— health care
— gun violence
— climate change
— ocean pollution
— noise pollution
— light pollution
— every fucking kind of pollution
— protecting the Mueller investigation
— Sarah Huckabee Sanders
— equal pay for the US Women’s Soccer team
— urban e-scooters
— single cup coffee makers
— the men’s rights movement
— angry white men
— men
— televisions as big as autopsy tables
— the novels of Dan Brown
— Ann Coulter
— de-clutter fascists
— individually-wrapped ‘cheese’ tiles
— slasher movies
— WalMart
— the Buffy the Vampire Slayer reboot
— everybody wearing ear-buds or headphones everywhere
— all those damned Kardashians
— sex robots
— Peeps-flavored coffee creamer
— drones
— kids living with their parents after age 25, or 21, or maybe 19
— designers who make women’s clothing without pockets
— everybody associated in any way with the Trump administration
— Trump
“I just want to stand on top of the Wall and piss off the edge of the world!” Tyrion Lannister
Comrade Donald Trump would be wise to hire the smallest Lannister, who at least understands the most important function of a wall.
gregfallis.com 
Why are you opposed to a wall?
You know damn well the wall will work to keep drugs, illegals, and gang members at bay.
The border patrol has said it for years.
Just admit that the ONLY reason you are opposed to the wall is because you have TDS and nothing else.
Walls work everywhere they are tried.
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Drugs come through borders in shipping containers. trucks, vehicles…not on the backs of people seeking asylum. Most “illegals” are here because they came with visas and stayed when they expired. South American gang members have more control and bigger profit margins where they are.
“The concept of a “wall” may sound good in political rallies. It purports to identify a source for the country’s ills; it plays on fear-driven nativist sentiments; and it recommends action to solve the problem, however imprecisely the problem is understood. But if you’re looking for effective policy, stay away from building more walls. For centuries, walls have not worked, and ultimately, they always come down.” – https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/08/donald-trump-2016-wall-wont-work-214167
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The thing is, Billy, that there’s already a wall or fencing in places where a wall or fencing might be effective. There’s over 650 miles of existing wall/barrier/fencing. That’s about a third of the border. The other two-thirds of the border is terrain that is hostile to wall construction: flood plains with rolling hills, most of which is owned by private citizens or tribal nations. Almost none of whom want to give up their land to build a wall.
But even if they did, a wall isn’t effective. A wall won’t keep out drugs; very few drugs are carried across the border by individuals because that’s a terribly ineffective way for drug cartels to get their product to the American market. Most drugs come in through regular points of entry: mostly airports and shipping ports. Other common drug practices include flying them in in small aircraft and small boats, which land at unmarked locations. A wall won’t stop that.
Nor would a wall solve the problem of illegal immigration. The vast majority of illegal immigrants are NOT people who are sneaking across the border. They’re people who are already in the US and overstay their visas. A wall won’t stop that.
The truth is, walls haven’t really worked since the Renaissance.
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“Border official shows Trump tunnels under border wall”
https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2019/01/11/border-official-trump-tunnels-under-wall-acosta-pkg-vpx.cnn?fbclid=IwAR2ZPFkeXHZ-PyQ5iWSzzxXcrY7_Olrzi2FgVtMnc3Hv77vwtbkEIIXOTvE
“Test of steel prototype for border wall showed it could be sawed through”
A photo shows that the steel columns were breached with a common industrial tool.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/test-steel-prototype-border-wall-showed-it-could-be-sawed-n956856?fbclid=IwAR1b_Wy0IkMhe45LG7_xd-96_O5UDJwTT8KqjfgH5KSy07IdnmVQ0ekmEb8
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Someone posted the following:
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.
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.
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Each wall only presents a new challenge for those on either side to find a way to get around it, under it, over it or through it. We are supposed to be a free country, a wall not only keeps people out but keeps us within. What kind of LOVE is that, Mr. Walleye??
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“Comrade Donald Trump would be wise to hire the smallest Lannister, who at least understands the most important function of a wall.”
That would be to take a piss off the top of it, no?
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Precisely.
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Love the Gervais-esque timing (er, um, placement?) of “designers who make women’s clothing without pockets”. Ha!
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There is absolutely NO reason women shouldn’t have functional pockets. The fact that they don’t — AND NOBODY KNOWS WHY — is clearly a national emergency. We need to get to the bottom of this.
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Add controlling disease? An immigrant or refugee that comes here illegally is never screened by the CDC.
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That’s true. Of course, foreign visitors arriving legally in the US don’t have to be screened for diseases either — and there are a LOT more foreigners arriving in the US every hour of every day than folks sneaking across the border.
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But they are here with their gov’t permission. So, there’s a control in place by sending country.
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Permission doesn’t equal control. A passport and a tourist visa doesn’t equal a certificate of health. Sick people legally visit the US all the time.
There are a LOT of valid reasons for nations to control immigration and secure their borders, but the argument that people illegally crossing the border pose a national health risk is really low on the list of problems. At the same time, we compound that small risk when we pass legislation requiring proof of citizenship in order to receive medical treatment. I don’t want folks to enter the US illegally, but if they do I want us to do everything possible to insure they’re not sick.
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