They’ve arrested someone for sending the ricin letter to Trump
Lots of info at Ace’s:
She was found because her Twitter account listed “techno-creative nomad” and she called herself a “techno-creative Nomad” in her threatening letter to Trump.
She also called Trump an “ugly tyrant clown” in both her ricin letter and in a response to someone else on-line.
What a genius.
Even more information can be found here, including this:
Ferrier was carrying a gun when she was arrested, CNN reported. She was trying to cross the border from Fort Erie, Ontario, into Buffalo, New York, via the Peace Bridge when Customs and Border Protection agents took her into custody, NBC News reported.
The Peace Bridge.
Like I said previously about these sort of people, her bio reads like a criminally insane person, who given the current climate, has now been given license to act out her delusions. Thanks, Dems, you own this.
One of those peaceful, sensible Canadians, not like their gun-crazed neighbors to the south. 🙂 (After I wrote that I read that she had a gun problem…Oh well…)
I worked with Canadians in Latin America, and found them to be sensible people. Perhaps their being from Alberta had something to do with that.
There is a species of online Canadian that has decided that any American to the right of Trudeau or Obama needs to be resolutely condemned and driven out of civilized society. There was a Sprague from Toronto who used to comment here. I recall one who opined on a Venezuelan affairs blog that Mitt Romney was one of those sensible Republicans, unlike Donald Trump. It was not difficult at all to find one of his comments from 2012 that indicated that Mitt Romney was the devil incarnate. A rather common Democrat dodge- the only good Republican is a Republican out of power.
What the heck. A yellow dog Canadian Democrat is no worse than a yellow dog American Democrat- provided the Canadian doesn’t vote in US elections. As I see no need to spend much time, if any, commenting on Trudeau or any affairs Canadian, I find it amusing that some Canadians are so obsessed about the US. Most don’t carry their obsession as far as she did.
Note that she is French Canadian. I met an “interesting” French Canadian on a backpacking trip in South America. He “corrected” me on a verb conjugation in Spanish. I pointed out to him I was using a subjunctive tense that is usually not taught in beginning Spanish. The next day he put the moves on a local girl in the market- until her furious boyfriend put him in his place. A lot of French Canadians immigrated to New England, and growing up in New England I knew some. No different from anyone else.
Weird Al’ Yankovic – Canadian Idiot (Official Music video). Love it. Mocks stereotypes from both sides.
The mocking of Trump as “ugly” is rather amusing, since, in the photos available, Pascale hardly qualifies as pulchritudinous. It is widely believed on the political right (with good reason) that the thuggish foot-soldiers of Antifa/BLM, completely contemptuous of civilized comportment, are very often astonishingly unattractive (ugliness within and without).
Speaking of Canadians – see Gringo’s comments above – I used to travel frequently to Alberta, where I learned Albertans have interesting opinions of fellow Canadians.
Re: Quebec; Albertans consider them spoiled brats and privileged and would not mind if Quebec left the Canadian Federation.
Re: Newfoundland ; Albertans refer to them as “Newfies” and mock them as being inbred dolts, but all in good fun.
Re: British Columbia (BC); Albertans say that BC means “bring cash.”
In general, Albertans resent the fact that they send more money to Ontario than they receive from Ontario.
I found Canadians in general to be very friendly and really nice folks and the ones I met, more or less, like Yanks .
She’s a programmer but her tech experience is pretty junior — apparently just Python scripts and Subversion (a version-control system) configuration.
She’s not my candidate for a crafty ricin terrorist. I read on the web that it’s actually hard to make ricin and it’s not a slam-dunk, look-it-up-on-the-web home project.
https://www.thoughtco.com/myth-make-ricin-from-the-internet-3976051
I wonder if the ricin she sent was potent or wannabe.
Lovely person, no? She was deported for having overstayed her visa in the US.
This is just a preview of the coming attempts at assassination…
Desperate people act desperately and fanatics act upon their fanaticism. Throw in the MSM’s incessant lying incitement to violence and it doesn’t take a crystal ball to see what awaits.
@huxley
Broad Generalisation: The only ‘women’ who are remotely good at programming are transsexuals. Bizarre, but there are more than a few high functioning autistic types who decide that they are female for some reason. Audrey Tang (brilliant programmer) being a prime case in point.
Nothing wrong with Python per se… Not much Deep Learning happens without being driven by Python. Not Pythons/Turtles all the way down to the bare metal, obviously but nobody in the Current Year does Machine Learning / Deep Learning without using Python to conduct the performance.
Now Subversion? You’d have to be an effing retard to be using that in 2020 instead of git.
So she’s probably just a psychotic breaking script kiddie after all.
Really, most females claiming to be in this space are just LARPing. Not trying to offend women, just the facts.
No, Zaphod. My neighbor, definitely female, is a very good programmer for IBM.
Broad Generalisation: The only ‘women’ who are remotely good at programming are transsexuals. Bizarre
There are 90,000 women employed as computer programmers in this country and 1.1 million women in other IT occupations. I’m sure they’ll be crushed to learn that there’s a combox motormouth who fancies that none of them are ‘remotely good at it’.
@Kate:
Broad Generalisation.
Show me the female equivalent of Linus Torvalds or Richard Stallman. You can’t. And the world doesn’t want or need women like that. Both the individuals just mentioned are deeply unpleasant people — it goes with the territory of being uncompromisingly brilliant programmers.
Women certainly do have a place doing programming in large organisations such as IBM. Much workaday programming and IT stuff is perfectly suited to the female temperament.
I’ll add that in the Current Year IBM is not the IBM of old. It’s more like McKinsey or BCG. It sells big complicated BS solutions to large sclerotic organisations ruled by C-Suite Bugmen who need the IBM branding to cover their asses.
Brilliance in this field is 99.99% male. Just is. The facts don’t care.
It is also a well-known phenomenon in the trade that women with social media profiles going on about their tech l33tness are mostly LARPers. You can only fake it so much in this game. Eventually your $#@% has to work (or not) and gets judged against the competition.
Art Deco: Microsoft Bob on Line Three for you.
Our side of politics does have a major tech problem though. The smart folk doing Deep Learning, Sentiment Analysis (Guess what? You can flip that around and do Sentiment Injection into critical nodes in social networks. Wonder if that might be useful in politics? :P) are almost to a man (and trans and LARPing woman) Progressives. This keeps me awake at night
Zaphod: It’s true that the tippy-tippy-top of programmers, like mathematicians and chess players, are male, which doesn’t mean that there aren’t many solid female programmers, mathematicians and chess players. Grace Hopper, a computer pioneer, has an impressive record. The Polgar sisters are remarkable as women chess players and for their training.
As to male-to-female trans, I consider them male, cognitively and athletically. That’s their DNA and that’s the hormone bath their brains and bodies matured in.
I meant no disrespect to the Python programming language. I’ve written a few thousand lines of Python code and love it for its flexibility and scripting. I’ll be getting to Machine Learning next year. But Python is the BASIC of the 21st C. It’s no feat for anyone to write in it and more power to them.
I wasn’t impressed that Pascale Ferrier, our ricin terrorist, was working in Subversion. I assume that’s for old-code, legacy projects.
My point is that Ferrier doesn’t have mad tech skillz, for all her “techno-creative” posing, and I doubt she could make a decent batch of ricin either, though it was close enough to trigger detection equipment.
@ Huxley:
I think we’re agreed on Ferrier not being A-List Google Hiring Material.
Agreed re many solid female programmers for some definition of many. Easily an order of magnitude (or two) more male solid programmers. Grace Hopper was the Thomas Sowell of the early days computing. Smarter and more accomplished person than I’ll ever have a hope of being, but I wouldn’t wager my life or billions on too many of her like eventuating no matter how much positive encouragement or intervention is thrown at the problem.
My point is that a randomly-sampled female programmer is unlikely to be very good. A randomly sampled female programmer making a big deal about Python and Subversion is likely to be doubleplusungood.
In the particular: One mailing Ricin and packing heat at border crossings is definitely a Kook of the Finest Alkali.
Re Python again… Agree that it has a very low barrier to entry. It’s a question of what you then use it to accomplish. A lot of the good uses are high level scripting of powerful low-level stuff. But I’m sure you know this.
Interesting thing the Low Barrier to Entry Problem. Jane Street Capital used to recruit quant programmers purely on their ability to perform in OCaml precisely because Low IQ non-mathematical types cannot even get simple things to compile in a strongly typed language which is basically a bastard child of category theory. So the language becomes the Bridge of Asses. If you can figure it out, you’ll be able to handle the rest. Other reasons why a high frequency trading operation would want to use very strongly typed languages beyond scope this rant.
Haskell even better for filtering out dummies and poseurs.
Same reason hedge funds often recruit physics PhD types. It’s easier to turn a 3rd-rate Feynman into a very good Quant than it is to turn a Masters in Finance Striver into a passable Quant. Just point the newly-minted Stanford Physics person at Wilmott.com and he/she will be up to speed in a few months. After mastering Hyperdimensional Quantum Bogodynamics the money maths is laughably trivial for them.
Special note to Art Deco: When not discussing particular *individuals* I am usually talking about Normally Distributed Populations. The defining parameters of which can vary.
People have a hard time with distributions. If I, as a 5′ 10″ male, remark that men on average are taller than women, I can count on someone pointing to a 6′ female as though that debunks my statement.
When it comes to a statistical distribution, the averages don’t have be different to pile up an enormous gender disparity (or racial, or what have you) at the tails.
But if the means are the same, then the closer to the middle you get the much less disparity there is.
I don’t have any hard facts, but if Zaphod is correct that the right-hand tail of programming ability is dominated by men, it does not follow that the gender disproportion persists to the same degree as you move to the center of the distribution.
The million women in IT and programming may be every bit as good as the average man in IT and programming.
And if I need to hire a programmer, I’m not going to get Linus Torvalds or Richard Stallman. There aren’t enough of them to fill all the jobs. I’m going to have to hire much nearer the center of the distribution, and for the level of programmer I’m likely to get I’m not likely to find the women worse than the men.
What I am likely to find is the women outnumbered by the men. But I’m not interviewing women selected at random from the population, I’m interviewing women who applied and who have some kind of reason for thinking they can do the job, whether it’s education, experience, or both. And so even if I take for granted that the far-right of computer programming is male-dominated, there’s really no reason to think on that basis alone that the general run of women programmers aren’t as good as the general run of men.
Because it is not unusual at all for two normal distributions to have the means nearly equal but the standard deviations different.
I came out of a field (physics) where women were vastly outnumbered; but at the time I went in we all had the same expectations, and the typical physicist woman was as good as the typical physicist man. There just weren’t as many of them.
Physics is a discipline where the extreme right of the intelligence distribution is concentrated enough that you can easily meet someone 3 or 5 or 10 times smarter than you. If you are of above-average intelligence and work in a discipline much closer to the mean you might never meet anyone much smarter than you ever. But in physics you go to a conference there they are, asking you questions in front of everyone and thinking more quickly and more deeply than you can.
It can be hard to take. You can choose to cultivate humility, or you can be embittered by it. I was glad to learn such people existed, it gave me hope for the future, but I must admit I was deeply disappointed to know I would never be able to work at the level they do.
Following on Frederick’s remarks, over my 35 years of college teaching, about 50% of the students that apprenticed in my lab were women. The best student I ever had over in all those years was a woman. I got to know them very well, and I often brought up the subject of the lower numbers in general in the field for women. They all responded the same way: they first cited the statistic that in high school, there is a 50/50 split, but in FRESHMAN physics the number drops to 20%. The first “leak” in the pipeline is that HS physics is turning off the girls to the subject.
Second point: they all also said that physics is a way to other careers that tend to be more appealing to women. They all were good physics students, but also said that while they enjoyed physics they wanted a career with more immediate “impact”. True to what they were saying, all but one, who continued in physics, are now in engineering, or in some form of medicine (dental, medical, vet); the vast majority doing engineering. My best student? At the ripe old age of 28, after just receiving her PhD in CE, she is now one of the top civil engineers in the world specializing in analysis and restoration of historical structures. My next best student entered EE, was recruited heavily by Naval Research Lab, but opted for a position at Bose. Due to personal circumstances just left Bose, and was quickly snatched up by Dolby.
I can agree with the above about the percentage of women at the top levels of physics, math, and hard sciences. I happen to have two female childhood friends with PhDs in, respectively, physics and chemistry, who both were at the top level of their fields. But they are outliers, I agree.
Given all of the reported turmoil and lack of professionalism in the ranks of the current Secret Service, I would hope that President Trump also has an additional ring of his own private security guys protecting him and his family members.
Special note to Art Deco: When not discussing particular *individuals* I am usually talking about Normally Distributed Populations. The defining parameters of which can vary.
You weren’t talking about that, as any of us can see from reading your actual words in black letters in the comment in question. People would take you more seriously if you weren’t a Dunning-Kruger exemplar in every thread you elect to enter.
I can agree with the above about the percentage of women at the top levels of physics, math, and hard sciences. I happen to have two female childhood friends with PhDs in, respectively, physics and chemistry, who both were at the top level of their fields. But they are outliers, I agree.
Almost no one is at ‘the top of their field’
Women are amply represented in the fields in question (between 10% and 25% depending on which detailed occupation you look at). They’re just not equally represented. This is not a social problem, just how things play out when you have free choice in education and labor markets. It’s of professional interest to industrial psychologists and diverting fodder for magazine articles, but that’s about it. The problem arises when you have lawyers, scheming academics, hr pests, and higher ed apparatchiks pretending its a problem and making the world worse for hiring managers and their teams alike.
They all responded the same way: they first cited the statistic that in high school, there is a 50/50 split, but in FRESHMAN physics the number drops to 20%. The first “leak” in the pipeline is that HS physics is turning off the girls to the subject.
Inneresting. I’ve been out of high school a long time. My recollection is that there were two levels of each of the natural sciences available and three levels of math at each grade level. The girls tended to prefer biology to chemistry and chemistry to physics. The advanced math classes were 70% male and the advanced physics and chemistry classes were 100% male.
Art Deco, the stat comes from AIP which has been tracking this data for about 25 years now. HS physics, even AP, is generally 50/50, then enrollment in the freshman college year drops to the cited 20%. There has been some speculation about the fact that almost half of the HS physics courses are taught by biologists/chemists as there are not enough HS physics teachers to go around, could be a factor?? Hard to say.
@physicsguy:There has been some speculation about the fact that almost half of the HS physics courses are taught by biologists/chemists as there are not enough HS physics teachers to go around, could be a factor?
The people who really get physics don’t generally go in for teaching high school. Anyone with the kind of IQ that would let them understand physics well enough to teach it well might be drawn to a non-teaching occupation that pays better.*
*Brief aside to pooh-pooh the notion that teachers are “underpaid”. For nine months’ work, and the kind of benefits they get, they are amply compensated, and most teachers are above US median individual income ($60,300 K median for teachers vs $58,379 for all US).
It’s not that we underpay teachers. It’s that we pay the wrong ones more and in many states are practically unable to fire them.
Very early on, Gramsci’s Long March Through the Institutions/Culture sent one of it’s subversive columns straight for the Academy.
It was no wonder that unrepentant urban terrorist Bill Ayres switched from physical revolution to becoming an “educator,” and proceeded to churn out extremely influential teacher textbooks, model curricula, and reading lists, which have obviously generated a far greater revolutionary payoff than bombs ever did.
Unless and until Conservatives find some way to take back control of the Academy–the education of our children, and the formation and content of their characters and mind-sets–we will never have a chance in Hell of dethroning Leftism from it’s current dominant position in our culture, and society, or of winning against the Left and its subversive ideology, which today has a virtual monopoly on all of the positions of power, and an ever tightening stranglehold on just about every aspect of our dwindling traditional culture and society.
One small blow by Conservatives that might be landed against the dominant Leftist Academy could be exposing and highlighting for parents–who likely, many of them, have no clue–the kinds of deeply subversive historical, cultural, and social poison their local K-12 “educators” have been feeding their kids.
One good thing that might be resulting from the Chinese Corona virus lock downs could be a large increase in such parental enlightenment.
@Frederick:
You’re right about male and female distributions having different standard deviations as well as means. It appears that distributions for many female traits have less variance than those for males. So we see more male geniuses, more male retards, far more violent male criminals.
The high school / College Male/Female Maths & Physics break is something I observed in my youth.
At the time my understanding was somewhat naive, but I *did* make the observation that up until ca. Age 15, academic results were as much a function of neatness and conscientiously showing up and doing the work by rote as anything else. In other words, all those not clinically retarded or dyslexic had not yet encountered any of the many Bridges of Asses we all eventually stumble upon in our lives. Even at that age I realized that girls were far more neat and tidy and conscientious than we boys. Didn’t take much realizing really – we had it rammed down our throats all the time by irate teachers and parents.
But hitting the later years of High School, it got a bit different. Calculus knocked off a few of the less smart, but that wasn’t the Filter. I’m pretty sure it was spatial reasoning — an area where Males have been proven to out-perform Females. Loci in the Complex Plane, playing fast and loose with Basis Vectors. You can memorize a lot of it and decorate it with different colored highlighters and post-it notes, but eventually you do have to grok what’s going on in n-space or some exam questions are just going to stump you. It stopped them in their tracks. Not all of course, but the disparity was obvious.
High School Chemistry and Biology apart from some smells, explosions and investigating the innards of small critters, is largely rote bookworm and in case of Biology ingesting and regurgitating a lot of Political Correctness and quoting Sources of Authority. I think we know which sex gets off on this more than the other 😀
Today, the outer higher reaches of Biology seem to be largely computational. Be interested to know the gender distribution at the cutting edge. If I had to guess, I’d say the males wrote the foundational software tools and then the women moved in and out-socialized them… but I’m just Mister Dunning Kruger 😛
Note to Art Deco: The outfit I have the good fortune to work for hired a bunch of Harvard School of Public Health post-docs some years back. Started with one and then hovered up a few more via that first contact. What we do (far from anything health sciences related) is intensely right tail stuff in the machine learning domain. These guys were hired because this skill set was necessary to get them up into the Academic Bio Stratosphere. As for why did such smart *guys* quit and come to money grub with us? Politics. It’s all politics at the top. Same as everywhere else but more so.
I do think that when researching gender or race difference traits across any dimension it’s important to look at the absolute cutting edge where money is either made or lost in true marketplaces where you can bankrupt yourself as easily as enrich yourself. It’s only there that the politics stops and the reality kicks in. Every other department in an organization can afford to be PC as long as (e.g.) the quant algos work. So I look at who works there when I’m trying to cut through the fog and crap.
In my high school days, for some reason the administration decided to switch the chemistry teacher’s and physics teacher’s classes. The physics guy did a crappy job at chemistry and I got little from the class. The chemistry guy also did a crappy job with physics. However, physics was something I could grasp and understand on my own. I wish I had continued with it in college. I coulda been a contender.
Susanamantha – all those sciences look alike….
@Susanamantha: In their defense, chemistry’s theories derive purely from physics. It’s not easy to draw the line between the two, which is why there are journals for chemical physics and journals for physical chemistry.