UAA Sports Program Provides More Excitement Than The Teams And Regents Don't Like It Public

Our ride home from the airport last night mentioned the brouhaha over the firing of the hockey coach at UAA.  All this happened after we left and despite the ADN subscription folks assuring me that I could follow the ADN online, while it has some things the print version doesn't (like nasty comments), it's harder for me to peruse the news stories. Besides, I prefer reading the newspapers where I'm traveling.

So I looked online, and found Wednesday's story in the sports section (where it belongs, but not where I'd look online.)  I was struck by the concern for keeping things from the public expressed by Regents:

"Regent Gloria O'Neill of Anchorage called the events 'extremely unfortunate, because it was so public.' 

"'As you think forward, what kind of communication strategy (can you) employ in the future ... so this nastiness does not have to play out in the community?' she asked Case."

Really?!  The university doesn't belong to the regents.  It belongs to the residents of Alaska.  It's not the regents job to hide things from the press and the public.  It's important that the public see the bad as well as the good so they can better judge how well the Regents and the President and the Chancellors are doing.  Here's another regent's comments:

"I don't like to read things in the newspaper before I hear about them (from you)," [Regent Fuller Cowell] said. "In this case I had a dozen emails before I heard anything from the university whatsoever.

"We've got to a figure out a way to communicate instantly with the Board of Regents, or at least keep us in the loop so we're aware this problem is developing so we can seem coherent when people ask us what is happening."

I can understand not wanting to be blind-sided, but exactly how much and about what does this Regent want to be told in advance?  Or is it just this one item because it's become a hot political potato?  It seems like, at least the way the ADN quoted him, his main concern is not to be embarrassed.

Then: 

After 25 minutes of public discussion, the board took the rest of the conversation behind closed doors. 

From the Board's by-laws:

"B.      Executive Sessions.
To the full extent allowed and pursuant to procedures provided by AS 44.62.310, the board or a committee of the board may go into executive session upon majority vote. Voice votes are authorized on all motions made during executive sessions. At any time during executive session, without regard to how the regent voted, a motion to reconsider the motion to go into executive session may be made by any regent, and discussed by the board or committee in executive session. If the board makes findings during an executive session, the findings will be made a part of the record of the proceedings and will be open to inspection by the public at reasonable times."

AS 44.62.310 discusses what can be discussed in executive session:

(b) If permitted subjects are to be discussed at a meeting in executive session, the meeting must first be convened as a public meeting and the question of holding an executive session to discuss matters that are listed in (c) of this section shall be determined by a majority vote of the governmental body. The motion to convene in executive session must clearly and with specificity describe the subject of the proposed executive session without defeating the purpose of addressing the subject in private. Subjects may not be considered at the executive session except those mentioned in the motion calling for the executive session unless auxiliary to the main question. Action may not be taken at an executive session, except to give direction to an attorney or labor negotiator regarding the handling of a specific legal matter or pending labor negotiations.

(c) The following subjects may be considered in an executive session:

(1) matters, the immediate knowledge of which would clearly have an adverse effect upon the finances of the public entity;

(2) subjects that tend to prejudice the reputation and character of any person, provided the person may request a public discussion;

(3) matters which by law, municipal charter, or ordinance are required to be confidential;

(4) matters involving consideration of government records that by law are not subject to public disclosure.

(d) This section does not apply to

(1) a governmental body performing a judicial or quasi-judicial function when holding a meeting solely to make a decision in an adjudicatory proceeding;

(2) juries;

(3) parole or pardon boards;

(4) meetings of a hospital medical staff;

(5) meetings of the governmental body or any committee of a hospital when holding a meeting solely to act upon matters of professional qualifications, privileges or discipline;

(6) staff meetings or other gatherings of the employees of a public entity, including meetings of an employee group established by policy of the Board of Regents of the University of Alaska or held while acting in an advisory capacity to the Board of Regents; or

(7) meetings held for the purpose of participating in or attending a gathering of a national, state, or regional organization of which the public entity, governmental body, or member of the governmental body is a member, but only if no action is taken and no business of the governmental body is conducted at the meetings.  [If anyone can tell me what's in the html code that is making this all bold, please do.  I copied it from the statutes.  It doesn't show bold in the compose page, but does in my preview.]

The ADN article does not tell us what the motion to go into executive session said, so it's not clear why they went into executive session.  Of the four, the only possible two, would be:

(2) subjects that tend to prejudice the reputation and character of any person, provided the person may request a public discussion;

(3) matters which by law, municipal charter, or ordinance are required to be confidential;

(2) would generally have to do with personnel issues which this is, but it seems to me the discussion was less about Cobb than about the process that led to his firing and possibly pressure applied to the university.  (3) most likely here would also be personnel issues, but there could be other things.  But the motion to take the issue to executive session should have clearly stated the reason.  

What person's reputation and character might have been prejudiced?  It seems the key people involved were Chancellor Case and ex-Athletic Director Cobb.  Case was there and could have asked for the meeting to be public.  Cobb, presumably, wasn't there, so he couldn't.  I'm guessing he well might have.  Or was it because they wanted to discuss the roles of President Gamble and Governor Parnell in the firing of Cobb?  [See Anchorage Daily News May 29, 2013] Those shouldn't have been shielded by an executive session, but I'm not positive. 

Looking at both articles, including some of the comments, it seems to me that the hockey supporters were strongly opposed to Cobb and that supporters of other sports thought he was ok to good.

It also looks like this decision might not have been made by Chancellor Case.  I don't believe that executive session is legitimate if the purpose is to hide the role of University administrators and the governor.  And Cobb's character couldn't be prejudiced any more than it already has been publicly by his opponents and by his own comments given to the ADN.

In a blistering statement given to the Daily News, Cobb said Gamble didn't speak to him or anyone in the athletic department before the university's decision to fire him. He also took aim at Ashley Reed, a lobbyist who was among those who encouraged Parnell to get involved.

"Patrick Gamble may be mentally ill," Cobb said in the statement, "when you give away the university to Ashley Reed and a few local scoundrels, you are by definition insane and I intend to prove it in court.

"Gamble made the decision to fire me without speaking to one employee of the UAA Athletic Department, not one staff member, not one coach, not one student-athlete and certainly not me. Apparently Ashley Reed is the final authority.

Taking this a slightly different direction,  I also want to point out how easy it is for us to read something in newspaper article and remember selected parts.  It was only the Regent statements expressing concern about keeping nastiness out of the public view and not wanting to be embarrassed that I remembered.  Where were the substantive comments about the actual problems raised about sports?  Well, in a second reading, I found that they were there all along.

Regent Jo Heckman of Fairbanks seemed to be referencing that incident when she asked about policies addressing the behavior of authority figures.

"Do we have very stringent policies on acceptable behavior of the heads of different arenas, whether it's hockey or basketball coaches or athletic directors or assistant coaches?'' she said. "Do we have good policies we can hang our hats on?"

 And

Regent Mary Hughes of Anchorage urged the chancellors at UAA and UAF, Alaska's only schools with intercollegiate sports, to stay on top of what's happening in their athletic departments and to make sure those departments don't become too separate from the rest of the university.

Visiting The Cathedral of Christ the Light in Oakland

We got to the cathedral just in time to join the daily 1pm tour. 

Here's the insides.  The outside is mostly glass and the building is shaped like a fish - an early Christian symbol.

The Christ image is from a computer image of an ancient sculpture that is created by putting many, many holes in the aluminum.

You can get lots of details about the cathedral from this site which appears to be notes for a class on the cathedral.  For instance:

Baptismal pool at entrance

"The new Cathedral, which replaced the Cathedral of St. Frances de Sales after it was damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, is located in downtown Oakland at the northern edge of Lake Merritt. The cathedral complex includes the public plaza, rectory (Bishops residence), chancery offices, conference center, a medical clinic, a bookstore as well as a café."

Here's the "reconciliation room" the modern version of the confessional.  The space was quite open and one woman on the tour with us said she could never confess there. 

There were bronze plaques for the stations of the cross at eye level around the cathedral and people were encouraged to touch them.

There was a similar set of organs above me when I took this picture.

The mausoleum above, and a closer view of the crucifix below.

They just ordained their new bishop last week.  From the National Catholic Reporter:

"In a joyful celebration that incorporated the many gifts of the diverse communities that make up the Oakland diocese, Bishop Michael Barber was ordained and installed as Oakland's fifth bishop May 25 at the Cathedral of Christ the Light.
With his brother Jesuit Fr. Stephen Barber and another brother, Kevin Barber, serving as lector, Bishop Barber, 58, became the first Jesuit to become the bishop of Oakland. He also is the first priest to be named bishop of Oakland. All previous bishops had already been ordained bishops."

The Cathedral has a healing garden outside so that people will not forget the ""those innocents sexually abused by members of the clergy."


The former Bishop of Oakland, who was appointed Archbishop lacross the Bay in San

Francisco, may not have forgotten those sexually abused, but he's strongly in the camp of those opposing the rights of gays.  Because of his strong stance against Prop. 8, his appointment to probably the gayest city in the US caused quite a stir last fall.


From the Christian Science Monitor:

He also led Church support for the 2008 voter-approved California state constitutional amendment, Proposition 8, that banned gay marriage.
While taking his place as the archbishop of San Francisco and two other area counties, Cordileone called the drunken driving incident a "regrettable mistake."
Pope Benedict appointed Cordileone to preside over the Archdiocese of San Francisco in July.

But there are some positives too:

"The archbishop is an advocate for immigrants and an opponent of the death penalty, but he comes here perceived as a one-issue bishop," Brian Cahill, former San Francisco Catholic Charities executive director, wrote in an editorial published in the San Francisco Chronicle on Wednesday.

Our plane is about to board as we head for another short visit with Z and M in Seattle - cut even shorter by a 50 minute delay of our flight.  So I'm going to post this now and correct errors later. 

And I discovered, looking up things for this post, that Yelpers review churches.  Here are the Yelp reviews of the Oakland Cathedral.

Taylor Bickford To Work Part Time For Alaska Redistricting Board To Help With Mapping

After being pressured by the Anchorage Daily News into announcing the candidates for their Executive Director position, the Board publicly interviewed the three remaining candidates and then decided, in executive session, to not hire for the position at all.  I've posted about this already and my belief that they had a preferred candidate and when things went public, they couldn't choose him because he was so clearly less qualified than the other candidates.

I've heard a rumor for two weeks now that they would hire Taylor Bickford, who was the Executive Director before the Board went on pause last year,  in a more technical position than executive director and today a press release from the Board confirms that.  

They will also meet on Friday at 11 am.   For details of the hire and the meeting, see the press release below:

Anchorage, AK - The Alaska Redistricting Board will meet via teleconference at 11:00 a.m. on Friday, June 7, 2013. The purpose of the meeting is to receive a report on legal issues and discuss a schedule for future Board work sessions and meetings.

"The Board is committed to proceeding on a reasonable timeline to ensure we have a constitutionally acceptable redistricting plan for the 2014 state legislative elections," said Board Chairman John Torgerson. "The Superior Court judge presiding over this case has recognized our process as the most open and transparent in the history of Alaska redistricting, and we intend to continue with that tradition." 

All Board meetings are public meetings. Members of the public may listen to the teleconference at the Board's Anchorage office (411 West 4th Avenue, Suite 302, Anchorage, AK 99501), by calling 1-855-463-5009, or via live stream at www.aklegislature.tv.

Anyone needing special accommodations is requested to call 907-269-7402 or email info@akredistricting.org.

Additionally, the Board announces that its former executive director, Taylor Bickford, will be returning on a part-time, as-needed basis to assist with the drawing of a new plan.

"Taylor understands the process and what needs to be done," Torgerson said. "We are thankful to have him back."

 My experience with Taylor when he was deputy director and then executive director of the Board was mostly positive.  He's a bright and decent young man and was almost always responsive to my requests.  He's also part of the team at the Board and I'm pretty sure he will do what he's asked.  As the chair, John Torgerson, said, "Taylor understands  .  .  . what needs to be done."

Ludie Mitchell, Ollie Hawkins, and Ruth Powers - Three Rosies

Rosie the Riveter was the symbol of the women who worked to support the military effort in World War II.  The Historic National Park honoring these women, and the other workers, is full of information and I'm going to just offer a bit over several posts.  I don't want to load people down so you skip things.  These are personal stories that tell a lot more than the facts.  But I'll give a few facts too.

Sorry, it's too small to read.  Here's a bit from this description of Ollie Hawkins who was born in 1913 and would be celebrating her 100th birthday this year:

"Ollie felt the urge to help out during the war, which is one of the reasons why she came from out of state (Flagstaff, Arizona) as many others did, to work in the Kaiser shipyards in Richmond.  She recalls that it was really hard for women alone to find a place to stay.  Sometime, one woman would sleep in a bunk during the day and at night another woman would take her place.  It was a problem on their days off!  She went to the Housing Bureau and insisted on her own place, threatening to go back home if she didn’t get one and, of course, she got one.  By the time the war ended she had become a journeyman welder.  The welding lines weighed about 200 pounds each -- a person had to have lots of strength and endurance."

Ruth Powers worked at day care centers for the men and women working at the shipyards.

“Being strong-willed, Mrs. Ludie Mitchel told us of the pride she felt while working in the war effort.  “Like all learning,” she said, “welding was difficult.”  and she cried often when she was unable to do it correctly.  Eventually she mastered the craft and was allowed to work on high corners and main joints.”

It also says she went on to appear in

“many television commercials and was an extra in the Clint Eastwood film True Crime.”

I think this info plaque gives a sense of the impact of the war on women working.

I'll add more in a later post.  There are also stories about Blacks working in the war effort.  And the high death rate among defense workers - they said more died at home in the war effort than in battle!

Here's another post on this National Historic Park.

Rosie The Riveter Has A National Park

The National Park Service has an Historical Park honoring Rosie the Riveter.  I'm going to do this in two parts.  This one shows a plant next to the museum.


It seems that today they use it for events.

 From Wikipedia:

"To ensure that America prepared for total war by mobilizing all the industrial might of the United States, President Franklin D. Roosevelt banned the production of civilian automobiles during WWII. The Richmond Ford Assembly Plant switched to assembling jeeps and to putting the finishing touches on tanks, half-tracked armored personnel carriers, armored cars and other military vehicles destined for the Pacific Theater. By July 1942, military combat vehicles began flowing into the Richmond Ford plant to get final processing before being transported out the deep-water channel to the war zones. The "Richmond Tank Depot" (only one of three tank depots in the country) as the Ford plant was then called, helped keep American fighting men supplied with up-to-the-minute improvements in their battle equipment. Approximately 49,000 jeeps were assembled and 91,000 other military vehicles were processed here.
In mobilizing the wartime production effort to its full potential, Federal military authorities and private industry began to work closely together on a scale never seen before in American history. This laid the groundwork for what became known as the "military-industrial complex" during the Cold War years.^[2] This Assembly Plant was one cog in the mobilization of the "Arsenal of Democracy" and a historic part of what is today's industrial culture of the United States."

And here is a photo they had when it was being used to build tanks.











Next to it was the engine room that today has been converted into a restaurant.  I first looked in from the main room into the kitchen.

Then in the dining area, which wasn't open, but they let us in.

 

The museum was next door and I'll try to get some stuff up on that later.  It's actually a temporary exhibit until the new design is finished and the permanent exhibit goes in. 

Here's a followup post on some of the women who worked here.

1913 Cadillac, Lazy Geese, And Other Lake Merritt Run Encounters

We're staying with friends in Oakland and I ran down from their house around Lake Merritt and back.  It's a beautiful day and here are a few shots.

Oaktown Art says:

"This is actually Alameda County’s Fifth Courthouse. The fourth was a real stunner, built in the Parisian Second Empire Style with a domed central tower and four miniature corner towers… see historical photo below. It was opened in 1875, located between 4th and 5th Streets at Broadway, and for over 50 years served “as a powerful symbol of the importance and wealth of what was then California’s fourth most populous county.” Sadly, it fell out of favor before the modern historic preservation movement and was ultimately replaced and eventually demolished. (Courthouse historical placard)" [The link has a picture of the demolished court house.  It was pretty spectacular.]

 

Guitarist embraced by eucalyptus tree

I couldn't help thinking that these Canada Geese were a bit lazy, hanging out here in Oakland instead of going on to Alaska with the others.  But, we're probably better off without all of them coming our way.  

I'm afraid my shot of the Scottish Rites Temple was too bright to see all the carvings and even the name.  And I'm getting hints to get off of here so we can go on our afternoon sightseeing to the Rosie the Riveter Visitor Center.  Here's a link to the Scottish Rites Temple Oakland website.

This picture is for my friend Des who comes from Hunan originally.

I took the wrong turn going back and asked for directions from this gentleman who was working on his 1913 Cadillac (yes, that makes it 100 years old) in his garage. 

Fracking California

I took this picture in a Turkish restaurant where we stopped for a snack as we arrived in San Francisco Thursday. 

Today's New York Times gives some context to it.  

". . . By all accounts, oilmen and farmers — often shortened to “oil and ag” here — have coexisted peacefully for decades in this conservative, business friendly part of California about 110 miles northwest of Los Angeles. But oil’s push into new areas and its increasing reliance on fracking, which uses vast amounts of water and chemicals that critics say could contaminate groundwater, are testing that relationship and complicating the continuing debate over how to regulate fracking in California. . ."

I've got lots of processing to do from the PATNet conference, so I'm just going to give you a snippet of the Times article and you can read the rest at the link if you like.  And here's  SF Bay Guardian article takes a stronger stand (and has a map).  It begins:

Fracking changes everything

It's toxic. It's contributing to climate change. And it's happening all over California — with little regulation

Sunday Morning Mind Stretching

The PATNet conference goes on.  Things end this afternoon and we'll be able to get out into the beautiful San Francisco sunshine.  But meanwhile people are still earnestly discussing how to think about public administration.  

Panel: “Self-Other Relations and Utopian Transformations”


“Progressives’ Utopia: Know Thy Enemy as Yourself”

Amy Gould, The Evergreen State College

In The Art of War, Sun Tzu stated “if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle” (ch. 3). In the 21st century Progressives aretheir own worst enemy. From the Reconstruction era to present day, Progressives create archetypes of utopian governance through bureaucratic systems of dependency on strangers rather than directed cooperation within communities of trust. Using historical and present day examples, the paper will support these arguments through theoretical comparisons of David Farmer’s To Kill the King, Mark Levin’s Ameritopia, and Paul Seabright’s The Company of Strangers. The imagination of Progressives is the site of the struggle for utopian governance.


“Accountability as an Instrument of Power: Lessons from the Louisiana BTOP”
Roy L. Heidelberg, Louisiana State University
Accountability is an essential part of the effort to construct a better world for a diverse community governed by many sovereigns. Democracy was rejected in one of the earliest

commentaries on a utopia in favor of a benevolent dictator in Republic, yet it persists today as the preferred form of governance in many societies, especially the West. To achieve a democracy requires the institution of meta-rules that guide decision making in order to guarantee answerability to the many-headed sovereign and peaceful resolution of conflict. But can we go too far in our intentional designs through accountability? In this case study I argue that the very system of controls intended to ensure answerability to the sovereign provides the edifice for obscuring actions from the sovereign. Instead of promoting transparency, a system of procedural accountability offers actors entrusted by the public the instruments to conceal their actions and intents rather than reveal them."




“Taking Things Seriously in Public Administration: Beyond the Human-Object Dichotomy”
Thomas J. Catlaw, Arizona State University (Thomas.Catlaw@asu.edu)
Thomas M. Holland Arizona State University (Thomas.Holland@asu.edu)

Thomas Holland

Does public administration think about things? This paper argues that public administration’s positivists and constructivists hold objects in generally low regard. Positivists do think much about things at all and constructivists love to police the divide between humans and things, always nervous about reification (thingification). But does it really have to be so bad to be a thing? The point of view in explored in paper is that all objects—computers, animals, plants, buildings, mountains, and languages—exist and that there is no normative hierarchy among them. To this end, we explore developments in contemporary philosophy that seek to develop a “flat ontology”  (Delanda, 2002, 2006) or a

Thomas Catlaw

“democracy of objects” (Bryant, 2011). We then to see how these ideas can help public administration reframe some tradition problems, like agency. Consistent with developments in contemporary philosophy, we call our position speculative realism (Bryant, Srnicek, & Harman, 2011) insofar as it wantonly speculative and metaphysical in its effort to consider the existence of real things and to consider them as real—not just artifacts of human consciousness, construction, and language.






Sarah Surak, "Utopian Visions of Waste/Reimagining a Closed Loop Economy."  [Sarah was added to this panel and I couldn't find an abstract and I would presume to try to write my own.]



Moderator/Discussant
Larry Luton (on the right of the top photo)

Bond Swaps and Occupy Oakland

Two really good talks over lunch going on now at the PATNet conference.

Journalist (and Sociology PhD) Darwin Bond-Graham talked about how during the Occupy time, they managed to politicize public finance by unraveling the complex mechanisms of bond swaps that had Oakland paying Goldman Sachs a billion dollars (sorry I wasn't taking notes, so I may be a bit off here).  He also related how a 1998 bond covered police and fire pensions - and most of the retired police were white and had moved out of Oakland - to the Sierra foothills, Hawaii, etc.  And the relationship between $1billion owed to the pension fund that had to come from the present, basically diverse Oakland population paying to cover the losses on the pension fund.  Here's an article he wrote that gives a lot more details.

And here's a link to his blog that has a lot more stories.

Now Laleh Behbehanian, a graduate sociology student at UC Berkeley is now talking about the experience of Occupy Oakland - how it was organized and run.  About some of the philosophical underpinnings - like taking back public space for the people.  How they used General Assemblies to decide on how and what to do. 

Rather than my trying to capture this I'm going to post a video I've found on Youtube featuring Laleh.

Dystopias - Three Presentations On Conspiracies In US And Lack of Academic Coverage of Them

Here's the panel I'm at this morning.  (Yeah I'm here at 8am - that's 7am Alaska time)

(l-r)Thorne, Good, Wilson, DeHaven-Smith (head), Witt

I've decided the best I can do is give you the abstracts and some pictures.  So here you go. 

Concurrent Session III, Session #1
Saturday June 1, 2013
8:00 am

Panel: "Between Rocks and Hard Places, Dystopias and Utopias: Of Cold War, Camelot, and Beyond”
Cold War hysteria made John F. Kennedy's peace overtures to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev—first in Cuba, then Indochina—into the dystopian nightmares of the military industrial complex (MIC) and its allies. The usage of Kennedy’s assassination to render salient and vivid the MIC’s preferred narrative of an evil other poised against a forever virtuous America, a "City on the Hill", links the deaths of the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and scores of others. We know from the Church Commission hearings the extent to which civil rights activism was tarred with communist hysteria by the machinations of the FBI and its COINTELPRO units. Presumptive dystopian vistas fabricated by state secrecy, counter-insurgent propaganda (the "conspiracy theory" and “red scare” memes) and media manipulation form a clear and coherent pattern of elite usurpation of government authority in U.S. history over the past several decades. Today war mongering and profiteering culminate with the dystopian nightmare of a forever militarized US devoted to Orwellian contradictions, teetering perilously towards the very real nightmare vista William Sloane Coffin limned succinctly: "Hell is truth seen too late." This panel assembles papers that key into topical areas #1 and #2 of this year’s PATNet conference call, examining direct and indirect political and administrative consequences of President Kennedy’s assassination and the legacy of permanent war zeitgeist now inscribed throughout U.S. governing institutions.

Convener: Matthew Witt, University of LaVerne

“The Dystopian Turn in America’s Political Lexicon after the Assassination of President Kennedy”
Lance deHaven-Smith, Florida State University (dehavensmith@earthlink.net)
The assassination of President Kennedy is widely considered to have marked a turning point in American politics and civic culture.  Almost immediately after the assassination, the Kennedy years were described in utopian terms as “Camelot.”   This label was associated with youth, prosperity, progress, and grandeur, and this is how the “Kennedy Era,” as it is now called, continues to be viewed. Eventually looking back, Americans viewed themselves as having lost pride and faith in the nation’s political class, its optimism about the nation’s future, and its trust in government. As scores of polls indicate,

certainly trust in government declined, and suspicions about government conspiracies proliferated.  But how did the president’s assassination cause the civic culture to take this dystopian turn?  Why did the government’s efforts to discredit JFK-assassination conspiracy theories fail? How should government respond to these suspicions today, as the 50th anniversary of the assassination approaches and refocuses attention on the crime?  What are the implications for government action in the future when suspicious political crimes and tragedies occur?  This paper will analyze data from Google Labs’ “n-gram” database to track changes in the American political lexicon in the aftermath of the assassination of President Kennedy. The n-gram database is a set of searchable datasets containing 500 billion words and phrases from 5.2 million books published between 1500 and 2008.  Google’s “n-gram viewer” offers a powerful tool for studying the dynamics of civic culture in response to major events and official accounts.
 
“Dystopian Crucible:  The Kennedy Assassinations and the Fate of “American Liberalism”
Aaron Good, Temple University
Fifty years after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, this paper reexamines the consequences of the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers.  It finds that rather than being stochastic and ultimately insignificant phenomena, the assassinations were pivotal events with enormous structural effects on American politics in the decades since. Questions examined include the

following: How did the pragmatic ‘eutopian’ project of American liberalism essentially vanish from the American political landscape?  What events were most responsible for the breakdown of the liberal Bretton-Woods international economic order?  Was there a crucible that eventually gave rise to the project for neoliberal globalization, a project that has assumed an increasingly dystopian cast?  How did America’s postwar position as vaguely benevolent global capitalist hegemon deteriorate to the extent that it is now the financially strained, militarily overstretched, neoliberal hegemon that we see today? 



Dystopian Spectacle and the False Flag Mechanism: Dallas, The Gulf of Tonkin, and Watergate
Eric Wilson, Monash University
Abstract: As David Kaiser has recently demonstrated in his magisterial The Road to Dallas: the Assassination of John F. Kennedy (Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 2008), the stage-managing of self-induced political crises and states of emergency—the ‘false flag’—became part of the standard operational procedure of the US ‘dual state’ over the course of the Cold War. Discussing Operation Northwoods and its uncanny resemblance to the ‘Cuban angle’ of both Lee Harvey Oswald and Dallas, Kaiser reveals how the Kennedy assassination, even if it were the handiwork of a ‘lone gunman’, can be cognitively situated into the wider networks of parapolitical relationships of the dual state. Whatever the truth of Dallas, the ‘false flag’ was successfully deployed in the Gulf of Tonkin crisis of August 1964, leading to direct and

full-scale US military intervention throughout the entirety of Indo-China. The parapolitical continuity between Dallas and Watergate is given additional plausibility by interpreting the constitutional crisis of the Nixon presidency as a parapolitical attempt to undermine, or at least retaliate against, post-Vietnam peace settlement and detente. The notorious ‘third-rate burglary’ may itself have been a highly singular form of the false flag, signifying the complete undermining of the public liberal state by the shadow deep state. This paper outlines a ‘minimalist’ theory of a conspiracy to assassinate the President; that is, in order for a ‘conspiracy’ to be made out on the basis of the historical record before us, what conditions must have been fulfilled and what is the absolute minimum that must be true? A ‘minimalist’ theory would involve two necessary suppositions: (i) that the murder of Kennedy was a ‘false flag’ operation (the artificial creation of a ‘state of exception’ by the covert agencies of the State to further a foreign policy objective—in this case, the invasion of Cuba); and (ii) that the epicenter of the operation was within the disparate and myriad ‘parapolitical’ networks of Cold War New Orleans (CIA, DIA, NI, Mafia, anti-Castro Cuban networks).

Moderator: Kym Thorne, University of South Australia

Really, there are women at this conference, they play a big role, but I'm afraid the two panels I've covered so far are just men. 
There was another paper scheduled, but the presenter didn't make it.  Judging from the name, I'm guessing missing the presenter is a woman.

“Dystopian Denial: How Failure in Public Discourse Fuels the Drug-Security Relationship” 
Laurie Manwell, University of Guelph
Utopia” is inextricably linked with Western hegemony and violence and cannot be productively rehabilitated unless the denial of a dystopian reality is destroyed. Since the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Western "drug-security relationship" has fueled America’s economic and military influence over the rest of the world--notoriously revealed by the Iran-Contra scandal. Collective denial of such “deep state events” (global criminal syndicates) is a way to control information related to drug trafficking, human security, and war policy. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) now emphasizes research “based on a public health and human rights approach,” including “drug prevention, treatment and rehabilitation efforts focused on decreasing vulnerability among at-risk groups, including women, youth, prisoners, people who have been trafficked and people living with HIV/AIDS” (UNODC, 2010, p. 43). Yet collective denial of the “the twin forces of sanctioned violence and drugs” has permitted the metastasis of the “deep state” of which there will be no recompense until “these interactions are publicly exposed and debated” (Scott, 2010, p. 16). If not, we face the looming prospect of “the dystopic future toward which the United States is inexorably heading[…]when ordinary people are threatened with imprisonment for petty offenses while they see elites illegally spying, invading, torturing, and plundering with nearly total impunity” (Greenwald, 2011, p. 273-4). This paper examines the role government and public administration can and should play to subvert contemporary utopian imaginings founded on misleading campaigns linking drugs and violence.