Dallas Regional VA called me to get me scheduled for a vascular appointment. I live over 100 miles from there and asked them to please stop trying to schedule me there instead of around my local area - which does have one of the small VA clinics. What they don't seem to understand is it will take me about 1.5 to 2 hours (if during rush hour traffic) to get there, the same amount of time to get home, an hour or two for the appointments, and 30-60 minutes for gas/food/drinks on the drive(s). I am a cyber contractor that specializes in nuclear cyber, and do well for my hourly rate. I shouldn't have to lose hundreds of dollars 2 or 3 times a month when they want me to go there - it's idiotic. I mean - we have vascular doctors, podiatrists, and x-ray and MRI machines...
I do get reimbursed for mileage, but that doesn't begin to replace the hours I miss at work. Two times this year so far I lost enough hourly pay where the money would've covered my mortgage. To be fair I got my mortgage in Trump's first term at a 2.25% interest rate, so it is only around $1550 for a 2500 sq ft good-sized house with my WFH office (garage with a full bath and small kitchen - (we bought the house from someone that had a wheelchair-bound mother) - 4 other BRs, and y of 1 acre of land. Small towns in TX are great.
I know some of the older disabled vets (80yrs and older) like those trips though, because a bunch are scheduled at the same time and they are all driven there in a bus with all their buds. Good for them.
I know how sick you can get thanks to dental issues. I have TMJ and Bruxism (I grind the crap out of teeth) and it is bad enough that the VA gave me a 10% disability rating for each condition. I'm going down the same path and it keeps getting worse - lost several fillings, 2 crowns, and have chipped a few more. The worst though was when I put so much pressure on one of my teeth that I actually pushed it through my jaw bone and into my sinus cavity. I had a really bad infection, the whole left side of my face turned red and noticeably swelled up, and I had to go to an oral surgeon over Christmas to have it pulled. They even gave me a fentanyl patch during surgery and I freaked out because I had a drug test in 2 days for a new job. Oddly enough it either didn't show up on the test or they just didn't mention it. They also gave me a 30 day course of antibiotics - normally they do 10 days.
Fast forward 3 or so years and I'm getting ready to have a bridge put in (the VA sent me to a civilian dentist since my case is so different). I asked the VA why they wouldn't just put an implant in and they showed me my x-ray. About a millimeter (or less) of bone grew back where I pushed the old tooth clean through my jaw. They don't even have a choice to try an implant. The bone reminded me of the thin coat of ice on a pond when it has just frozen.
I've been waiting to get several fillings fixed, 2 root canals, and 2 or 3 crowns replaced (not counting the root canals) thanks to how booked the civilian dentist is. Then last week I crushed one of the teeth that they were supposed to fix. I had to go in for an emergency filling just to get me through to the regular work. I am lucky though. Most disabled vets don't get dental care unless they are at 100%, and I'm sitting at 80%. Because my TMJ and Bruxism is rated, my dental work is covered.
The worst part is the VA initially sent me to get one of those mouth guards that you wear at night to transfer the energy from your teeth to the bite guard, but they can't make it since I need all this work done. It needs to be molded to my teeth patterns and the patterns keep changing. The last mouth guard I had (like 20-30 years ago) I ground my way through it in about a month.
Yeah - that one still pisses me off. I'm not a trucker but am a disabled vet with commissary rights. However - the nearest commissary to me is roughly 90 mins away. That means I can't carry on the whole trip since they won't even allow my gun to stay in my car safe.
The worst part of it is my wife called the front gate security and she got 3 different answers as to whether I could leave my gun in my car safe or even check it in somehow at the gate. Two said yes and one said no. I'd rather not lose my base access, so I left it at home.
I paid $2.93 yesterday at a WalMart in East Texas. I do have WalMart+, so I get a 10c per gallon discount at WalMart and Murphys gas stations (as well as some Exxons) so the advertised price was actually $3.03. Good benefit, but the Exxon part doesn't really matter because they are always more than 10C higher anyway.
This is (in my opinion) the most idiotic take in the posted article:
In a May 2026 radio appearance on Maine's Morning News, IPVM found Flock Chief Legal Officer Dan Haley making an offhand admission that cuts against the company's standard deflections:
Very rarely, someone does something stupid. They use it to figure out where an ex-girlfriend is or something like that. That's actually the most common thing.
He characterizes the behavior as rare. He simultaneously identifies it as the most common form of abuse. The tension between those two statements is the problem Flock has left unaddressed.
There is zero "tension between those two statements". Using Flock to "monitor ex-girlfriends (or something related)" was called out by Flock as the most common abuse, as well as saying it is rare. Then the article author tries to make it into some type of coverup by basically claiming the two statements contradict each other.
Compare that to this fictitious example. Say a computer company says their most common issue is bad CPU chips from an external factory, but also says the problem is rare. Same thing - the computer company may have had 300 failures out of a million shipped, a very small number, but it is their biggest bad issue. Issues can be both rare and the biggest issue a company has.
I knew the article would have an agenda when I saw this:
profiled by Time, The Atlantic, Wired and collaborated with the BBC, NY Times, Reuters, WaPo, WSJ, and more.
The sidebar for this board says the following (in relation to your question):
They want you divided.
They want you labeled by race, religion, class, sex, etc.
Divided you are weak [no collective power].
Divided you attack each other and miss the true target [them].
You mean like this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvuktushEhY
Even if there are only 6 stories, we don't have any idea how wide the bottom floor(s) expand.
(Edited to add this:) Plus - supposedly these are military members. The rooms won't be hotel rooms. They will be big areas with bunk beds everywhere, and shower and restroom banks similar to what we had in basic training (Air Force anyway).
I was also billeted at Fort Myer in VA when I was assigned to the Pentagon (before I got married and moved into base housing). When I was there I was in a standard Army dorm room. It had 4 bunk beds. I was an NCO so I didn't have a roommate. That room could've easily fit 12-16 soldiers. Judging by the size and the beds I took that to mean that's how junior-enlisted soldiers lived if they weren't married. Military members are used to that, and I imagine it is worse for the sailors on ships or in subs.
Was it just about chemical weapons?
I remember one of OAN's special reports from one or two years ago when Pearson Sharp visited Syria and interviewed regular people, as well as doctors and nurses, and all of them said those chemical attacks were fake. Crisis actors.
I wasn't sure if they were telling the truth or not, but this news could be why they were faked (if those people were telling the truth).
I keep getting distracted by those videos and waste a couple hours. They're a lot of fun to watch though.
What really cracks me up is the TSA had to put out a public service announcement (I saw it on OAN today) telling the foreigners flying home to stop putting ranch dressing in their carry-on bags. I didn't have that one on my bingo card. I mean sure, maybe brisket, but ranch?
Nobody is 100% sure. The thought is they are 10 years away, but they did fire on Diego Garcia this year. The missiles went about 2500 miles but were intercepted or failed. They could likely hit many of our allies in Europe (assuming we don't intercept them), and certainly our middle-eastern allies. They need to almost double that range to hit the USA. Alaska is around 4100 miles and is the closest point for them.
We also have a bunch of bases that are within their known range. The other issue is one of their allies could give them a missile that can reach us. Of course they could easily just move missiles closer via storage containers. Not much we can do about that one.
That's what we're here for. I did, however, make a mistake in saying a dozen. It is possible to do it with just one blast in the right place and at the right altitude because of how the blast works. Line of sight will reach a lot of places depending on where it is detonated, but the real worry is the sweeping wave of overloads making it's way through the grid. If the ERCOT (Texas) grid was the target the line of sight would hit 3 grids, and the waves would go east and west. Fortunately that issue is being worked on though.
It is possible to have an automatic break in the grid based on these massive waves, which would certainly take out the Texas grid (in this scenario) but might protect the other two. It has been theorized, but not created or tested yet. Hopefully they get on that. Automatic breaks could help if for example the detonation was only over the east or west. One grid would be toast, but if the automatic breaks work faster than the waves of overloads do, the other 2 grids might survive - at least that attack anyway.
If it were me, I'd consider 2 missiles over each grid (6 total missiles) and then start lobbing more to try to overwhelm the golden dome (that doesn't yet exist either). I saw something that said it will have a finite amount of missiles/lasers/whatever so we would have to be strategic in which missiles we try to intercept.
A dirty bomb won't destroy the electronic infrastructure. There is no nuclear blast. A dirty bomb's sole purpose is to cause widespread panic. It would take a nuclear detonation, causing an EMP, to destroy electronics - and even then it would have to either be a gigantic one at exactly the right altitude and location, or a dozen or more detonated in strategic locations (and the right altitudes) to effectively destroy electronic infrastructure.
My stab at the barnacles - maybe it is referencing the fact that all those ships that were stranded for so long around the Strait (while full of oil waiting to be shipped) didn't have a lasting effect on much of anything other than some higher prices for a while. Or - maybe it is referencing the up-to-130 Iranian ships growing barnacles at the bottom of the sea, and the fact that WWIII (or as Ilhan Omar would say - World War one hundred eleven) didn't break out as a result. I think it is option 2, but it is a pick 'em.
I assume it is just 1 year since it says "250" on it.