Trump proposes to make Gaza “the Riviera of the Middle East!”

I kid you not. No, really, the Riviera of the Middle East. Writing in today’s New York Times, Peter Baker opens with:

President Trump basked as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel praised his “willingness to think outside the box.” But when it came to Gaza, Mr. Trump’s thinking on Tuesday was so far outside the box that it was not clear he even knew there was a box.

Mr. Trump’s announcement that he intends to seize control of Gaza, displace the Palestinian population and turn the coastal enclave into “the Riviera of the Middle East” was the kind of thing he might have said to get a rise on “The Howard Stern Show” a decade or two ago. Provocative, intriguing, outlandish, outrageous — and not at all presidential.

The idea built on Trump during the day:

Indeed, it seemed to be an idea that grew by the hour as the day went on. In the morning, before Mr. Netanyahu arrived at the White House to meet with Mr. Trump, aides to the president told reporters that it would take 15 years or more to rebuild Gaza after the destructive war between Israel and Hamas and that it would require working with partners in the region to find Palestinians a place to live temporarily.

By the afternoon, as he signed some executive orders, Mr. Trump told reporters that Palestinians would have “no alternative” but to move out of Gaza because it was just “a demolition site.” A little later, he welcomed Mr. Netanyahu to the Oval Office and went even further, saying he wanted “all of them” to leave and that Gazans should “be thrilled” to live someplace better that he expected Egypt and Jordan to provide.

Then at a formal news conference with Mr. Netanyahu in the East Room on Tuesday evening, he took it the final step, declaring not just that Palestinians should leave but that “the U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip” and rebuild it into a prosperous economic destination.

This was not a temporary takeover, but “a long-term ownership position” and he made clear that he had no intention of turning Gaza back over to the Palestinians but would make it a place “not for a specific group of people but for everybody.”

What that meant exactly, he did not say. Nor did he say how this would be accomplished. Even he seemed to grasp how wild the whole thing sounded. “I don’t mean to be cute, I don’t mean to be a wise guy,” he said at one point. “But the Riviera of the Middle East!”

As you might imagine, the idea was not greeted with universal joy and hosannas:

Others saw nothing cute or wise about what amounted to “ethnic cleansing by another name,” as Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, put it.

“The notion that the United States is going to take over Gaza, including with the deployment of U.S. troops, isn’t just extreme, it’s completely detached from reality,” said Halie Soifer, chief executive of the Jewish Democratic Council of America. “In what world is this happening?”

Khaled Elgindy, a visiting scholar at Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, said Mr. Trump’s comments were “truly bizarre and incoherent,” raising more questions than answers.

But, just for the sheer hell of it, let’s set those reservations aside, I mean, the idea of forcibly relocating the Palestinians, it’s, it’s,...it’s batshit bonkers. But let’s suspend reality for a minute or three.

World Island?

What could we do with a Riviera of the Middle East? Consider the idea my friend Zeal proposed, and pursued for a number of years (and I helped him):

He proposed to transform Governors Island, a 172 acre former Coast Guard base in New York Harbor, into World Island, which he described as a “permanent world’s fair for a world that’s permanently fair”. Think of it as a combination of the best features of the United Nations, Disney World, a kid’s rumpus room, the trading floor at the Chicago Board of Trade, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and the Japanese exhibit at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. It would cost $25 billion or so and be planted with orchids. Why orchids? Beauty aside, they’re an early warning system for climate change, when the orchids go, we’re not going to be far behind.

I met Zeal in his office a couple days later and he explained.

Governors Island had been a Coast Guard base until the end of the century. Senator Moynihan convinced the government to was sell the island to GIPEC (Governors Island Preservation and Education Corporation), jointly owned by New York State and New York City. GIPEC took possession for a couple dollars rather than a price at market rate. Can you imagine the market rate for a 172 acres of developable property in New York Harbor?

Gaza is considerably larger than 172 acres, but then what Zeal envisioned for World Island was a bit much for that site. But in Gaza, in Gaza there’d be room. And, when you consider the thousands of years of conflict that has bedeviled that land, it would be the perfect place to realize Zeal’s vision. Here’s the executive summary of the proposal we submitted to GIPEC: Governors Island as a World Resource Center. Here’s slide presentation that you can scroll through.

World Island, a Global Commons by Bill Benzon

Trump's cultural policy, a speculative proposal 

What will actually happen? Who knows? I certainly don’t, and neither does Donald Trump. But you should read Tyler Cowen’s recent post: Trumpian policy as cultural policy. It’s quite provocative. Here’s a bit:

The Trump administration has issued a blizzard of Executive Orders, and set many other potential changes in the works. They might rename Dulles Airport (can you guess to what?). A bill has been introduced to add you-know-who to Mount Rushmore. There is DOGE, and the ongoing attempt to reshape federal employment. [...]

Imagine you hold a vision where the (partial) decline of America largely is about culture. After all, we have more people and more natural resources than ever before. Our top achievements remain impressive. But is the overall culture of the people in such great shape? The culture of government and public service? Interest in our religious organizations? The quality of local government in many states? You don’t have to be a diehard Trumper to have some serious reservations on such questions.

We also see countries, such as China, that have screwed-up policies but have grown a lot, in large part because of a pro-business, pro-learning, pro-work culture. Latin America, in contrast, did lots of policy reforms but still is somewhat stagnant.

OK, so how might you fix the culture of America? You want to tell everyone that America comes first. That America should be more masculine and less soft. That we need to build. That we should “own the libs.” I could go on with more examples and details, but this part of it you already get.

So imagine you started a political revolution and asked the simple question “does this policy change reinforce or overturn our basic cultural messages?” Every time the policy or policy debate pushes culture in what you think is the right direction, just do it. Do it in the view that the cultural factors will, over some time horizon, surpass everything else in import.

Simply pass or announce or promise such policies. Do not worry about any other constraints.

You don’t even have to do them!

After this that and the other:

To be clear, this hypothesis does not not not require any kind of cohesive elite planning the whole strategy (though there are elites planning significant parts of what Trump is doing). It suffices to have a) conflicting interest groups, b) competition for Trump’s attention, and c) Trump believing cultural issues are super-important, as he seems to. There then results a spontaneous order, in which the visible strategy looks just like someone intended exactly this as a concrete plan.

We live in interesting times.

Governors Island as a World Resource Center [World Island]

I spent a good deal of time early in the millennium working with Zeal Greenberg, of the World Development Endowment Foundation, on a plan to develop Governors Island. It's located in New York harbor just below the southern tip of Manhattan between Ellis Island and Brooklyn. This photo shows the tip of Manhattan as seen from the ferry terminal on Governors Island:

Here we're on a large lawn in the middle of the island, looking toward Manhattan:

These houses used to be officers quarters when the island was a military base:

Here's a link to the executive summary for our development proposal: Governors Island as a World Resource Center: A Vision for the Future Development of New York Harbor as a Global Cultural Center. The preface:

In 2002 the federal government transferred the management of Governors Island to the Governors Island Preservation and Education Corporation (GIPEC), operated jointly by New York State and New York City. The transfer deed specified that the island be developed for public purposes and prohibited permanent housing and casinos on the island. In 2005 GIPEC issued and Request for Expression of Interest (RFEI) followed by a Request for Proposal (RFP) in February 2006. The World Endowment Development Foundation submitted a formal proposal on May 10, 2006. This document contains the executive summary for that proposal.

UPDATE AT 76: Reflections on entering my eighth decade and why it portends to be the most productive one of my life

I posted this six years ago, a few days after my 70th birthday. It’s still a reasonable overview of things I’ve accomplished, though the future looks a bit different. GPT-3 and then ChatGPT came along unexpectedly. I’ve devoted a great deal of time on ChatGPT over the last year, over 100 blog posts and 11 working papers. I’d hoped to finish a 12th paper by today, but other things intervened so I’ve still got a day’s or so worth of work on it. Then I’ve got to look over that work, arrive at some conclusions, and set directions for future work. That’ll take several more days.

One of those working papers, Xanadu, GPT, and Beyond: An adventure of the mind, outlines the connections between this strand of current work and my earlier work going back to “Kubla Khan” and even a bit before. Back in 2022 I posted Relational Nets Over Attractors, A Primer: Part 1, Design for a Mind, which knits together the work I did with David Hays, first on cognitive networks in the 1970s, and then our two papers on the brain in 1988, Principles and Development of Natural Intelligence and Metaphor, Recognition, and Neural Process. That was unexpected.

It also appears that I’ve undertaken yet another overview of literary criticism, GOAT Literary Critics. I’ve posted two pieces already and have tentative plans for five more. I don’t know just when I’ll do them as the ChatGPT wrap-up has higher priority.

Finally, back in 2017 I wrote about how I made Jersey City my home: through photographs. Now Hoboken has become my home and, once more, it’s been through photographs. I post photos to a Facebook group for Hoboken photos and am planning a small exhibit of some of my photos. I’m working with one of my Jersey City friends, Greg Edgell, on that (& Greg’s gotten married and moved to the house near Morristown where he grew up).

Things are moving along. Like my friend Al used to say, “These are the good old days. The best days are yet to come.” 

* * * * *

Reflections on entering my eighth decade and why it portends to be the most productive one of my life

In destinies sad or merry, true men can but try.

– Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 

In scientific prognostication we have a condition analogous to a fact of archery—the farther back you draw your longbow, the farther ahead you can shoot.

– Buckminster Fuller

Birthdays are generally just that, even “major” birthdays, like my most recent one, my 70th. They are an occasion for a celebration, perhaps a modest one, perhaps not quite so modest – our house was crowded with dinner guests for my father’s 50th birthday – perhaps even extravagant. I’ve never been to an extravagant birthday party. Birthdays may also be a time for reflection, but by no means necessarily so.

But in my experience birthdays rarely correspond to major life events. What’s a major life event? Getting married, whether at a small civil ceremony before a judge or an elaborate wedding with 100s of guests into the church and out to the reception where a great band – like me and my colleagues in The Out of Control Rhythm and Blues Band – performs for hours of dancing, that’s a major life event. Climbing a mountain you’ve trained for over a period of years, that’s a different kind of major life event. Graduating from school, or completing basic training in the military, passing the bar exam, all major.

Years ago, in my early 20s, I was in a rock band called “St. Matthew Passion.” It was our last gig, the sax player and I were jamming a whacked out intro to “She’s Not There” and suddenly it all disappeared, me, the musicians, the room, the world, all into a brilliant, but soft, white light. Only the light and the music. It lasted what, half a second, a second, two seconds? Whatever. Those few moments challenged me for years, changing my sense of myself and the world.

Major life events come in all forms and durations, but they rarely coincide with a birthday. Birthdays simply mark the passage of time.

And so it set out to be on Thursday, December 7, 2017, when I turned 70. I woke up, cruised the web, made four posts to New Savanna, had breakfast and then, and then I decided to go out and take some photos, including some of that green platform pump I’ve been having so much fun photographing.

That was a bit unusual because I generally write in the morning, and perhaps I was motivated by my birthday to do something a bit different. But that’s all it was, a change in routine. It’s no big deal; I do it all the time.

But then I realized, sometime in the afternoon, that this birthday IS a big deal, and that I really can make it a big deal. How? By finishing my working paper, Calculating meaning in “Kubla Khan” – a rough cut. Why is that important, major milestone important? Because I’ve been working on it almost 50 years, all my adult life.

Teaser: Calculating meaning in “Kubla Khan”, 2017

This image likely makes little sense. Don’t worry about it. There are two more images that won’t make much sense. Don’t worry about them either. Just look at them as you would displays in a museum or gallery and move on.

Not that paper, no, not that. It’s the poem, “Kubla Khan”, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, that I’ve been tracking all my adult life. I’ve been working on it since the spring of 1969 when I read it in Earl Wasserman’s class in my senior year at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore – where my father had gone to school. To have completed a project that framed one’s adult life, that is indeed a major event. Not completed, not in the sense that it’s all over and done with – for it isn’t, but in some deep and fundamental sense, things have changed. I’ve got a new understanding, and new obligations to go with it.

The first five lines:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
          Down to a sunless sea.

There are 49 more.

Let me explain. Perhaps then you will understand why I expect the next decade to be the most productive one of my life. And not just my intellectual life. There is the Bergen Arches Project as well. And who knows what else? I wonder if Rita Moreno is available for salsa lessons?

The 1893 World's Columbian Exposition (aka Chicago World's Fair)

World's Columbian Exposition

A World’s Fair for a world that’s permanently fair @3QD [Hey, kids! Let's create a NEW World's Fair!]

I'm bumping this to the top of the queue because Tyler Cowen's Emergent Ventures has made Cameron Wiese a Progress Studies fellow so that he can re-animate and re-conceptualize an old idea and create a new World's Fair. From Weise's call to action:

Today, World's Fairs have been rebranded as "International Expositions" that occur every 5 years, and are a hollow shell of their former glory. They no longer showcase the promise of the future or celebrate achievement. Instead, they serve as national branding exercises, infrastructure development projects masquerading as innovation, architecture competitions, and an opportunity to promote tourism. If anything, they're the perfect representation of our current vision for the future: unfocused and uninspiring.

But it doesn't have to be this way; we can't afford for it to be this way.

The world has changed dramatically since 1984. We now live in the most incredible time in human history. The internet has brought billions of people together and tech companies have given us supercomputers in our pockets. We're starting to build hyperloops and supersonic jets. We're on the cusp of incredible breakthroughs in genetics, biology, medicine, food science, energy, transportation, manufacturing, computing, and robotics. We're finally going back to the moon and then on to Mars. We've once again seen the power of a collective vision with the record-breaking development of the COVID-19 vaccine.

* * * * *

 

I’ve got a new piece up at 3 Quarks Daily: World Island: Zeal Means Hope [The World’s Got Talent]. It’s about my friend, Jerry Greenberg, who now goes by “Zeal”, and his project to create a World Island, as he calls it, “a world’s fair for a world that’s permanently fair.” It was a wonderful quixotic idea, a $25 billion dollar city-within-a-city dedicated to peace and human flourishing. It was to be located on Governors Island, 172 acres in New York Harbor a quarter of a mill off the tip of Manhattan and only 100s of yards from Red Hook, Brooklyn.

The article tells the story of what happened between the time we meet in 2003 or 2004 and the time we had to deliver a proposal to locate World Island on Governors Island. The agency in charge of the island, GIPEC (Governors Island Preservation and Education Corporation) was holding a competition for proposals. The proposals were due May 10, 2010. We made the deadline, with 5 minutes to spare.

Our proposal wasn’t accepted. No proposals were. I continued to work with Jerry on other locations for the project, Sierra Leone, and Athens, Greece were looking good at various times, and with other projects, such as WISE, World Investment Summit/Exposition. But this isn’t about that.

It’s about something else, about Jerry’s influence on others. He’s worked with a handful of people quite closely on these various projects, a very large handful. But he’s met 1000s of others and worked with some of them for a bit. How’d he change their lives?

Zeal's database system

In my own case, in November of 2007, a year and a half after the Governors Island proposal, I wrote a document, Jersey City: From a Skate Park to the World, and posted it to the web. I told that story in a post, How I Found a Home in Jersey City and Got Steve Fulop Elected Mayor, Part 3. That part about electing the mayor, that’s a bit tongue in cheek; but I did give a copy of that report to Fulop. It was about a park project, a two-and-a-half mile cultural corridor, through the middle of Jersey City. I figured it would cost a quarter to half a billion dollars, much cheaper than World Island, and would transform the city. Here’s the executive summary.

Jersey City has an unparalleled opportunity for developing park space and cultural amenities in a two-mile corridor running from the Powerhouse Arts District in the East, along the Sixth Street Embankment to the Palisades, then up the River Line to the Bergen Tunnel, and west through the Erie Cut-Bergen Arches to JFK Boulevard. What is unique about this strategy is that is builds on both abandoned railroad properties and on Jersey City’s status as a center for graffiti art of the highest caliber. By capitalizing on its graffiti heritage, Jersey City can attract tourists from around the world and establish itself as an international center of cutting-edge art.

This development strategy includes three park-garden areas: 1) Sixth Street Embankment, 2) River Line Walk, and 3) Erie Cut. A skate park is already being planned for the River Line Walk area. At full development the Erie Cut would have a series of small gardens in various national styles – Indian, Chinese, Spanish, etc. – and a conservatory linking the bottom of the cut to the street-level surface(Route 139). There would also be two modest museum complexes: 1) a graffiti museum at 12th and Monmouth, and 2) a railroad museum nearby at the Bergen Tunnel. These complexes would include restaurants and shops.

A thumbnail calculation indicates that these developments could bring new tourist revenue to the city in the amount $36 to $90 million (or more) annually. Other benefits include increased property values along the corridor and new businesses.

Crazy a way – where’s the quarter to half billion construction costs going to come from? – but not so crazy. It was a vision for the future, not a concrete plan. Visions work indirectly.

A couple years later I gave a copy of that report to Greg Edgell. Since then he and I, along with dozens of others, have been working on it in one way or another. We worked with June Jones (Morris Canal CDC) and skateboarders to get the city to agree to build a skate park, albeit in a different place from the one proposed in that report. More recently we started The Bergen Arches Project, which aims to complete another aspect of that proposal, and at a much lower cost.

The vision I projected in that report is thus coming to life. I wouldn’t have written it if I hadn’t spent two or three years working on the World Island project with Zeal.

Ideas have influences. Visions have consequences. Such is the way of the world.

 

Addendum:  You can download some World Island documents at Scribd.

Walt Disney, Stephen Miller and the Future of Jersey City

I'm bumping this 2013 post to the top of the queue on general principle. But also, BECAUSE. Who'd believe an expert with a laser cutter was living in the ghetto and included international starchitect Norman Foster among his clients? Not that I think of it as a ghetto. It's where I lived for 2 and a half years and felt very comfortable, at home, thank you very much. 

* * * * *

Buildings ... are not discrete objects. They are building blocks of a democratic society. W. H. Auden once proposed that a civilization could be judged by "the degree of diversity attained and the degree of unity attained." In the spirit of service, architecture can contribute to both. Without the spirit of service, architecture can be a highly destructive force.

– Herbert Muschamp, Visions of Utopia

No doubt you are familiar with Walt Disney, the guy who made cartoons and nature documentaries, created the world’s first theme park, and gave his name to what is now the world’s largest entertainment company. But it’s been years since Disney himself appeared in the media – he died in 1966 – and his life story isn’t well-known, though there must be at least a dozen biographies of him (I’ve read four of them).

But what does Uncle Walt have to do with Stephen Miller and what do either of them have to do with the future of Jersey City?

And, by the way, WHO is Stephen Miller?

I don’t know how many laser cutters there are in Jersey City – 10, 20, 100, 763? I have no idea – but one of them is in his atelier off Harrison Street between Monticello and Bergen.

What’s a laser cutter?

It’s a high tech jigsaw used for cutting materials such as wood, plastic, leather, metal perhaps.

And what the h___ is an atelier?

It’s a workshop and design studio. A high-class term.

OK, gotcha, but what does that have to do with Walt Disney and what do they have to do with the future of Jersey City?

Let’s start with Walt Disney. Disney was an entertainer; he made movies and went on to build a theme park. Miller is an entertainer too, though of a different kind. He’s musician and a very good MC – he tells me he used to front a band. And he’s a slammin’ djembe player.

And I know a little about djembe players. When I lived in upstate New York I performed with Eddie “Ade” Knowles, a percussionist who toured as a percussionist with Gil Scott-Heron early in his career. I hear and feel the same power and nuance in Miller’s djembe playing that Ade has in his.

OK, so he’s an entertainer, there are lots of entertainers in the world...

Just cool your jets. Don’t go getting testy on me. I’m gettin’ there.

Take a look at this video (embedded below). It’s a promotional video that Disney prepared for Epcot (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow) and it shows a small city that’s very different from and far more interesting than what the Disney Company eventually built in central Florida.

About 16 minutes in you’ll see an architectural model for the central building and transportation hub that Disney had planned (but that never got built). Well, those models don’t grow on trees – though such models often feature model trees. Someone has to build them. That’s how Miller makes his living; he makes architectural models.

An architect, say Norman Foster, has a client who’s about to sink $100,000,000 into a project. The client wants to see what he’s getting for all those spondulix, and the client wants to see more than plans and pretty 2D renderings. Plans don't really mean much to anyone but architects and engineers and pretty 2D renderings are, well, pretty, but they don't really give you a sense of the space. What the client really wants, of course, is to walk around and through the finished structure before it’s actually built and paid for. That’s not possible. But it is possible to build a scale model.

That’s Miller’s job. Foster shoots over the plans in Autocad format, Miller feeds them into the laser cutter, and the cutter spits out the parts. Miller assembles the parts into a model, sprinkles some artificial grass on the ground, plants artificial trees and shazayum! finished model, ready for client viewing.

Now, long before he even thought of Disneyland, much less Epcot, Walt Disney built models. As I put it in Walt Disney: A Career in Three Acts:

In the late 1940s Walt turned his attention to model railroads. Not only did he give them as gifts to himself, and his nieces and nephews, he also learned to construct them. He was already a respectable carpenter - skills he had learned from his father. Now he learned how to fabricate the metal parts necessary for a 1/8 scale railroad which was constructed in the yard at his new house. This railroad was his pride and joy; he loved operating the engine - which was a real steam engine, though not full-sized - and giving people rides on the train...

At the same time - the late 1940s - Disney began thinking about creating a “Mickey Mouse Park” on sixteen acres of land near the studio. The original purpose was to have a place where studio employees and visitors could park their children. But, as Disney thought about the park, and investigated amusement parks here and there, his aspirations became ever more elaborate, and ever different from standard amusement parks of the Coney Island type.

And thus Disneyland was born, a theme park that James Rouse – the real estate developer perhaps best-known for creating Columbia, Maryland – called “the greatest piece of urban design in the United States today” in a 1963 speech at Harvard University.

Malaysia's $100B Forest City built on four artificial islands

I’ve decided that it’s TALENT SEARCH week at New Savanna

I’m slated to post another column at 3 Quarks Daily this coming Monday, October 15. Over the weekend I decided that I would devote it to the MacArthur Fellows program, and perhaps more generally to the problem of identifying talented people. So I yesterday I downloaded the foundation’s summary of the 2012-2013 review of the program and looked through it today and sat down to write up some notes toward that up-coming column.

As you may know, I’ve already given this a bit of thought starting in 2013 and ongoing. Back then I started with the simple thought that they could improve the program by not giving any fellowships to people with tenure at elite universities – which I explained at some length over the years, most recently here. So I decided that I’d do a bit of digging in a different direction for that upcoming 3QD piece.

And you know what? It’s tough! It really is. So I’ve decided to write some post each day this week toward that end. I’m not going to go for polished in these preliminaries, quick, rude, and crude will do. Thinking out loud.

And I may throw in a few words about a new, and somewhat smaller, talent search, the Emergent Ventures program just announced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. This is a much smaller program, with no track record to speak of, thought it’s already given out two awards. And one of them sure looks like a winner to me:

I'm honored to accept a grant from @tylercowen's Emergent Venture's to create a genealogy of street art, using machine learning. To learn more, see here: https://t.co/7zh0IYeXiK

— Leonard Bogdonoff (@rememberlenny) September 26, 2018

What’s not to like? You know I’m all over graffiti here at New Savanna, and I’m interested in machine learning as well.

And you know what, I might as well take another look at Zeal’s World Island project. And Sabine Hossenfelder’s been calling out theoretical physics for being out to lunch. I might as well work her into the mix. Maybe I’ll give a shout out to Charlie Keil. [Zeal: Yeah, I know, interesting name, he picked it himself.]

Who knows what other mischief I’ll get up to.

Later.

Oh, PS and for the record, what got me stumped as I was thinking about this was getting more precise, moving to the next layer of detail, about just why I thought that the Fellows program would improve by cutting out tenured faculty at elite schools. Moving to that next layer of detail, that’s going to be tough. I mean, maybe that’ll require a 10-fold expansion or more, plus call on expertise that I don’t have.

Help!