I was expecting Andy Borowitz or someone to be all over it, but the media is full of derisive howling at Dotard Donald and his petty White House invitation Gaffe. The really mythological part of his comments was when he started talking about solar power and the wall.

Many places report drily about this amazing statement: [cbs]

Question: You were joking about solar, right?
Trump: No, not joking, no. There is a chance that we can do a solar wall. We have major companies looking at that. Look, there’s no better place for solar than the Mexico border — the southern border. And there is a very good chance we can do a solar wall, which would actually look good. But there is a very good chance we could do a solar wall.

One of the things with the wall is you need transparency. You have to be able to see through it. In other words, if you can’t see through that wall — so it could be a steel wall with openings, but you have to have openings because you have to see what’s on the other side of the wall.

And I’ll give you an example. As horrible as it sounds, when they throw the large sacks of drugs over, and if you have people on the other side of the wall, you don’t see them — they hit you on the head with 60 pounds of stuff? It’s over. As crazy as that sounds, you need transparency through that wall. But we have some incredible designs.

It’s The Emperor’s New Wall. He’s going to point at an empty piece of desert and say, “look at my amazing transparent wall! Hey, ‘Fake News Guy’ can you get the camera so the light’s reflecting off of it?”

The emperor’s new wall is going to be 100 feet high – but it’ll be invisible – that way the drug guys who are flying drones over it will fly into it and their drones will crash because they can’t see it.

Now, what Trump is referring to as “incredible designs” are the responses from a call that went out from the royal seneschal to all the tailors in the land, requesting and requiring that they propose raiment for his highness. Some of the responses are creative, sort of a “F you!”, e.g.: Otra Nation’s “hyperloop non-wall” – which would basically be like a kind of F-35/DoD research project: “We’ll tell them we’re building a weapons system but actually we’re doing research on hyperloops.”

It’s still enough to make the oligarchy happy: they can zoom along in hyperloop comfort (which is stupid, because they already zoom around in perfectly good private jets!) and they don’t have to come into contact with hoi polloi.

Then there’s Gleason Partners’ “might as well make lemonade out of all these lemons!” wall design, which would be pretty good except that any “bad dude” worth his salt would put a couple bullets into some of the power-feed systems and watch the whole thing fry. Or maybe the “bad dudes” who are catapulting drugs over the wall (WTF is Dotard Donald talking about!?) would be too afraid to lob a few rocks at the damn thing just for fun.

What the idiot in the Oval Office doesn’t understand is that if he’s dead set on triggering a border war, he should be thinking of something that looks more like the De Lattre Line [wik] except the De Lattre line was only 250 miles (and didn’t slow the Vietcong down noticeably) and the Maginot Line, which was 280 miles (and didn’t slow the Germans down noticeably) – there’s a pattern here: fixed emplacements are pretty easy to defeat; they just cost money.

One of the other suggestions for Trump’s wall was classically-inspired:

The dirt glacis seems like a bad idea; it’s just inviting undermining. There was another wall built to that design, at incredible expense, which didn’t slow the Mongols down noticeably.

The story about how the Mongols allegedly breached the wall in China goes something like this:
Mongols ride up to the wall; it’s a small horde but they are very hard-looking warriors indeed.
Chinese Wall Defender: “Can we help you?”
Mongol Spokeshorde: “Yes, we’d like to come through.”
Chinese Wall Defender: “I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
Mongol Spokeshorde: “Listen, (shows Defender a big bag of gold) you can let us in and have this big bag of gold to divide up among the survivors, otherwise we’re going to be tired and grumpy when we get over your wall, and we’re going to relax in the shade while we do horrible stuff to you. It’s your call but it’s hot, sweaty, weather out here and the guys would prefer to play some hackey-sack and have a barbecue tonight, rather than spend the whole night climbing the wall and impaling you all…  Whadda you say?”
Chinese Wall Defender: “Hang on, we’ll be right down.”

Now, the imperial American wall wouldn’t be guarded by such staunch defenders, nor would they be attacked by such ruthless hordes. It’d go more like:
American Wall Defender: “Can we help you?”
Bad Dude: “Yeah, we got the weekly split; your take’s 10% or your kids collect on daddy’s insurance.”
American Wall Defender: “Hang on, let me open the gate.”

This is fun! It’s sort of like what happened on the Maginot Line, where a load of panzergrenadiers with flamethrowers and superior tanks showed up:

Maginot Line Defender: “Bonjour messieurs!”
Panzergrenadier Spokes-flamethrower-guy: “Do we have to do this?”
Maginot Line Defender: “Bienvenue dans La France!”

Clayton Industries suggested using the wall to store radiological waste. I’m particularly impressed by this one because it means that anyone who was willing to do some wiring and light demolitions work could have their very own radiologic dispersion bomb, near whatever American city the wall runs near. I don’t want to seem defeatist (OK, actually, I do) but this seems like a whole lot of “nope.”

Artist Meridian suggests a wall made of 3 million hammocks and 10 million pipe organs. Somehow I think she’s not serious. But it would be cool if they had some wind chimes, too.

The suggestions are here [trib] and, I’m sad to say, some of them aren’t pure trolling; it looks like there are the usual money-hungry authoritarian bootlickers who want to make a quick billion or two.

The whole idea that people need to be able to see through the wall so they don’t get hit on the head with 60-lb bales of drugs is absolutely imagination-beggaring. When I hear that I was, literally, dumbfounded and gobsmacked at the same time. It’s one of the stupidest things that has ever been said, anywhere, any time. First off, it presupposes that the Bad Dudes with catapults are somehow sneaking the catapults up and shooting them where they know border guards are, which is simultaneously a Bad Dude Fail and a Border Guard Fail. Would someone give those Bad Dudes a cheap radio controlled camera drone so they can target their artillery better?

That thing can’t fling 60-lb of drugs; maybe 5 or 10. And did you notice the date on that video? 2011. By now, the drug smugglers are going to be using custom-made octocopters; they can lift 30-40lb pretty easily and if you make your own you can leave out things like blackout flight areas and distances – a custom octo like this could easily carry 20lb of drugs 2-3 miles behind a border, at an altitude of 1000ft. Someone who wants to do a really nice  one could make one that would navigate in the dark using GPS coordinates; it could land right in the back of your pickup truck. Then you drive somewhere, unload it, recharge the batteries, put the switch to “home” and it vanishes into the night sky.

Part of the problem with security people in particular, and stupid people in general, is that all too often we are prepared to fight the last battle. (The one we lost!) We don’t step back and ask what the enemy’s response will be if we develop a better strategy – what kind of response will the enemy come up with and how much has our new strategy set them back? To go back to the example of the Chinese Wall:

Chinese Wall Defender: “Can we help you?”
Mongol Spokeshorde: “Yes, we’d like to come through.”
Chinese Wall Defender: “I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
Mongol Spokeshorde: “Listen, (shows Defender a big bag of gold) you can let us in and have this big bag of gold to divide up among the survivors, otherwise we’re going to be tired and grumpy when we get over your wall, and we’re going to relax in the shade while we do horrible stuff to you. It’s your call but it’s hot, sweaty, weather out here and the guys would prefer to play some hackey-sack and have a barbecue tonight, rather than spend the whole night climbing the wall and impaling you all…  Whadda you say?”
Chinese Wall Defender: “We have a new political overseer from the city to make sure we don’t take bribes, even if you threaten us with our lives. It’s … complicated. So I must say (tentatively) ‘No!'”
Mongol Spokeshorde: (sighing) “Hang on, we’ll be right up.”

It’s too late to put my suggestion in, but if I did, it would have been to do an imaginary wall. Or maybe hire Vik Muniz to simply delineate the border, take a picture of it from space, and go, “SEE?!” [vik] The imaginary wall’s the best; I think I could make the whole thing for under $20 million.

It occurs to me that if they ever did build a wall, it would be incredibly fun to troll the crap out of the wall defenders using high-flying quadcopters. Most of the anti-copter stuff depends on overriding the control signals but an autonomous GPS-programmed one would have its fingers stuffed in its “ears” the whole time “la, la, la!” You could have a tremendous amount of fun for about $200/drone. Oh, the shit-fits you could cause! Don’t use this idea to deliver bars of soap to the White House. Just, don’t.

When I was in basic training I got in a small amount of trouble (I was only a suspect, and was not caught) because someone kept shooting out the range-lights whenever we got the order to fire. Since I was the only person in the company that could shoot that well, I was naturally a suspect. Fortunately for me, my targets always had bullet holes equal to the number of rounds I’d been issued. [Here’s how that worked: people who got jams would eject live rounds which would just lie there in the sand by the firing pit; it was pretty easy to pick them up and hand-feed them really quickly when the bolt of the rifle was locked back.]