DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Palus Politicus The Wall. An Honest Discussion.

This all started when I was commenting that just because GOP controlled the house didn't mean they all agreed with his wall proposal, so it was never as simple as "We control it, it's gunna pass"

You and mgh are the ones that are bringing the shutdown into the discussion, that I never commented on or mentioned.

I don't think the government should EVER be shut down, and I have posted my thoughts on how to solve that issue. If you can't come to a budget resolution, roll back in the previous years budget and try again next year.

The fact that it ever gets that far shows me that they don't give 2 morning dumps about us the citizens.

I didn't disagree with much of anything you had said, just that the idea that just because they controlled it, that they should have been able to get it done.

When in truth, I'd rather have government representatives that do not vote party line, but rather vote on what is best for the country as a whole, especially if they disagree with the proposal. it's also why I think the whole idea of riders and things being total bullcrap when you are proposing a operational budget.

I didn't say that. What I said is he waited two years to take it to this level. He knew he couldn't pass it with Republicans. You knew that and I knew that. The issue is that he didn't want to make that fight with his fellow Republicans.

He chose to wait until the Dems controlled congress so he could make the Dems out to be the boogeyman and put the blame on.

I’ve asked this many times before and never gotten an answer-

If conservatives were so serious about border security being an imminent threat and a pressing need, then why on earth would you throw your lot behind the sundowning game show host whose proposal was “we’ll build a wall around the border and get Mexico to pay for it” - quite literally the most unserious option on the table?

Like, if I were worried my roof might collapse, the last person I would hire is the guy in clown paint and no pants shouting from the turnpike off-ramp that he could fix my roof better than anyone, for free.

j/c...

Border Security Utilizing a Distributed Fiber Optic Intrusion Sensor

Distributed Fiber Optic Sensing for Homeland Security

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/us/politics/will-hurd-border-wall-trump.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/us/politics/will-hurd-border-wall-trump.html

This is an interesting article.

good article, thanks for posting.


“My boss is not the president,” Mr. Hurd said. “My boss is not the speaker. My boss is not the minority leader. My bosses are those 800,000 people that I represented and sent me up here.”

Aides say he often requests analysis of his personal outreach, including social media data and telephone town halls, that quantify who is following his work and their responses — metrics that inform his support of legislation on Capitol Hill, regardless of the party line or pressure from the presidential Twitter feed.

“You can’t take a vocal minority as an indication of the epicenter of where people feel,” Mr. Hurd said. The mix of Republicans and Democrats in his district, he said, “believe that we should be able to secure our borders, and they think that’s a mix of tools that is necessary to do that.”


That's the kind of folks we need representing us.

It was actually one of the links Milkman posted just above me - 1 of 3. I only highlighted it because I thought it was very good.

Good stuff!

First of all, Obama built a well-oiled deportation machine the likes of which hadn’t been seen in modern American history. I wasn’t a fan of it, but he gave you what you all wanted, only you didn’t notice, because he was the boogeyman. You all decided to give that up when you threw your lot behind a sundowning game show host whose plan was “we’ll build a wall and make Mexico pay for it”, and was literally dumb enough to release a statement calling for a “Muslim ban” (which ironically was actually in effect under Obama until Trump said “Muslim ban”, thus throwing it in legal peril).

Also, it’s kind of hard to demand negotiation when one side is a senile manchild who once proposed that the wall should be seethrough, otherwise drug dealers would throw sacks of drugs over the wall and injure or kill people walking by it.

You don’t negotiate with petulant children, you either tell them to be quiet or you distract them.

You guys threw your weight behind a clown. You can’t get mad when no one takes the clown seriously.

If he is as dumb as you say, why can't the Democratics just outsmart him and get what they want, and make him think he is winning? Seems that should be a simple enough task.

Because dumb people can still be stubborn and punish people who have zero to do with the conflict.

Oh, I agree with you wholeheartedly.

Trump essentially has the mind of a child, and really the only thing he wants is to be praised by people on TV. He doesn’t have any ideology besides that. If I were the Dems, I would 100% pitch a Medicare for All bill and call it “TrumpCare”. Go on TV and talk about how wise and benevolent Trump would be if he backed TrumpCare.

He’d do it in a heartbeat.

They just did that! You wanna see it again, wait until 2/15/19

My co-worker has a sign in his office, it reads:

"Arguing with idiots is like playing chess with a pigeon..
no matter how good you are, the bird is going to
sh*t on the board and strut around like it won anyway."

While this could be said of many politicians of all stripes, it certainly applies to the President.... and I have come to view most political debate through this lens, which is why I have avoided most political "debate"...

Its simply another waste of money being argued about, along party lines, keeping all the party people fighting over whose right or wrong with regard to its construction, who pays, whose idea it really is......you name it....

And the prize for the people and their respective party is the self-righteous proclamation that we were right, first, got it done,etc. etc....

Meanwhile, its a lost cause..a waste of time and money....and I sit at work listening to ppl debating cost, whose trying to get it done right, and whose sabotaging the best laid plans...

And I just think to myself how foolish all these ppl are....heads so deep in the sand.....there is nothing to be said or done to bring them out of their own personal OZ...…

My younger sibling has left the rat race to simply live in a tent and walk around the country...totally discouraged with the status quo......I'm nearly right there with him.....

President Trump says Republicans 'wasting their time' on border security talks
USA TODAY

https://news.yahoo.com/president-trump-says-republicans-apos-134931721.html

this is HIS wall. why isn't he taking the lead on his biggest campaign promise? why isn't he meeting with the dems left and right?

and since he wont do that himself, why is he running interference on his own party who is trying to negotiate?

is this what he did in the art of the deal? cause ive never known this strategy to work. ever.

Because the Dems won't discuss the wall. It is not part of these so called negotiations.

They refuse to negotiate in good faith.

They simply say no wall.

So, moving along now, build that wall another way.

no leadership from trump. pathetic.

i miss a real leader like obama.

They have shock treatments that may help you.

Swish, don't worry bro, Nancy already told him NO. He's just beginning his next tantrum.

So you’ll be cool when a liberal president shuts down the gov’t or declares a national crises to get, federal gun control legislation, federal funding to slow global warming or to get medicare for all, right? Considering the items I listed above have more of a crisis tag attached to them then a useless wall.

Careful what you wish 4t

I certainly hope he does. I hope he uses a national emergency to fund it. That will open the door for Democrats to do the exact same thing when they hold the presidency. They can too take such measures to correct things that actually impact the life and death of Americans. Like healthcare and the environment.

The we'll see those in the GOP brains exploding.

well... their heads will explode...

j/c

As I mentioned in a recent PP post, I don't think there is a single serious-minded American who thinks that open borders and zero security is a good idea. The debate has always been the efficacy and sensibility of a 2000 mile-long wall/barricade/physical structure.

Here is something that is well worth consideration.

Fiber Optic Border Security


A simple technology could secure the border for a fraction of the cost of a wall — but no one's talking about it
Michelle Mark

*Amid the ongoing debate over whether to fund President Donald Trump's border wall to the tune of $5.7 billion, experts and industry leaders say there's a far more effective technology — at a fraction of the price.

*Fiber-optic cables have been previously tested at the US-Mexico border, and can detect a range of intrusions — from animals, to people, to vehicles — and determine their exact location.

*One Texas lawmaker, Rep. Will Hurd, has been arguing for years that stretching a fiber optic cable "from sea to shining sea" would do far more to secure the border than physical barriers.

*Even though the technology has been around for years, and is ready to be deployed, the US government has been slow to adopt it.


Roughly 10 years ago, a bizarre parade of animals, people, and vehicles lined up in the middle of the Sonoran Desert to trot, walk, and drive over a 100-foot cable stretched out across the dirt by a team of scientists.

By the University of Arizona researchers' accounts, the experiment was a resounding success, heralding a new frontier in border-security technology.

A fiber-optic cable installed in the loose, sandy soil could tell precisely what was moving above it — be it a 200-pound man, a group of people concealed in a cloud of dust from a passing car, a wandering dog, or a pair of cantering horses.

"At the time, there was a lot of interest from the federal government," Moe Momayez, an associate professor of mining and geological engineering, told INSIDER. "But like anything else, it just dies off."

These days, nearly a full decade after Momayez's experiment, the federal government remains fixated on building a border wall that critics have derided as a "medieval" solution to border security.

Barely one week after a record 35-day government shutdown over the wall's funding, President Donald Trump now appears likely to declare a national emergency to secure his requested $5.7 billion to build the wall.

[size:11pt]Fiber-optic cables could secure the border instead[/size]
Amid the cacophony, one lawmaker has tried fruitlessly to divert attention away from the wall, and toward fiber-optic technology that could pinpoint with precision where border intrusions occur, determine what exactly is coming across, and relay the information to Border Patrol agents in realtime.

"I would love to lay a fiber-optic cable from sea to shining sea," Rep. Will Hurd, A Texas Republican who represents more of the US-Mexico border than anyone in Congress, told The New York Times' "The Daily" podcast in January.

"You need something that can detect a threat and track that threat until you're able to deploy your most important resource — the men and women of Border Patrol — to do that interdiction," he added.

Contrary to popular belief, satellites carry less than 1% of human communications. Fiber-optic cables, stretching across the sea floor, buried under cities, and connected to people's homes, carry the rest. While they're mostly used to transmit telecommunications, they can also detect motion.

Lawmakers like Hurd have been trying for years to push for this enhanced technology at the border rather than physical barriers, but they've had limited success.

Hurd even teamed up with a bipartisan group of lawmakers in July 2017 to introduce the Secure Miles with All Resources and Technology (SMART) Act, which would have tasked the Department of Homeland Security with deploying high-tech systems like radar, LIDAR, fiber optics, drones, and cameras along the border.

The bill stalled in committee and never moved forward.

Hurd's office and the White House did not respond to INSIDER's requests for comment.

Using light and sound to detect border activity

Experts and industry leaders told INSIDER that fiber-optic technology is already advanced enough to work across most of the US-Mexico border, nearly 10 times less expensive than a wall, and is ready to be deployed immediately.

All it needs is the government to ask for it.

The long delays in implementing the technology have frustrated industry leaders, who say they've been waiting for years to bid on government contracts.

The technology itself is simple enough, Momayez said. All his experiment in the Sonoran Desert required was a simple fiber like the ones that have become commonplace for providing internet in American homes.

"That's the beauty of the technology that we tested. You don't need to put any sensors on the fiber, the fiber itself can be turned into a sensor," he said. "Because we can detect movement, we can detect events anywhere along the length of the cable."

Companies like the Montana-based Adelos have been developing their own versions of the technology, and say the same fiber that could secure the border can also be used for telecommunications — and even provide broadband internet access to communities that live nearby.

"What we're doing is we're taking sound that is caused by things in the sky, on the ground, or subsurface — we're converting those sound waves, that pressure, and we're measuring how it impacts light in the cable itself, the fiber optic glass, and then we can convert that into acoustic information," Adelos founder and chief technology officer Alex Philp told INSIDER. "You can hear all this stuff happening."

But the budding industry recognizes that the technology on its own won't entirely do away with activity like illegal border-crossing and drug smuggling. At the very least, the technology would need to be combined with Border Patrol agents on the ground who are ready to respond to intrusions.

"Our approach has always been that when fiber-optic sensing is used, it's usually one of many other solutions," Mark Uncapher, the director of the Fiber Optic Sensing Association, told INSIDER. "It would do no good to know that an intrusion is going on if you don't have the capacity to do a timely response.

"So this is a tool that's used in conjunction with other tools," he continued. "But clearly being able to know that in realtime [that] something unexpected is happening within five meters of a particular location is very helpful to be able to have some kind of response."

'We're way cheaper than the crap they're talking about'

The federal government isn't ignorant of the technology, but it has been painfully slow to adopt it, Philp said.


Only in recent years has the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency begun testing and evaluating fiber optic sensory equipment — known as a linear ground detection system — in the Arizona desert.

The government even set aside $16 million out of the budget for fiscal year 2018 explicitly to test the system.

"We have a tactical advantage of being able to classify a report, a sensor hit, whatever indication we have of possible illegal activity along the border," Stephen Spencer, an assistant chief patrol agent in Tucson, told the agency in a press release posted Thursday.

He continued: "It might take 45 minutes to an hour and a half to get to point of that indication. The benefits [of the new technologies] are a rapid response to make the judgment call whether that is something we need to assign assets to look at. If I spend an hour and a half walking to discover a goat tripped a device, I've just wasted three hours of my patrol time."

In October 2017, the federal government released a public request for information, soliciting information from companies about linear ground detection systems like fiber optics, that can "detect all entering threats without being affected by blind spots created by man-made and natural occurring obstacles."

The Customs and Border Protection agency and Border Patrol didn't immediately respond to questions from INSIDER about the technology.

But businesses like Adelos have been waiting on tenterhooks for the government to release what's called a "request for proposal" (RFP) detailing exactly what specifications the government needs. When and if that drops, companies like Adelos can submit their proposals on what the technology will do, and how it'll be implemented.

Philp said there's likely a lot of reasons why systems like his aren't already in place along the US-Mexico border, and why the government is still hung up on a wall — chief among them being that the government is known for being slow-moving, especially when it comes to technology.

"Sometimes it takes technology awhile to get into the public consciousness. Remember when it was weird to talk about fiber to the home? Well it's weird to talk about fiber as a sensor," Philp said. "I would argue that we are now at a tipping point in terms of understanding and adoption. The fact is that I can put basically 32 kilometers of this stuff in the ground, I can light it up with our laser, and I have literally thousands of microphones listening to everything."

He added: "We're way cheaper than the crap they're talking about in terms of physical barriers."

_____________________________


Now see- if Trump wanted to adopt this solution and call it a wall (or part of a "multi-faceted wall of detection/protection") I'd be on-board. Enthusiastically. I just think sending conventional construction crews into the middle of the Sonoran desert to build a 30-50 ft wall is a ridiculous way to invest in national security. It's 2019, not 1219.

This entire wall conversation sickens me.

The south rears it’s ugly head again. You’re an anchor to progression. Republicans sicken me, Im talking biodiversity, the species that can’t speak for themself..

You’re a little too country to realize what that means, antiquated. If biodiversity loss is on the table, we should have crucified you fools in the civil war.

You are a detriment to planet earth.

Preemptive shot to every Ohian that voted for trump,

When he does go down, I’ll be coming back at you 10 fold.

Inexcusable, I will be taking names.

Top Democrat: No Trump border wall, but 'some sort of enhanced barrier' may be acceptable

Texas Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar insisted...

"First of all, we are not going to have a wall,"
"Now, we can look at some sort of enhanced, uh, barrier."



Get ready folks, Trumps wall is on its way! uh, barrier.

You obviously don't read much do you? You and Trump certainly have that much in common. Try googling cyber wall. Whether you agree with it or not is up to you. But you really should quit playing ignorant. I mean, if you're playing that is.

A Cyber WHAT???

Go ahead, you can say it.

dead @ the shift

That's hilarious that you think it means the same as a physical wall.

uh, barrier.

You know, we were actually beginning to have some actual discussions and debate on here. Then you came back.

But it is nice to see you admit you were wrong about the Dems not caring about border security. You and Trump were both wrong.

i liked how you brought up a cyber wall. thats next level topics that we haven't cracked at all on this board.

I would absolutely support this Clem. I think America needs all the fiber optics it can get... spend 30 billion on that please.

j\c

What honest discussion...the left is blaming all the bad things that has happened to the illegals on TRUMP and will never agree with any conservative idea and have no problem with the scumbag PELOSI and her lemmings in congress enticing millions of the poor people to make such a dangerous trek thru mexico led by coyoties drug dealers rapist all for the liberal agenda.

IMO

Hey, 40
Above you is a post I made last night. Interesting article. It's a little long, but I found it fascinating.

It was published in Business Insider, not exactly a bastion of liberal bias or fake news.

Check it out. Turns out we already have a great, cheap tool at our disposal. All we need is the political will to git'er done.

It's funny that you can't see that the exact same thing is true for both sides. All you have to do is flip the names around.

Paco isn't supplying the drug trade with his back pack and over half of illegals here are people who came here and have overstayed their visas. Quit buying the rhetoric.

um... look up.

Is my post invisible to all but ODC and GM?