Easy solution to the Trump wall problem

Since his followers believe everything he says, why doesn't Trump just assert that the wall has been built (thanks, Mexicans!) and then open the government. He could even show a picture of the Game of Thrones wall and claim it's his. Problem solved.


That looks too cold for Mexico.

Just show them a picture of the Grand Canyon. Job done.


Trump can pose in close up next to one of his stupid wall prototypes.



In a few years it will be to keep Americans from getting universal health care in Mexico; paid for by Big Pharma. 


In more than one of his incoherent comments, he has asserted that it's being built and that it is built.

I believe the folks who are saying that he should just declare emergency, fake success, open gov, and then let the whole matter fade away as he sees another shiny object or someone swipes docs from his desk. This is what we've come to. We're humoring a demented old man who has the car keys for two more years unless we get lucky and he's forced to resign in disgrace (if he's capable of feeling disgraced).


Amy PatrickJanuary 8 at 10:52 PM

Howdy.

To recap: I’m a licensed structural and civil engineer with a MS in structural engineering from the top program in the nation and over a decade of experience on high-performance projects, and particularly of cleaning up design disasters where the factors weren’t properly accounted for, and I’m an adjunct professor of structural analysis and design at UH-Downtown. I have previously been deposed as an expert witness in matters regarding proper construction of walls and the various factors associated therein, and my testimony has passed Daubert.

Am I a wall expert? I am. I am literally a court-accepted expert on walls.

Structurally and civil engineering-wise, the border wall is not a feasible project. Trump did not hire engineers to design the thing. He solicited bids from contractors, not engineers. This means it’s not been designed by professionals. It’s a disaster of numerous types waiting to happen.

What disasters?

Off the top of my head... 1) It will mess with our ability to drain land in flash flooding. Anything impeding the ability of water to get where it needs to go (doesn’t matter if there are holes in the wall or whatever) is going to dramatically increase the risk of flooding. 2) Messes with all kind of stuff ecologically. For all other projects, we have to do an Environmental Site Assessment, which is arduous. They’re either planning to circumvent all this, or they haven’t accounted for it yet, because that’s part of the design process, and this thing hasn’t been designed. 3) The prototypes they came up with are nearly impossible to build or don’t actually do the job. This article explains more:

https://www.google.com/…/mobile.engineering.…/amp/17599.html

And so on.

The estimates provided for the cost are arrived at unreasonably. You can look for yourself at the two-year-old estimate that you see everyone citing.

1ff-B9R7bKOzViCtcveurowmZO1VxYlgGIyXtaPao8BaHppGaL7a7CUGAt5imIZoJ_VN_2SsrzSZX1P6X8WA">http://fronterasdesk.org/…/Bernstein-%20The%20Trump%20Wall.…

It does not account for rework, complexities beyond the prototype design, factors to prevent flood and environmental hazard creation, engineering redesign... It’s going to be higher than $50bn. The contractors will hit the government with near CONSTANT change orders. “Cost overrun” will be the name of the game. It will not be completed in Trump’s lifetime.

I’m a structural forensicist, which means I’m called in when things go wrong. This is a project that WILL go wrong. When projects go wrong, the original estimates are just *obliterated*. And when that happens, good luck getting it fixed, because there aren’t that many forensicists out there to right the ship, particularly not that are willing to work on a border wall project— a large quotient of us are immigrants, and besides, we can’t afford to bid on jobs that are this political. We’re small firms, and we’re already busy, and we don’t gamble our reputations on political footballs. So you’d end up with a revolving door of contractors making a giant, uncoordinated muddle of things, and it’d generally be a mess. Good money after bad. The GAO agrees with me.

And it won’t be effective. I could, right now, purchase a 32 foot extension ladder and weld a cheap custom saddle for the top of the proposed wall so that I can get over it. I don’t know who they talked to about the wall design and its efficacy, but it sure as heck wasn’t anybody with any engineering imagination.

Another thing: we are not far from the day where inexpensive drones will be able to pick up and carry someone. This will happen in the next ten years, and it’s folly to think that the coyotes who ferry people over the border won’t purchase or create them. They’re low enough, quiet enough, and small enough to quickly zip people over any wall we could build undetected with our current monitoring setup.

Let’s have border security, by all means, but let’s be smart about it. This is not smart. It’s not effective. It’s NOT cheap. The returns will be diminishing as technology advances, too. This is a ridiculous idea that will never be successfully executed and, as such, would be a monumental waste of money.


Trump wants a physical wall because he said he would build a physical wall.  While initially the wall may have been a metaphor for protecting white Americans from scary, brown Spanish-speaking peoples, in Trump's mind it is a physical thing that he promised to build.



"I still say we should just build a wall around Perdue Pharma. Cheap! Effective!"

https://twitter.com/emptywheel/status/1083568183917850624


the one thing that's bugging me about the discussion of Trump's wall is that neither the pundits nor the Democratic leadership are speaking the blunt truth -- that the wall is a deeply, deeply, deeply stupid idea.  It's like the Emperor's New Wall.  Nobody will come right out and state the obvious.


ml1 said:
the one thing that's bugging me about the discussion of Trump's wall is that neither the pundits nor the Democratic leadership are speaking the blunt truth -- that the wall is a deeply, deeply, deeply stupid idea.  It's like the Emperor's New Wall.  Nobody will come right out and state the obvious.

 I think many people know that even if it's not articulated as such.


In political battles, as in religious arguments, cognitive dissonance rules the day.  Some people try to claim that there is NOT a problem with our border and others claim the wall will solve all the problems.  Of course, the best solution is in between with money being spent on border security, civilized detention centers and addressing factors that make families desperate to leave their homes in Central America.  And we need to actually set a immigration policy - something that hasn't been taken up by Congress in a serious way for far too long.


He is the Master of Distraction.  So if this to divert attention from his many upcoming investigations or does he want something to brag about at the State of the Union?

One for sure - it 100% optics for his upcoming re-election commercials.  It's all about selling himself and his base would love to see us keeping out Mexicans in any way possible.  So sad.

Another things that is never mentioned is - where is the crackdown on hiring illegal immigrants?  Trump even had a few, and he needs visas for help at Mar-A-Lago - can he at least commit to ending this practice himself?  I'm sure there's a lot of republican farmers that rely on them to some degree.


ml1 said:
the one thing that's bugging me about the discussion of Trump's wall is that neither the pundits nor the Democratic leadership are speaking the blunt truth -- that the wall is a deeply, deeply, deeply stupid idea.  It's like the Emperor's New Wall.  Nobody will come right out and state the obvious.

Heard a caller on NPR this morning who began talking about his deceased brother having been killed by an undocumented man. Couldn't get through the call before he began sobbing and saying we need the wall. How does one address this guy's grief while explaining the inanity of a wall and the low crime rates among immigrants? It's a tough one to explain while still respecting his grief.


GL2 said:

ml1 said:
the one thing that's bugging me about the discussion of Trump's wall is that neither the pundits nor the Democratic leadership are speaking the blunt truth -- that the wall is a deeply, deeply, deeply stupid idea.  It's like the Emperor's New Wall.  Nobody will come right out and state the obvious.
Heard a caller on NPR this morning who began talking about his deceased brother having been killed by an undocumented man. Couldn't get through the call before he began sobbing and saying we need the wall. How does one address this guy's grief while explaining the inanity of a wall and the low crime rates among immigrants? It's a tough one to explain while still respecting his grief.

Always a problem - so many momentous decisions and policies are strongly influenced by tragic events that are also statistical outliers.  


The_Soulful_Mr_T said:


ml1 said:
the one thing that's bugging me about the discussion of Trump's wall is that neither the pundits nor the Democratic leadership are speaking the blunt truth -- that the wall is a deeply, deeply, deeply stupid idea.  It's like the Emperor's New Wall.  Nobody will come right out and state the obvious.
 I think many people know that even if it's not articulated as such.

I don't agree.  A lot of people think it's just a policy disagreement.  I don't think many supporters of the wall have been told what an absurdly stupid idea it is.


GL2 said:

ml1 said:
the one thing that's bugging me about the discussion of Trump's wall is that neither the pundits nor the Democratic leadership are speaking the blunt truth -- that the wall is a deeply, deeply, deeply stupid idea.  It's like the Emperor's New Wall.  Nobody will come right out and state the obvious.
Heard a caller on NPR this morning who began talking about his deceased brother having been killed by an undocumented man. Couldn't get through the call before he began sobbing and saying we need the wall. How does one address this guy's grief while explaining the inanity of a wall and the low crime rates among immigrants? It's a tough one to explain while still respecting his grief.

I think a person's grief can be addressed appropriately.  And then it could be pointed out to this person that his brother's killer almost certainly didn't run across the desert or swim a river to come to the U.S.  He either arrived in a car through a valid checkpoint, or got off an airplane.  


ml1 said:


The_Soulful_Mr_T said:

ml1 said:
the one thing that's bugging me about the discussion of Trump's wall is that neither the pundits nor the Democratic leadership are speaking the blunt truth -- that the wall is a deeply, deeply, deeply stupid idea.  It's like the Emperor's New Wall.  Nobody will come right out and state the obvious.
 I think many people know that even if it's not articulated as such.
I don't agree.  A lot of people think it's just a policy disagreement.  I don't think many supporters of the wall have been told what an absurdly stupid idea it is.

 It's not that they haven't been told how absurdly stupid the wall is.  It's that they are as absurdly stupid as the wall is.   We all know it, some of us choose to believe they can be reached through considerate discussion and convinced otherwise.  The truth is that there will be no change until these people lose everything to Trump's policies or there is a generational change. 


It isn't a function of people being stupid.  It is cognitive dissonance.  How many otherwise intelligent people who happened to be communists continue to believe in the goodness of Stalin and the Soviet Union well into the 50's despite no end of evidence that Stalin was a mass murderer?


tjohn said:
It isn't a function of people being stupid.  It is cognitive dissonance.  How many otherwise intelligent people who happened to be communists continue to believe in the goodness of Stalin and the Soviet Union well into the 50's despite no end of evidence that Stalin was a mass murderer?

probably about 0.01% as many people as think the wall is a good idea.  


Rational adults when confronted with major change consider the issue through multiple sources and respond in their own best interest or that of their community.   This is not rocket science.  It does not take advanced education or lots of time.   Yet this simple practice is sorely lacking and we're all suffering for it.  Stupid and lazy.  That's it. 


Red_Barchetta said:
Rational adults when confronted with major change consider the issue through multiple sources and respond in their own best interest or that of their community.   This is not rocket science.  It does not take advanced education or lots of time.   Yet this simple practice is sorely lacking and we're all suffering for it.  Stupid and lazy.  That's it. 

Funny thing about cognitive dissonance is it leads us to conclude that people who don't see our truth are stupid.  It's a little more complicated than that.



Red_Barchetta said:
Rational adults when confronted with major change consider the issue through multiple sources and respond in their own best interest or that of their community.   This is not rocket science.  It does not take advanced education or lots of time.   Yet this simple practice is sorely lacking and we're all suffering for it.  Stupid and lazy.  That's it. 

a few of us were in a discussion on FB about Trump's wall speech.  One person actually said they don't want to be educated on immigration, and doesn't bother to research an issue before forming an opinion.  It's a pretty defiant expression of ignorance.


ml1 said:


Red_Barchetta said:
Rational adults when confronted with major change consider the issue through multiple sources and respond in their own best interest or that of their community.   This is not rocket science.  It does not take advanced education or lots of time.   Yet this simple practice is sorely lacking and we're all suffering for it.  Stupid and lazy.  That's it. 
a few of us were in a discussion on FB about Trump's wall speech.  One person actually said they don't want to be educated on immigration, and doesn't bother to research an issue before forming an opinion.  It's a pretty defiant expression of ignorance.

It's a good example of hunkering down or burying your head in the sand.  The hardest thing for a lot of people is to change when they are wrong.


tjohn said:


ml1 said:

Red_Barchetta said:
Rational adults when confronted with major change consider the issue through multiple sources and respond in their own best interest or that of their community.   This is not rocket science.  It does not take advanced education or lots of time.   Yet this simple practice is sorely lacking and we're all suffering for it.  Stupid and lazy.  That's it. 
a few of us were in a discussion on FB about Trump's wall speech.  One person actually said they don't want to be educated on immigration, and doesn't bother to research an issue before forming an opinion.  It's a pretty defiant expression of ignorance.
It's a good example of hunkering down or burying your head in the sand.  The hardest thing for a lot of people is to change when they are wrong.

sure.  I was more surprised that someone would openly admit to it.  My contention is that only in political/social issues discussions are people so proud of their ignorance.  I mean, how utterly absurd would it be if someone said "Here's my review of the latest movie. I didn't see it, and I don't plan to see it, and I don't need anyone to educate me about it.  But I have a strongly held opinion on it that I'm going to share with everyone.  And you should respect my opinion!"


ml1 said:


Red_Barchetta said:
Rational adults when confronted with major change consider the issue through multiple sources and respond in their own best interest or that of their community.   This is not rocket science.  It does not take advanced education or lots of time.   Yet this simple practice is sorely lacking and we're all suffering for it.  Stupid and lazy.  That's it. 
a few of us were in a discussion on FB about Trump's wall speech.  One person actually said they don't want to be educated on immigration, and doesn't bother to research an issue before forming an opinion.  It's a pretty defiant expression of ignorance.

Its okay to be wrong but keep your mind open. Don’t assume that something is correct because you believe it. Follow the facts. If the facts lead in a different direction then be willing to change your belief. To persist in not changing is a definition of stupidity. - McDevitt

He may as well put a sign on his back.


Let us assume that the 40% of the people who support the wall are stupid.  Let us further assume that 100% of these 40% won't change their minds in response to facts.  What to do?

I think Democrats need to resurrect a more comprehensive immigration bill containing:

1. DACA.

2. Immigration reform.

3. Humanitarian funding for migrants/potential migrants.

4. Border security (technology, agents, some fencing).

And let Trump reject the proposal.


One way to turn Trump around on the wall issue would be for Obama to come out in favor of the wall. That would work quickly.


tjohn said:

I think Democrats need to resurrect a more comprehensive immigration bill containing:
1. DACA.
2. Immigration reform.
3. Humanitarian funding for migrants/potential migrants.
4. Border security (technology, agents, some fencing).
And let Trump reject the proposal.

That quote’s from 11th Jan.  Someone on Trump’s side reading MOL? (Have I missed someone else asking?)


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