How dare any one question my belief the wall will work! You have to have FAITH!! It is insulting to my gender fluid non aggressive nature that your opinion offends me!! So there fore you just not present fact or reason you have to belive it will work and it Will!!
"I was going for heavy sarcasm yet am beginning to sound less and less sarcastic"
I don't think reason or facts are going to resolve the issue personally. It's a case will the house fold and give trump what he wants?
I doubt it. Public opinion is more on the side of the Democrats on this one. Plus various experts are weighing in making valid points that it will do nothing substantive. It's a multi-billion dollar project that achieves none of the stated goals and has lots and lots of drawbacks. It would be political malpractice to give Trump any more money for the stupid wall.
The Army Corps of Engineers will be used to build most of the wall. I’ll take their expertise on building a wall over a totally random twitter account. Also, nobody knows what is needed better than the people on the ground...
First off there are stories that Trump has talked to the Corps of Engineers about building the wall. It appears the Corps of Engineers is involved in vetting some of the contractors and has flagged a number of them. Dodgy people attracted to a Trump project? What else is new?
That Twitter account is just reporting what Amy Patrick said on Facebook:
Amy Patrick
If she isn't a real person, someone went to a significant amount of effort to create a fake person and it looks like she has a fairly well established history on the internet, though it appears her Facebook page is new. Her Linkedin page is pretty extensive.
I'm not a structural or civil engineer, but I am an engineer. Reading her post makes sound engineering sense to my eye. If it's a fake, it's a fake by someone who knows engineering principles and makes good points. I'm inclined to believe the post is legitimate. Occam's Razor.
Here is an article from last September bringing up many engineering challenges for the wall project:
Writing on the Wall: Report Suggests Border Project Is Off-Track and Over Budget
Another way to smuggle which is getting more sophisticated, but has not been mentioned in the political debate are submarines:
Narco-submarine - Wikipedia
We old white people have lost the battle; we just do not know it yet.
BTW, I'm old, white and have never consider democracy a battle.
A lot depends on your point of view of the fact that whites will not be the majority in the US within a few decades. I'm white, but grew up a fairly small minority in the suburbs of Los Angeles. Before college I never attended a school that was more than 15% white. In my experience, nothing all that bad happened when whites were a minority. I was picked on at school, but that was mostly because I was a geeky kid who was poor at sports, not because I was white. One of the most popular kids in my class at two schools was white (he and I transferred schools the same year). For some reason kids always followed him even though he had the personality of a plant.
Many humans have at least some degree of xenophobia and fear people who are different. The US has gone through phases of rejecting Irish, Asians, Jews, Eastern Europeans, Southern Europeans, etc. mostly because they were different, but once their communities got used to them, they melted into the pot with the rest of the country.
In parts of the country where Hispanics have been common for generations, there is significantly less friction about Hispanic, non-whites coming to the US because Hispanics are a known factor. I lived on the border of East LA which was the largest concentration of Mexicans outside Mexico City when I was a kid. I knew lots of Hispanics and had Hispanic friends. Everyone was cautious of the Hispanic gang members, but there were little problems because of someone's ethnicity.
Living in that environment we learned who was dangerous and who wasn't and our queues were different from people in other parts of the country with little experience with non-white people. Hispanics dressed like everyone else = probably safe. Anyone dressed like gang members = dangerous.
As the US becomes more non-white, places that never saw some ethnic groups are seeing non-white ethnic groups moving in. In the Deep South there were only two ethnicities for hundreds of years: whites and African Americans. In living memory there was an apartheid system to keep the two groups separated which created further mind barriers that never existed in other parts of the country. Now Hispanics are beginning to move into the South and the whites don't know what to do. It's breaking the cultural apartheid that continued after Jim Crow laws officially went away.
Years ago I worked with a woman who had grown up in rural North Dakota. She said she never saw a black person until she went to college and only saw a few non-whites growing up. Politically she was very liberal and volunteered her spare time helping the underprivileged in Seattle, so she had gravitated to a culture more in line with her attitudes, but she had a very isolated upbringing. She said a lot of people in her home town were very xenophobic.
As communication has improved and people have learned about other parts of the country, people have become more mobile and self selected for places that fit their personality better. Whites who are the most xenophobic have gravitated to some of the more white dominated parts of the country, where their biases are reinforced by their new neighbors. Whites who are more open minded have gravitated towards more culturally diverse or culturally accepting places when their neighbors reinforce their attitudes.
As the US gets less white, the white enclaves feel they are getting squeezed and because they have a group think community to a large degree, they react thinking they are a majority. They can't understand why some white people don't vote Republican. But whites who aren't xenophobic or have learned non-white people are no more dangerous than anyone else don't see the world that way and are likely to vote for other reasons. Some white have been voting Republican for non-racial reasons like they believe Republicans are better for their financial future, but a lot of those Republicans are leaving the fold (as they did in the last election) because the xenophobia has gone too far and they had largely ignored it before Trump.
Rick Wilson who was once at the heart of the Republican party has realized in the last two years that the Republican party has a far more serious racist problem than he ever thought. He was aware there were some, but he really didn't grok how big that faction was until Trump gave them permission to speak out. There are a fair number of people who have been voting Republican for years like Rick Wilson who have come to some revelations about their party in the last couple of years. Some are still voting Republican because they are still in denial about how bad the problem is, but the number of defectors is growing.
