Let me start this crazy story by saying in 2007 there was a huge debate in Arizona about water washing away the border wall.

Yes, you read that right. Nearly 15 years ago — FIFTEEN — federal officials were sternly warned their wall designs would fail catastrophically due to basic water runoff.

In October 2007, before the fence was built by Kiewit Western Co. for $21.3 million, Organ Pipe officials told the U.S. Department of Homeland Security they were worried that the design would impede the movement of floodwater across the border; that debris would get trapped in the fence; that water would pool; and that the lateral flow of water would cause damage to the environment and patrol roads, according to a report issued by Organ Pipe in August 2008 about flooding that summer.

In response, the Border Patrol issued a final environmental assessment with a finding of no significant impact. It also said the fence would not impede the natural flow of water or cause flooding. […] At a December 2007 meeting, Kiewit officials stated in a handout that the fence design “would permit water and debris to flow freely and not allow pounding of water on either side of the border” because the drainage crossing grates “met hydraulic modeling requirements.”

“Now we know who’s right,” said Matt Clark, Southwest representative for Defenders of Wildlife. “Period. End of story.”

End of story? Sadly not.

Matt Clark was talking about the wall three years later in 2011 when that fancy $20 million “hydraulic modeling” wall, as predicted, simply washed away. Problems started immediately in 2008, prompting lawsuits and complaints about the wall operating like a weak dam and then it came down exactly as predicted.

It begs the question of whether people who had been advocating for these walls were taking a slice of $20 million; really didn’t mind if their overpriced wall malfunctioned or fell.

They may as well be building monuments to corruption and stupidity for all they care.

Lesson learned from this 2007 debacle? Not so fast.

Take a look at the big story now coming from Arizona.

José Manuel Pérez Cantú, the director of the nonprofit Cuenca de Los Ojos, said in an email that six gates were washed out at this location alone. Other gates were also reportedly impacted by the heavy rainfall and flooding. The power and height of the waters can be seen in not just the heavy gates ripped open but the debris that wrapped around intact portions of the wall.

Who could have predicted this? Ah yes, just about everyone.

Indeed. Anyone could have predicted this.

The border wall is becoming the standard for illustrating how to fail at security, but behind the obvious failure of the wall to function longer than a year are the massive corruption and ecological disaster stories that make it even worse.

Let me add a little more context to just how stupid the corruption was, from another section of the wall that failed.

1. …boasted at a campaign event in New Jersey that the wall was ‘going up at record speed’…
2. Steel panels from the fence in the town of Calexico, California were knocked down on Wednesday morning. The concrete used to anchor the 30ft-tall (9m) panels in place had not yet set.

You see boasts about how quickly the wall goes up, while the wall being a poorly-planned rush job is given as the excuse for it falling right back down.

Whistling can be a language, and there are still many to learn around the world.

Whistled languages are almost always developed by traditional cultures that live in rugged, mountainous terrain or in dense forest. That’s because whistled speech carries much farther than ordinary speech or shouting, says Julien Meyer, a linguist and bioacoustician at CNRS, the French national research center, who explores the topic of whistled languages in the 2021 Annual Review of Linguistics. Skilled whistlers can reach 120 decibels — louder than a car horn — and their whistles pack most of this power into a frequency range of 1 to 4 kHz, which is above the pitch of most ambient noise.

Makes sense and brings to mind that nobody that I know of has an app yet so a phone can translate text or speech to whistle.

Wouldn’t a phone be an excellent whistler?

Turns out it’s really easy to do for humans. One can shift from speech to whistle and be fluent in just eight months.

Learning to whistle a language you already speak is relatively straightforward. Díaz Reyes’s Spanish-language whistling students spend the first two or three months of the course learning to make a loud whistle with different pitches. “In the fourth or fifth month, they can make some words,” he says. “After eight months, they can speak it properly and understand every message.” This articulation of speech within a whistle only works for nontonal languages, where the pitch of speech sounds isn’t crucial to the meaning of the word. (English, Spanish and most other European languages are nontonal.)

I still think a phone app would be a logical augmentation so humans wouldn’t have to learn whistling at all if they wanted to instead use technology.

That also brings to mind that there is no whistling translator. Imagine having a microphone hear a whistle in one language and then a speaker (pun not intended) would whistle it in another language. Or a phone app could be fluent in all whistled languages…

Sorely missing from these narratives is the American experience. Whistling can be found in outlaw stories such as the one describing how the legendary Bass Reeves caught two wanted men:

As the sun was setting, Reeves heard a sharp whistle coming from beyond the house. Shortly afterward, the woman went outside and responded with an answering whistle. Before long, two riders rode up to the house…