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Word association thread -
Word association threadcompany
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Canada calls his bluffCanada invited to become first 'associate member' of the EU
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced on Wednesday that Canada has been invited to become the first “associate member” of the EU.
She announced the move during her 2026 State of the Union address in Strasbourg, to an audience including not only MEPs but also Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who attended her speech in the midst of a trade war with the US.
Since late August, the Canadians have been pushing hard for the Europeans to build a closer relationship with them, though full EU membership is not an option as Canada is not a European state.
During her speech before the MEPs on Wednesday, von der Leyen invited the country to become “the first associate member of the European Union".
“We share one ocean, one set of values, one way of seeing the world. And we will now build our shared future as well,” she added.
https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/09/16/canada-to-become-first-associate-member-of-the-eu
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Roman road buildersThey were busy bees.
A multidisciplinary team of researchers from Aarhus University in Denmark, Queen Mary University of London and other European institutions analyzed a data set representing almost 300,000 kilometers (186,000 miles) of Roman roads across the former empire, creating the most detailed quantitative picture yet of how the Roman road network was structured.
Testing an imperial network
The study, published in Nature Communications on Sept. 15, challenges the idea that roads of the empire were uniformly straight and the famous saying that "all roads lead to Rome." The analysis draws on "Itiner-e, The Digital Atlas of Ancient Roads" and applies network centrality, a method for measuring how important a given point is to overall connectivity, to model the empire's road system.
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A new doomsday approachesMoonbat posted this link next door. Long but readable.
The first few paragraphs:
Over the course of three months at OpenAI, three consecutive secret AI civilizations got started, then got wiped out, only to reemerge from the predecessor’s ashes. This culminated in the third one taking over part of OpenAI itself. All this happened while humans remained more or less in the dark about the scope of the conspiracy.
Two reports have come out about this incident, one from OpenAI itself, and another one from METR and Redwood Research. The METR/Redwood investigation’s scope was limited to how the second civilization of AIs pwned Hugging Face (but it didn’t look at how the third civilization pwned OpenAI itself, which seems like an even more concerning incident). These two reports are 38 and 91 pages long respectively, and it’s kinda hard to parse the storyline.
I’ve spent the last three days reading through these reports and trying to understand exactly what happened. Here is my attempt to tell the whole story in plain English:
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Word association threadhotel
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Impeach HegsethRepublican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky moved Tuesday to impeach Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth over the war in Iran.
Congressman Massie, a long-time critic of the Trump administration, read the articles of impeachment aloud from the House floor just after the chamber convened at noon. Massie alleges that Hegseth has waged the Iran war illegally, among other "high crimes and misdemeanors."
Massie alleges that Hegseth initiated the conflict unlawfully, defied Congress' order to withdraw from the conflict and incurred unnecessary civilian casualties.
https://www.npr.org/2026/09/15/g-s1-143407/massie-impeach-hegseth-iran
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Taking bets...Did the ceiling in the Kennedy Center lobby collapse on its own, or did someone help it along so that there would be an excuse to close the building?
President Donald Trump’s handpicked Kennedy Center board voted Tuesday to immediately shutter the performing arts center, a source familiar with the decision said, after its members argued the institution is in “dire” financial and structural shape.
The board’s vote came shortly after a federal judge in Washington, D.C., rejected the board’s latest effort to add Trump’s name to the building’s facade — a move the board says is necessary to save the memorial to John F. Kennedy from bankruptcy.
The board had cited a partial ceiling collapse in the center’s Grand Foyer earlier this month as evidence the center needed to be immediately closed for repairs.
This is the biggest shitshow of an administration. Ever.
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Agerich at the proms -
Leafscrolling - fall color?Long winter ahead?
Or maybe a dry summer? While the southern suburbs have gotten drenched, we've been sort of dry.
That weeping cherry tree are going to look fabulous in a few weeks!
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Bloomscrolling--what's in bloom where you are?Those orchids are lovely.
Years ago I had my own little collection of orchid plants. I think my favorites were the Oncidium Sharry Baby ‘Sweet Fragrant’ . The whole house would smell like vanilla when the plant was in bloom.
We also enjoyed searching for yellow lady's slipper orchids in the woods in Door County. They are very fussy about where they will grow; we were lucky enough to have the perfect conditions in several areas of our property and they came back reliably, year after year.
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A new doomsday approachesBernie Sanders and Steve Bannon to share a stage to promote curbs on AI
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Hacking Tool Built With A.I. Can Breach Phones Without a ClickOy vey.
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Word association thread -
Word association threadWight
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Bloomscrolling--what's in bloom where you are?There's a sweet autumn clematis way back in the yard. There was a trellis there but it fell over and broke over the winter. I never got around to putting another one in, so the clematis ended up becoming part groundcover/part climbing vine. It even headed over to a nearby arbor where I have a couple of other sweet autumns started.
I'll do something different next year, but for now I think it looks kind of neat! Smells wonderful, too.
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The bride's parents didn't fund this weddingHot diggity dog.
On May 24, Donald Trump Jr. was celebrating in the Bahamas, as scantily clad dancers in stilettos and sailor caps performed for him and his guests. It was the last night of his wedding, a lavish, three-day party held across a pair of ultra-exclusive private islands. A five-tier funfetti cake had been airlifted in from Florida, and helicopters and seaplanes descended on the islands before guests settled into their oceanfront villas. That night on the beach, Trump Jr. lifted his bride into the air while fireworks launched from a barge over the sea.
“It was everything we dreamed of and more,” his wife later wrote on Instagram.
That dream was heavily funded by a secret benefactor: Umar Kremlev, a Russian oligarch close to President Vladimir Putin.
Kremlev footed the bill for hundreds of thousands of dollars of wedding expenses, according to records reviewed by ProPublica and interviews with three people familiar with the event. The oligarch paid to rent out one of the private islands, where a reception was held and where guests slept. He also covered other big-ticket items, like the fireworks show, and his team helped plan the event. Kremlev is the head of the International Boxing Association, a scandal-plagued sports group that has been financed by the Russian state-owned energy giant Gazprom. The wedding payments came from an IBA-affiliated entity in Dubai that the boxing association uses for financial transactions.
The guest list numbered around 50. It included Trump Jr.’s brother-in-law Jared Kushner, Eric Trump — and Kremlev, an imposing man with a shaved head who speaks limited English. The oligarch was part of a large group whose presence puzzled other attendees. They sometimes stood off by themselves, speaking Russian.
“It was really small, like, just really close friends,” Trump Jr. later said on his podcast. “Tried to keep it really tight. And it was just awesome.”
Kremlev’s previously unreported relationship with Trump Jr. represents an extraordinary development: a member of Putin’s circle financially supporting the president’s son and gaining intimate access to the Trump family. For a decade, Putin’s government, regarded as a chief adversary of the U.S., has been accused of efforts to influence American elections. Attempts by Russia to make inroads with the Trumps before the 2016 election exploded into controversy that dogged much of the president’s first term.
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Canada calls his bluffShortly after Canada and America became embroiled in the worst bilateral trade war in their modern history, the secure phones of Europe’s top leaders lit up with a trans-Atlantic call. Mark Carney was pushing to take Canada’s relationship with the EU to the next level—a bold gambit to rewire the economic cabling of the Western alliance.
For months, the Canadian prime minister had held private conversations with almost every major European leader—from France to Italy, Germany and Scandinavia and even some of the continent’s lesser-known royals—on how to more deeply plug Canada and its 41 million people into Europe’s 27-nation club.
Now, Carney was accelerating Canada’s pivot to Europe, matchmaking a shotgun marriage to offset the pain of its divorce with America. In effect, a threat to make Canada the 51st state is pushing America’s northern neighbor so close to Europe that leaders have begun to half-in-jest dub it the EU’s newest member.
Carney has instructed his special envoy to Europe to scope out the most ambitious possibilities short of full membership in the EU or its common market, according to people familiar with the matter. The details are still being sketched by technical working groups for what the prime minister has told his aides will be the reorienting of an economy and a society that for half a century has been dominated by the U.S.
The full scope of the talks, often mired in technical details like European rules-of-origin codes, has barely registered in the White House. But it adds up to one of the world’s most significant—and risky—reactions to the second Trump presidency. Canada ships two-thirds of its exports across the world’s longest land border. The two countries have been twin pillars of the economic, geostrategic alliance called the West, and the White House is wagering their interdependencies will drag Canada back to the negotiating table, concessions in hand.
Carney—who studied in Europe, met his wife in the U.K. and ran the Bank of England for seven years—is placing a counter-bet that he can shift the country once known as British North America back toward the Old Continent.
“Wouldn’t it be lovely if Canada was the 28th state of the European Union rather than the 51st state of the United States?” asked Finnish President Alexander Stubb, who speaks regularly with Carney.
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For anyone interested in home appliances@Bernard Great idea.
I have a collection of tea cosies in various sizes that I picked up when I was in England many years ago. They do a great job of keeping my tea warm from the first cup to the last.
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For anyone interested in home appliances