tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-57826529402854488622024-03-12T17:09:19.138-07:00This Really Happened part 2In 2010 this site was "Sunset Boulevard, Memoir of a Pedophile Priest Victim." But the weird experience I had doing City of Angels Blog took over CofA2. This All Really Did Happen.Kay Ebelinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13753284586265566961noreply@blogger.comBlogger145125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5782652940285448862.post-76842127456203256842019-10-23T07:49:00.001-07:002021-06-10T11:25:36.569-07:00Finally a definition of what SNAP did to pedophile priest survivors: Black Propaganda<div class="g" style="background-color: white; font-family: roboto, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 27px; margin-top: 0px;">
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<div style="font-size: small;"><h3 class="LC20lb" style="display: inline-block; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.3; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Black_propaganda" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Black_propaganda&ved=2ahUKEwiHv6vbz7LlAhXyNX0KHUrSB6YQFjANegQIABAB" style="color: #660099; cursor: pointer;">Category:Black propaganda - Wikipedia</a> </h3><span style="color: #6a6a6a; font-weight: bold;">Black propaganda</span><span style="color: #545454;"> is </span><span style="color: #6a6a6a; font-weight: bold;">propaganda</span><span style="color: #545454;"> which purports to be from one side in a conflict but is actually produced by the opposing side.</span></div></div><div class="s" style="line-height: 1.57; max-width: 48em;">
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<span><a href="https://www.physics.smu.edu/pseudo/Propaganda/black.html" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.physics.smu.edu/pseudo/Propaganda/black.html&ved=2ahUKEwiHv6vbz7LlAhXyNX0KHUrSB6YQFjAOegQIAhAB" style="color: #660099; cursor: pointer; font-size: small;">Black Propaganda - Physics</a><span style="color: #545454; font-size: small;"> </span></span></h3><a href="https://www.physics.smu.edu/pseudo/Propaganda/black.html" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.physics.smu.edu/pseudo/Propaganda/black.html&ved=2ahUKEwiHv6vbz7LlAhXyNX0KHUrSB6YQFjAOegQIAhAB" style="color: #660099; cursor: pointer; font-size: small;"><div class="TbwUpd" style="display: inline-block; line-height: 1.57; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-top: 1px;"><cite class="iUh30 bc" style="color: #006621; font-style: normal; line-height: 1.5; padding-top: 1px;">https://www.physics.smu.edu </cite></div></a><span style="color: #6a6a6a; font-size: small; font-weight: bold;">Black propaganda</span><span style="color: #545454; font-size: small;"> is any kind of material that is not obiously propaganda and whose origin is completely concealed. The item is accepted for something other ...</span></div><div class="s" style="line-height: 1.57; max-width: 48em;"><a href="https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Black%20Propaganda" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php%3Fterm%3DBlack%2520Propaganda&ved=2ahUKEwiHv6vbz7LlAhXyNX0KHUrSB6YQFjAPegQICRAB" style="color: #660099; cursor: pointer; font-size: small; text-decoration-line: none;">Black Propaganda - Urban Dictionary</a> <a href="https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Black%20Propaganda" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php%3Fterm%3DBlack%2520Propaganda&ved=2ahUKEwiHv6vbz7LlAhXyNX0KHUrSB6YQFjAPegQICRAB" style="color: #660099; cursor: pointer; font-size: small; text-decoration-line: none;"><div class="TbwUpd" style="display: inline-block; line-height: 1.57; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-top: 1px;"><cite class="iUh30 bc" style="color: #006621; font-style: normal; line-height: 1.5; padding-top: 1px;">https://www.urbandictionary.com › define › term=Black Propaganda</cite></div></a><span style="color: #006621;"> </span><span style="color: #6a6a6a; font-size: small; font-weight: bold;">Black propaganda</span><span style="color: #545454; font-size: small;"> is false information that is spread claiming to be from a source on one side when in reality it usually comes from the opposed side. It was a ...</span></div><div class="s" style="line-height: 1.57; max-width: 48em;"><a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/2086855" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/2086855&ved=2ahUKEwiHv6vbz7LlAhXyNX0KHUrSB6YQFjARegQIChAB" style="color: #660099; cursor: pointer; font-size: small;">The Nature and Consequences of Black Propaganda - jstor</a><a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/2086855" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/2086855&ved=2ahUKEwiHv6vbz7LlAhXyNX0KHUrSB6YQFjARegQIChAB" style="color: #660099; cursor: pointer; font-size: small;"><div class="TbwUpd" style="display: inline-block; line-height: 1.57; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-top: 1px;"><cite class="iUh30 bc" style="color: #006621; font-style: normal; line-height: 1.5; padding-top: 1px;">https://www.jstor.org </cite></div></a><span style="color: #006621;"> </span><span style="color: #70757a; font-size: small;">by H Becker - 1949 - </span><span class="st" style="color: #545454; line-height: 1.57; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span class="st" style="font-size: x-small; line-height: 1.57; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="color: #6a6a6a; font-weight: bold;">BLACK PROPAGANDA</span>*. HOWARD BECKER. University of Wisconsin. I. F OR PRESENT purposes, propaganda may be defined as the planned use of any. </span></span><a href="https://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/english/black-propaganda" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/english/black-propaganda&ved=2ahUKEwiHv6vbz7LlAhXyNX0KHUrSB6YQFjASegQIBRAB" style="color: #660099; cursor: pointer;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">black propaganda | Definition of black propaganda in English ...</span></a><a href="https://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/english/black-propaganda" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/english/black-propaganda&ved=2ahUKEwiHv6vbz7LlAhXyNX0KHUrSB6YQFjASegQIBRAB" style="color: #660099; cursor: pointer; font-size: small; text-decoration-line: none;"><div class="TbwUpd" style="display: inline-block; line-height: 1.57; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-top: 1px;"><cite class="iUh30 bc" style="color: #006621; font-style: normal; line-height: 1.5; padding-top: 1px;">https://www.oxforddictionaries.com › definition › english › black-propaganda</cite></div></a><span style="color: #006621;"> </span><span style="color: #545454; font-size: small;">Definition of </span><span style="color: #6a6a6a; font-size: small; font-weight: bold;">black propaganda</span><span style="color: #545454; font-size: small;"> - Falsified or malicious propaganda from an unidentified source, especially propaganda purporting to come from an enemy's own ...</span></div></div></div></div><div class="g" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: roboto, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 27px; margin-top: 0px;"><div data-hveid="CAkQAA" data-ved="2ahUKEwiHv6vbz7LlAhXyNX0KHUrSB6YQFSgAMA96BAgJEAA"><div class="rc" style="position: relative;"><div class="s" style="color: #545454; line-height: 1.57; max-width: 48em;">
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Kay Ebelinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13753284586265566961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5782652940285448862.post-80998843978704275882014-10-31T04:57:00.000-07:002018-02-15T12:43:26.792-08:00<i>If you wonder why after a hundred thousand victims of pedophile priests found each other on the internet beginning in the 1990s yet nothing ever developed to prosecute the bishops for aiding and abetting pedophile priests, and if you wonder why the bad guys are still not only in office but revered, this blog tells you one reason. </i><br />
<i><b>STORY BEGINS HERE:</b></i><br />
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MONDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 2010</h2>
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<a href="http://cityofangels2.blogspot.com/2010/02/i-remember-moment-in-pershing-square.html"><span style="font-size: large;">The Whole SNAP Story, from City of Angels perspective... All based on true experience</span></a></h3>
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<i><b> Continues here:</b></i><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">THURSDAY, JULY 18, 2013</span></h2>
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<a href="http://cityofangels2.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-story-that-wont-go-away.html"><span style="font-size: large;">The Story That Won't Go Away</span></a></h3>
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<b><i>And continues here as well</i></b><br />
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<a href="http://cityofangels2.blogspot.com/2011/09/whole-snap-story-from-city-of-angels.html" style="color: #1b0431;"><span style="font-size: large;">The Other SNAP Story of Counter Intelligence and Sink Holes**</span></a></h3>
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<i>SNAP presents itself as a support network for survivors of pedophile priest crimes, but what SNAP really does is damage control. I know. I was creating damage and I got controlled.</i><br />
<span style="font-size: medium;">UPDATED regularly </span></div>
<i style="color: #29303b; font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Also see <a href="http://cityofangels2.blogspot.com/2011/02/blog-post.html" style="color: #956839;">Chapter 2 Angelic Intervention</a> and <a href="http://cityofangels2.blogspot.com/2010/12/soundtrack-for-1969-chapters.html" style="color: #956839;">Chapter 3 Other States</a>, ongoing reporting on the counter espionage aka fake support organization SNAP and how it ran damage control for the church in the pedophile priest crisis. A <a href="http://cityofangels2.blogspot.com/2010/02/i-remember-moment-in-pershing-square.html" style="color: #956839;">somewhat more cohesive version</a> of this story was written in 2010-2011... and as time passes, there will be more to come.</i><br />
<i><b>and it is the story that will not go away.</b></i><br />
<i><b>-ke</b></i>Kay Ebelinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13753284586265566961noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5782652940285448862.post-49213910322715036082014-10-14T14:57:00.000-07:002014-12-18T03:15:16.414-08:00A little perspective over time<i><span style="font-size: large;">Notes as the experience takes shape years later</span></i><br />
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1. Since SNAP outsourced the UN / Hague "investigation" of the Pope, No Long Time survivors were involved in the process. So the entire UN Filing had to come from the <a href="http://bishop-accountability.org/">Bishop Accountability database</a>, from news stories already published. After usurping the<a href="http://cityofangels11.blogspot.com/2011/04/write-hague-criminal-court-prosecutor.html"> effort started by survivors in Germany in 2011</a>, instead of using survivor / professionals who had been in the movement since the 1980s, SNAP outsourced the Hague effort to the CCR, a great group of guys who admit they knew nothing about the Pope or the Vatican. In total, SNAP dropped the ball, barely bringing up the UN / Hague project once it was theirs, even at their 25th anniversary conference just months after <a href="http://cityofangels12.blogspot.com/2014/01/fast-notes-from-un-hearing.html"> its minor success with hearings in early 2014</a>. SNAP never used its extensive news media lists and nationwide branches to publicize the effort to prosecute the Pope because SNAP's job was to make it go away. They let the whole effort fizzle, die, and be forgotten, same pattern SNAP repeated since they formed in the 1980s as counter intelligence to work inside the pedophile priest "survivor movement" and keep us from accomplishing anything.<br />
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2. Most the weird problems that happened in my personal life were Not a result of exposing on this blog pedophile priests and the bishops who aided and abetted them. Problems began when I started asking questions about SNAP, the "Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests," on this blog, and over time, just by doing the blog, discovered how the bishops used SNAP to con the crime victims. That's why SNAP tried so hard to stop CofA Blog from the beginning.<br />
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3. By creating SNAP in the 1980s, the bishops heard everyone's story. The crime victims would not pour their hearts out to a priest or therapist at the chancery, but all of us opened up and told everything to Blaine and Clohessy, trusting them with reverence as if they were saints.<br />
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4. The day I realized what SNAP really was (c. Feb 2010) I had a physical reaction. I dropped the phone and started shaking and that lasted two or three days, I kept under control with muscle relaxants. It was when I realized just how evil these people are, my body could not contain it, could not accept or "grok" it, without first a physical reaction. To think people can actually be this evil, just how much else has the Catholic Church done to cover up its crimes over the centuries?<br />
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5. When I was at the SNAP conference in 2008, I left my laptop in the hotel room while I attended different events. Someone broke in my room and used my computer in a way that caused me to be permanently banned from using Google Ads to monetize my blogs. Back in 2008, I was just starting to get a check from Google every month, I have Never been able to fix the problem that happened while my laptop was unattended in the hotel in Chicago. To This Day I can't even run ads at YouTube and almost all ads online at every other site are Google. Apparently the Chicago Archdiocese was determined to keep me from making any money doing this blog or any other blog. That was 2008. The attacks on me increased after Feb. 2010.<br />
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And then there was the <a href="http://cityofangels15.blogspot.com/2014/04/that-spider-bite-could-have-killed-me.html">poison spider let loose</a> in my rented room in Appalachia.<br />
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In retrospect I see the bishops used SNAP to put their crime victims exactly where they needed us to be to find out everything about us and fuck with us if we started to get effective.<br />
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-ke<br />
(hiding in the desert)Kay Ebelinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13753284586265566961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5782652940285448862.post-2401364196816283382014-09-23T14:55:00.001-07:002014-09-24T01:54:16.171-07:00Because I came out of nowhere starting CofA Blog in Jan 2007, for a short period I had a unique perspective on what happened in the pedophile priest survivor "movement." As a result I saw patterns and heard stories that those doing "damage control" did not want any journalist to see. I published what I saw and got blacklisted and sabotaged, a campaign that is still going on today. Needless to say, the true story of pedophile priest crime coverups in the United States has not been told, because the very persons who are supposed to be advocating for us were really working for the Church. Their resources are so extensive, it's useless for me to continue doing journalism on this topic. I know SNAP will step in and nullify it. That's what they do. Nullified is best way to describe how the pedophile priest story broke from Boston to Australia and look who has been "in charge" the whole time. No bishops have been indicted for aiding and abetting felonies that cross state and national boundaries, even with evidence in lawsuit documents from past two decades. The survivors are dispersed, disconnected, and defused. Thousands of sex crimes against children went unpunished while the perpetrators and their enablers are still community leaders. And for me, this is the story that will not go away.Kay Ebelinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13753284586265566961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5782652940285448862.post-27606964970144879092013-07-18T09:11:00.000-07:002014-09-24T05:13:54.931-07:00The Story That Won't Go Away<i>I believe SNAP was created by the bishops around 1984 to do damage control and keep the story of pedophile priests as untold as possible. <a href="http://cityofangels2.blogspot.com/2011/09/whole-snap-story-from-city-of-angels.html">Read the posts below here at CofA 2</a> for more about the experience I had producing this blog that caused me to come to these conclusions. </i><br />
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UPDATE: September 2014: Why did SNAP go to the Center for Constitutional Rights to file theor cases first with the Hague and then with the UN, when there were survivors chomping on the bit for decades for an opportunity to take action at this level. Instead SNAP left everyone else out of the loop and in secret went to a group in NY that does great work but was uneducated in the ways of the Vatican and the needs of survivors nationwide. Why? Why leave out experienced educated people who you claim to represent, professionals who've been studying this issue for decades, and instead outsource this important work to strangers? Especially since survivors on their own had been trying since at least 2006 to take international steps and SNAP had ignored us.<br />
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UPDATE: April 2014: The Hague filing was started by survivors in Germany in Spring 2011 then SNAP held a press conference and it segued into a Hague filing by SNAP in Fall 2011, then it turned into the Feb 2014 UN filing and now nobody in the general public knows it even happened, most the survivors don't know either. SNAP took it over, kept it from getting big, then let it die. <br />
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UPDATE: July 2014: UN verbally sanctions the Vatican then no one heard about it. SNAP took over work other survivors were doing, made it theirs with great media fanfare, then let it fizzle and die.<br />
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UPDATE JULY 2014: They just held a 25th Anniversary conference and barely mentioned this major accomplishment at the UN, after all that work there was never any follow-up using their local branches to inform local media around the world, which is what a REAL survivor organization would do. SNAP barely publicized their own work. That Makes No Sense unless they are Counter Intelligence, whose sole purpose is nullifying the survivor movement. And they succeeded, bk it takes people so long to realize what SNAP is that the damage is already done by the time people figure it out. <br />
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In Feb 2010 I published my belief that SNAP was counter intelligence*, created to control the pedophile priest survivors and run damage control over the story as it broke across the USA and now across the world. At the time SNAP's reaction to what I wrote at City of Angels Blog was as revealing as all the things victims had been telling me across the country, that <b>SNAP keeps survivors from accomplishing anything they try at a local level</b>. For publishing what I found out in Feb 2010 I got blackballed and shunned, as if it were the middle ages. <br />
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But in the years since, no one from SNAP showed me I was wrong.<br />
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In fact SNAP's reaction proves what I was saying was true, and<span style="font-size: large;"> </span><a href="http://cityofangels8.blogspot.com/2010/12/preview-revealing-concepts-in-1995.html"><span style="font-size: large;">little bits of evidence</span></a> support it Wherever the story breaks, wherever pedophile priest survivors and activists are doing something on their own, SNAP shows up and with its extensive resources, takes over the story and becomes the focal point of it. Then after one or two press events, you never hear anything about it again. SNAP returns to St. Louis, and the locals activists are left impotent, SNAP takes all the contact information with them when they leave.<br />
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Watch. It will happen now with the UN, like it did with The Hague, a flurry of activity in the press, then no follow-up. [So far that's what happened. A flurry of activity with UN in Feb 2014, then crickets, and no one but a few people following the story even know it happened- ke July '14)<br />
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The insight I got about how SNAP operates that I got from interviewing survivors all across the country in 2007-10 was exactly what SNAP was trying to keep me or any journalist from finding out. So they set out to snuff me out as a writer and reporter on this subject. And they almost succeeded, why wouldn't they, when they have all the resources of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops behind them?<br />
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They fly anywhere in the country, now the world, where the story is breaking and immediately start running damage control.<br />
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Look more closely. Nothing SNAP does results in bishops losing their power. SNAP actively publicizes cases that are already in the news, but they've usually shown up after the story breaks. Or the <a href="http://www.tribtoday.com/page/content.detail/id/592339/Church--abuse-group-spar-for-second-day.html?nav=5021">stories they choose to break</a> fizzle, or involve lay teachers and non Catholic predators, or in the end make the church look good. The reader is left wondering why SNAP chose that case to publicize, out of the hundreds of thousands of cases out there. Lord knows SNAP does not consult with the hundred thousand survivors in any way. SNAP's actual goal appears to be steering plaintiffs to attorneys, who then file lawsuits, and all details of these crimes remain secret. <br />
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And worst of all, there actually is no support network for the victims of pedophile priests. Just a series of press events that we watch with detachment because we know the story will never go any farther.<br />
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And today's mainstream media just swallow it whole and never dig any deeper.<br />
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There are a hundred thousand crime victims in this issue, and no real network of support. The group that claims to advocate for us actually works for the Church. There are a few local groups run by sincere local volunteers that meet, but for the most part, pedophile priest victims have all been left out here alone in the hinterlands to watch three people who run SNAP appear over and over in the news, saying they represent us, when they really have nothing to do with any of us. It's been so weird to be part of this and watch it happen.<br />
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See the previous posts here to find out how, after interviewing survivors around the country in spite of SNAP, I discovered this fraud, covered it, and got ostracized. But never proved wrong.<br />
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<i>-ke</i><br />
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*Except in Wisconsin. For some reason Peter Iseley is able to get real things done through SNAP. Don't know why but in that one place SNAP works.<br />
.Kay Ebelinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13753284586265566961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5782652940285448862.post-89480626202447830812013-06-10T14:35:00.000-07:002014-02-24T00:33:27.378-08:00<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">I believe U.S. Catholic bishops manipulated crime</span><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"> v</span><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">ictims as</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> well as the media to stop </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">the story of </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">pedophile priests </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">from emerging anymore than it had to. They invented SNAP to appear as activists for "survivors" when its true purpose was to stifle activism and keep grass-roots organizing from taking place. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><b>Nullification. </b>SNAP's purpose last two decades in the U.S. was to nullify any work victims did on their own locally. SNAP would show up, take over, and then the local project would fizzle and disappear. With few exceptions, SNAP prevented the scandal from emerging in the U.S., while the 2-3 people who run SNAP nationally stood up in front of cameras claiming to represent the victims. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #fff3db; color: #29303b;">Today</span></span><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #fff3db; color: #29303b;"> </span><a href="http://cityofangels8.blogspot.com/2010/12/preview-revealing-concepts-in-1995.html" style="background-color: #fff3db; color: #956839;">little bits of evidence</a><span style="background-color: #fff3db; color: #29303b;"> support what my experience showed me, </span></span><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #fff3db; color: #29303b;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #fff3db; color: #29303b;">that </span></span><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #fff3db; color: #29303b;">SNAP </span><span style="background-color: #fff3db; color: #29303b;">is counter-intelligence, created b</span></span><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #fff3db; color: #29303b;">y U.S. Catholic bishops in th</span><span style="background-color: #fff3db; color: #29303b;">e mid-1980s to manage </span><span style="background-color: #fff3db; color: #29303b;">the </span><span style="background-color: #fff3db; color: #29303b;">pedophile priest issue as news of it </span><span style="background-color: #fff3db; color: #29303b;">broke, </span><span style="background-color: #fff3db; color: #29303b;">and to </span><span style="background-color: #fff3db; color: #29303b;">keep the crime victims under control. SNAP is </span></span><span style="background-color: #fff3db; color: #29303b; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">the ubiquitous Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests. </span><span style="background-color: #fff3db; color: #29303b; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">They don't provide a network or support. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: #fff3db; color: #29303b; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: #fff3db; color: #29303b; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">They run </span><span style="background-color: #fff3db; color: #29303b; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Damage Control </span><span style="background-color: #fff3db; color: #29303b; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">I know. I was doing damage and I got controlled. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #fff3db; color: #29303b;"><br /></span>
Posts below were written as events took place. From the time I started City of Angels Blog in 2007, SNAP was sabotaging me. I finally realized what they were and wrote it in a post Feb 2010 and became blacklisted and shunned, honest, it was almost medieval. The posts below still stand the test of time; but they also show my confusion as the incidents took place, so these posts now serve as a rough first draft for a story of intrigue, deception, subterfuge, and reckless disregard for the lives of a hundred thousand crime victims of pedophile priests, on the part of U.S. Catholic bishops and their agents. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br />
N<b>o way I'm going to drop this story,</b> as so many have tried to make me do. it just may take a few years to polish it and produce it, but I will keep writing it. <i>-ke </i></span>Kay Ebelinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13753284586265566961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5782652940285448862.post-1017405518114111602011-09-29T15:15:00.000-07:002014-09-24T06:08:53.211-07:00The Other SNAP Story of Counter Intelligence and Sink Holes**<i>SNAP presents itself as a support network for survivors of pedophile priest crimes, but what SNAP really does is damage control. I know. I was creating damage and I got controlled.</i><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">UPDATED regularly </span><br />
<i>Also see <a href="http://cityofangels2.blogspot.com/2011/02/blog-post.html">Chapter 2 Angelic Intervention</a> and <a href="http://cityofangels2.blogspot.com/2010/12/soundtrack-for-1969-chapters.html">Chapter 3 Other States</a>, ongoing reporting on the counter espionage aka fake support organization SNAP and how it ran damage control for the church in the pedophile priest crisis. A <a href="http://cityofangels2.blogspot.com/2010/02/i-remember-moment-in-pershing-square.html">somewhat more cohesive version</a> of this story was written in 2010-2011... and as time passes, there will be more to come.</i><br />
<br />
<b>Feb 2014</b><br />
Don't expect anything more about the UN Commission or The Hague. Both those projects were already taking place when SNAP stepped in and stifled them. Now we won't hear anything more. That's what they do. Step in and take over things survivors are doing on their own, claim them as SNAP's, then let them fizzle and disappear. That was SNAP's way of doing damage control in the USA and now they are exporting it worldwide.<br />
<b>May 15, 2013</b><br />
With decades of criminal activity that should be investigated in the Chicago Archdiocese, SNAP draws attention to this one ex-priest who is at least, making a living and supporting himself after being removed from ministry for sex abuse allegations:<br />
<a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=X&q=http://www.dailyherald.com/article/20130515/news/705159837/&ct=ga&cad=CAcQARgBIAAoATAAOABAnKvPjAVIAVAAWABiBWVuLVVT&cd=o74Rsf05u48&usg=AFQjCNGCdE37fCOcY7CegR4Hh4xyCKA29g" style="background-color: white; color: #1111cc; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.666666984558105px;" target="_blank">SNAP wants ex-<b>priest</b> fired from Des Plaines facility</a><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5782652940285448862" style="color: #777777;">Chicago Daily Herald</a><br />The <b>Survivors Network</b> of those <b>Abused by Priests</b> has submitted letters to the Archdiocese of Chicago and Advocate Health Care demanding Russell Lawrence Romano, a counselor in Advocate's Illinois Professional Health Program, be fired. Advertisement <b>...</b></span><br />
Plus upon further scrutiny of this story, once again SNAP opened an opportunity for the Archdiocese to look good and victims to look like unrealistic witch hunters. Chicago is the HQ of SNAP, yet Illinois victims get no window for civil lawsuits in new legislation and Cardinals Stritch, Bernardin, and George go un-investigated. Chicagoland parishes thrive, and all the Catholics I've met here think the pedophile priest victims were just out for the money, a message SNAP has sent out. Plus I am persona non grata for criticizing SNAP. Only two survivor activists in Chicago would speak to me in the year I've been here. Apparently survivors are not allowed to point out elephants in the room when it comes to SNAP. They'll end up being treated like I am being treated. Oh well, I had to write what I saw was truth, let the repercussions fall, it's what I have to do.<br />
<br />
<div id="yui_3_7_2_1_1368610193279_13519" style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">
<span id="yui_3_7_2_1_1368610193279_13518">This observation of SNAP has gotten me ostracized and despised, </span></div>
<div id="yui_3_7_2_1_1368610193279_13521" style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">
<span id="yui_3_7_2_1_1368610193279_13520">so would I write it if I did not believe it to be true? </span></div>
<br />
In 2007-2009, SNAP went to every city as the pedophile priest story broke in the USA, vacuumed up all the contact information of press and victims, then took it all back with them to St. Louis or Chicago. SNAP executives kept to themselves all the data on allegations against new priests, new victims coming forward, and names of news media interested in writing more stories. They then don't follow up. <br />
<br />
They never follow up.<br />
<br />
<i>Everything victims tell SNAP gets lost in a sinkhole somewhere between Chicago and St. Louis.</i><br />
<br />
<b>May 6, 2013</b><br />
They take center stage when the news is there. SNAP was ubiquitous in the Papal conclave and release of archdiocese files in L.A. recently. Wherever reporters are going, SNAP gets itself there, then there is no follow-up. SNAP gets quoted everywhere, then sucks up all the contact information and goes silent again. There is no vast connection of the hundreds of thousands of victims worldwide, rallying together. There's just these streams of PR events.<br />
<br />
<b>April 7, 2013</b><br />
They are doing it again: "<span style="background-color: #dfddbd; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', georgia, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; line-height: 18.285715103149414px;">The pope should demote or discipline a few bishops who were found to have covered up misdeeds, said David Clohessy, executive director of Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, noting that Bishop Robert Finn of Kansas City has held onto..."</span><br />
Once they are in a position to say something significant, such as turn the bishops over to law enforcement, release all files, they <a href="http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/04/06/17620009-solving-the-sex-abuse-crisis-experts-draft-a-to-do-list-for-pope-francis?lite">instead say something milquetoast</a> like, "demote the bishops." Of course by now the media have learned to just call SNAP for a sound bite, so this is all coverage we get. New reporters don't realize SNAP has been repeating the same maxims since 2002, so gobble them up and publish them word for word. And no bishop ever suffers.<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>March 27, 2013</b><br />
<span class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1364384599_0" style="font-family: 'times new roman', 'new york', times, serif;">SNAP</span><span style="font-family: 'times new roman', 'new york', times, serif;"> had all that time in the media last weeks in Rome during the conclave, yet SNAP never once mentioned either the UN statement on clergy abuse or SNAP's own Hague filing against the Papacy itself. If they were real SNAP would have been talking up both of those major developments, including the UN and the CCR in their news releases, taking advantage of the time they had news cameras pointing to them, talking up progress they've made so far. Instead SNAP just found another new victim or two to put in front of the camera and now the media is silent about all of it. </span><br />
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Been sleeping a lot</div>
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<br /></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">March 1, 2013:</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'times new roman', 'new york', times, serif; font-size: 18.85714340209961px;">A group of us tried to get SNAP to approach the UN Committee on Rights of the Child back in 2006 and got no response. Then last week the UN mentions clerical abuse of children in two sentences of a report, the news media pick it up and go to SNAP for a quote, and SNAP is like a deer in the headlights, totally caught off guard not knowing what to say. Now days later SNAP has filed a document with the UN committee for children and Clohessy is holding press events in The Vatican to announce it. </span><br />
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</div>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'times new roman', 'new york', times, serif; font-size: 18.85714340209961px;">Reading reports this week of SNAP's UN document, I'm thinking, could I have been wrong? Is SNAP really working for survivors? But then I realized. The UN commission on children has been there all these twenty years of SNAP's control of the "movement," yet SNAP execs never filed a paper with the UN Committee on Rights of the Child until this week. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'times new roman', 'new york', times, serif; font-size: 18.85714340209961px;">Once again SNAP execs are taking their steps after someone else has done work that has made headlines. Once again, SNAP takes something they had nothing to do with and makes it their own and uses it to get the name of SNAP all over the news. So from here on out every story about the UN committee children and pedophile clergy will include quotes from SNAP, and no reporter will ever dig any deeper. </span><br />
<div id="yui_3_7_2_34_1361979212637_102" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'times new roman', 'new york', times, serif; font-size: 18.85714340209961px;">
And the story will never go any further. </div>
<div id="yui_3_7_2_34_1361979212637_105" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'times new roman', 'new york', times, serif; font-size: 18.85714340209961px;">
SNAP execs are So Good at making themselves look So Good that this week I was even starting to fall for it myself, for a while anyway. Now I see it's just more of the same. <span style="font-size: 18.85714340209961px;">Back in 2006 several of us wanted SNAP to approach the UN committee on children. We discussed it at the SNAP message board, but we could never got a rise out of the execs of SNAP. </span></div>
<div id="yui_3_7_2_34_1361979212637_108" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'times new roman', 'new york', times, serif; font-size: 18.85714340209961px;">
Then in February 2013 mainstream news reports that the UN Committee on Rights of the Child on its own mentioned clergy sex abuse of children in the U.S., and SNAP execs are all over it. </div>
<div id="yui_3_7_2_34_1361979212637_111" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'times new roman', 'new york', times, serif; font-size: 18.85714340209961px;">
<span style="font-size: 18.85714340209961px;">Also, last Wednesday was SNAP's lobby day in Springfield Illinois as there is a bill in the legislature there to eliminate the SOL on child sex crimes. SNAP was silent about the bill until a Chicago lawyer (not one of Jeff Anderson's group) sent out a mass email telling people about the bill. Then SNAP organized a lobby day. Then Wednesday came and went and there was NOTHING in the news about the Illinois bill or SNAP's lobbying efforts.</span></div>
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As always, SNAP jumps on a bandwagon after someone else has gotten it rolling, so it's likely that as always the bandwagon will mysteriously come to a stop. </div>
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Don't count on any follow-up with SNAP and the UN after this week, but their document filing sure gives Clohessy a great way to get his name and SNAP in the news over and over again. So now any researcher seeking follow-up information from a survivor perspective about the UN will go to SNAP and copy down what they say and print it. And there will never be any progress with the UN after that, or any stories about survivors in the U.S. that go farther than a quote from SNAP. </div>
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<br /></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>UPDATE Dec. 4, 2012:</b></span><br />
<br />
<div id="yui_3_7_2_388_1354558007853_39" style="font-family: 'times new roman', 'new york', times, serif; font-size: 18.85714340209961px;">
Not only is SNAP in a lot of news events in Australia right now, they are showing up unannounced at people's houses. They are announcing a press event three hours before it happens, so the result is chaos and minimal coverage. </div>
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Barbara Blaine is center stage</div>
<div id="yui_3_7_2_388_1354558007853_39" style="font-family: 'times new roman', 'new york', times, serif; font-size: 18.85714340209961px;">
Several Aussie survivors are enamored of her now, think she and SNAP are The Greatest and the Snap execs are getting across the message in Australia, "We know how to do it, we've been doing this for years, so this is how to do it," </div>
<div id="yui_3_7_2_388_1354558007853_39" style="font-family: 'times new roman', 'new york', times, serif; font-size: 18.85714340209961px;">
and then they take Aussie survivors with them to leaflet on church properties, outside church offices, etc... where church hierarchy can see everyone there and everything they do, same pattern as in the U.S. </div>
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Yes, they know how to do it, just look at the results in the USA. A hundred thousand victims yet no real network of survivors, no foundation. But if you Google any perpetrator priest, you will find news stories featuring Barbara Blaine and SNAP. </div>
<div id="yui_3_7_2_388_1354558007853_39" style="font-family: 'times new roman', 'new york', times, serif; font-size: 18.85714340209961px;">
She's is the Killroy pf the survivor movement. Except in World War Two, the American soldiers who wrote "Kilroy Was Here" on walls all over Europe were able to win a war. </div>
<div id="yui_3_7_2_388_1354558007853_39" style="font-family: 'times new roman', 'new york', times, serif; font-size: 18.85714340209961px;">
No American bishop has gone to prison after more than 20 years of SNAP running the "movement" in the USA.</div>
<div id="yui_3_7_2_388_1354558007853_39" style="font-family: 'times new roman', 'new york', times, serif; font-size: 18.85714340209961px;">
SNAP showed up at one of my friend's houses in Australia, at his front door, no advance notice, Blaine and Iseley, wanting my friend to drop everything and join them at their press event. My friend was working and they wanted him to come with them to their last minute press event. </div>
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No advance notice for their press events, for the media or the survivors. Sound familiar? </div>
<div id="yui_3_7_2_388_1354558007853_39" style="font-family: 'times new roman', 'new york', times, serif; font-size: 18.85714340209961px;">
I mean, it's a 14 hour plane ride and they must have spent some time in the Chicago airport before taking off, couldn't they have planned something in advance? </div>
<div id="yui_3_7_2_388_1354558007853_39" style="font-family: 'times new roman', 'new york', times, serif; font-size: 18.85714340209961px;">
<span style="font-size: 18.85714340209961px;">IMPORTANT ABOUT THE REPEATED PATTERN; </span></div>
<div id="yui_3_7_2_388_1354558007853_39" style="font-family: 'times new roman', 'new york', times, serif; font-size: 18.85714340209961px;">
<span style="font-size: 18.85714340209961px;">Remember, the survivors in Australia really accomplished something on their own, getting a Royal Inquiry into Institutional Child Sex Abuse started in November 2012. So by the end of that month, of course SNAP showed up and made the pedophile priest issue in Australia theirs and, well, we'll watch and see what happens next. </span></div>
<div id="yui_3_7_2_388_1354558007853_39" style="font-family: 'times new roman', 'new york', times, serif; font-size: 18.85714340209961px;">
<span style="font-size: 18.85714340209961px;">But just like efforts by Germans in spring 2011 to get The Hague to prosecute the Pope that were overcome by SNAP's similar efforts in Fall on 2011, just like efforts to hold several events in the USA that were taken over by SNAP from 2001 to 2011, indeed just as the entire survivor movement in the USA went from being run by gaggles of victims winging it at a grass roots level in the 1990s to SNAP stepping in and taking over what locals were doing, and then conducting very managed and exclusive damage control of the story, SNAP is now stepping in and beginning its information management in Australia. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 18.85714340209961px;">Oh, and Blaine can not really be running SNAP. Most of the time she is off in graduate school. She now has a Masters in Divinity as well as a Law Degree, all earned since 2001 while she has been President of SNAP. Someone is writing those sound bytes and sending her wherever the story breaks. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 18.85714340209961px;">And Clohessy seems to have disappeared <a href="http://www.speroforum.com/a/DEUFWIUGWY15/63355-Kansas-City-Star-coverup-for-SNAP">just as the press finally got wind</a> that his own brother was a pedophile priest whose crimes Clohessy hid. Mainstream press still has not made the connection that at the same time Clohessy's brother went secretly into treatment, Clohessy was named by "somebody" to be Executive Director of SNAP. </span></div>
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Mainstream media still has not realized that the great job SNAP has done in the survivor movement exists mostly in SNAP press releases. Otherwise there would be much more outrage among Catholics and several bishops would be in U.S. prisons. </div>
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What can one survivor do? Me, I'm writing fiction now at <a href="http://cityofangels15.blogspot.com/">City of Angels 15</a>, and trying not to dwell on the SNAP counterintelligence story as it makes my blood pressure rise too high. <br />
Still The Other SNAP Story continues here when there are new developments.</div>
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like it or not</div>
<div id="yui_3_7_2_388_1354558007853_39" style="font-family: 'times new roman', 'new york', times, serif; font-size: 18.85714340209961px;">
<span style="font-size: 18.85714340209961px;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 18.85714340209961px;">****************</span></div>
<br />
(<b>Nov. 27, 2012: </b>It's not slander if it's the truth. No one has ever contacted me saying this story is not true.)<br />
<br />
UPDATE: October 24, 2012<br />
<span style="font-size: 18pt; line-height: 115%;">If SNAP had really been a survivors network there’d be American bishops in prison right now.</span><span style="font-size: 18pt; line-height: 115%;"> </span><span style="font-size: 18pt; line-height: 115%;">People look at the pedophile priest survivor movement in the U.S. and say
SNAP did a great job.</span><span style="font-size: 18pt; line-height: 115%;"> </span><span style="font-size: 18pt; line-height: 115%;">I see the church
skating over most the charges, and victims keeping their stories secret. The "movement" turned into a mass of civil lawsuits, where details of the crimes stay hidden in documents and the parties stay silent. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: 18pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: 18pt; line-height: 115%;">With a hundred thousand victims of these crimes in the USA today, why isn't there a powerful voice or a movement, why isn't there a network and foundation of survivors? Why doesn't the world know by now what happened? </span><br />
<br />
<b>UPDATE: October 3, 2012.</b><br />
<b><span style="font-size: large;">A SINK HOLE</span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-size: large;">Somewhere between Chicago and St. Louis</span></b><br />
<b><br /></b>
Still ruminating on all this and what it comes down to is:<br />
<br />
In 2007-2009, SNAP went to every city as the pedophile priest story broke in the USA, sucked up all the contact information, then took it all back with them to St. Louis or Chicago. SNAP executives kept all the information about pedophile priests, new victims coming forward, and news media interested in writing more stories to themselves. Then SNAP never follows up.<br />
<br />
All the information at SNAP gets lost in a sinkhole somewhere between Chicago and St. Louis.<br />
<br />
As a result, today even though there are a hundred thousand victims in the USA, there is no network, we are all disconnected and loose on our own, with maybe a small local support group in some cities, not many, where local people work in spite of obstacles. For the most part we do not know each other and have not been able to really combine our information and see the patterns of crime at the top. <br />
<br />
They convinced many pedophile priest victims to keep their stories secret, used words like "Shame" struck in all of us a fear of the Church then did all their demonstrations in front of the church under the church's security cameras. SNAP used the same techniques as the church uses, that yearly conference where every minute is controlled and no individual victim's work is ever acknowledged.<br />
<br />
End result is, the hundred thousand stories have remained secret, there have been no significant convictions of bishops , and worst yet, the victims/survivors are disparate. We all still don't know how bad it really was. Nobody ever found out more than what was released through the news media. Then SNAP stepped in and there would be no more story.<br />
<br />
Every action they took, at least since 2002 when they "revived," was a response to stories that were already in the news. Over and over SNAP insinuated themselves on each pedophile priest story as it broke, designated themselves as the go-to persons for victims and media. That is the key to how this "project" worked. They kept all the contact information to themselves, while claiming to be a network. <br />
<br />
Today the only communication there is comes in blind CC'd emails. So today most pedo-priest victims do not even know who are other victims in their own regions.<br />
<br />
SNAP is a hologram. <br />
<br />
********<br />
Previous stuff, needs a lot of editing, but this is a difficult story to tell:<br />
********<br />
This post about a "support network" for pedophile priest victims that curiously operates in a way that prevents "survivors" from finding each other, comparing notes, or becoming an aggressive activist force based on our numbers- about a "support group" that I concluded is actually counter intelligence created by the bishops to run damage control on this crisis in the Catholic Church- is a work in progress.<br />
<br />
(You can also read <a href="http://cityofangels2.blogspot.com/2011/02/blog-post.html">Angelic Intervention Chapter 2</a> and read <a href="http://cityofangels2.blogspot.com/2010/12/soundtrack-for-1969-chapters.html">Chapter 3: Other States: SNAP Curious Pattern Repeated all over the USA</a> in progress, about obstructions other pedophile priest victims have experienced. ALSO: Documents that I think support my suspicions are here: <a href="http://cityofangels8.blogspot.com/2010/02/city-of-angels-is-down-for-while.html"><span style="color: #473624;">Docs in SNAP Group Leaders Packet 1997 scanned here</span></a> from the packet I received from SNAP when I ran a small group for them in San Francisco in 1997. Towards the end, this post is a rough draft, but I've left it here as it documents, in a way, what happened when I first posted these observations in Feb. 2010. )<br />
<br />
I did not want the story to go this direction, it just went... <br />
<br />
*********<br />
<br />
Just as sex molestation charges were being dismissed against Father Kevin Clohessy in St. Louis, his brother David Clohessy took reins as Executive Director of SNAP, about ten years into the life of the non profit. Father Kevin <a href="http://www.bishop-accountability.org/news3/2002_04_08_Rice_PriestAccused_John_Whiteley_2.htm">faced vague charges of sex abuse of a minor</a> details of which have never emerged. (<a href="http://www.firstgiving.com/fundraiser/kevin-clohessy/kevinclohessy">Read more about Kevin Clohessy here</a>) Interesting chain of events, and timing. <br />
<br />
<br />
SNAP had been started in the mid-1980s by Barbara Blaine, soon after she got her MSW from University of St. Louis, a Jesuit college, and began her career as a social worker with a Catholic social services agency in Chicago. Soon after starting SNAP as a tiny nonprofit, Blaine went to law school.<br />
<br />
Now (2012) the Archdiocese of St. Louis is according to SNAP trying to dismantle SNAP with subpoenas, which I find curious, since it looks to me more like the Archdiocese of St. Louis started SNAP back in the 1980s, around the same time Servants of the Paracletes ended their operations in New Mexico and moved to Missouri, just outside St. Louis.<br />
<br />
Is it a coincidence that David Clohessy was named Executive Director of a "support organization" for pedophile priest victims around the same time that his brother, Father Kevin, got his charges dropped for molesting a minor?<br />
<br />
They can say, "We are the largest, oldest and most active support group," for pedophile priest victims, because they prevent any other groups or projects from being able to form.<br />
<br />
SNAP went to great lengths to destroy the credibility of City of Angels Blog and of me, the blogger, when I was posting stories and documents that were not being published anywhere else, about sex crimes of Catholic priests. If you look closely, SNAP mainly responds to stories already breaking, or about to break, then takes over control of information about each story as it breaks: Damage control. <br />
<br />
What ever happened to the Linkup, which was a genuine survivor generated organization? When the Linkup director died, all their records vanished. Then SNAP emerged as the "voice" of pedophile priest victims. If you look closely, you find that most of the hundred thousand victims of pedophild priests in the USA feel marginalized, isolated, and that we have no voice at all. <br />
11/25/11: You get screwed by a priest as a child, you get screwed by the church when you tell them about it, then you get screwed by the organization that is supposed to be a support group for survivors. If I were the only person to have this experience with SNAP, I would not write it. The effect is so depleting that most survivors just quit trying to be advocates and leave the "movement." (Email Kay Ebeling at cityofangelslady@yahoo.com to comment.)<br />
<br />
***************<br />
<br />
(<strong>This story is still a work in progress.</strong>)<br />
<br />
<strong>By Kay Ebeling</strong><br />
<br />
Oh no! Now they are maneuvering all reports for The Hague on pedophile priests to go to SNAP, assuring that from here on out, those new charges will be heard as little as possible...<br />
<br />
<strong>Having victims leaflet outside cathedrals is perfect for the Church.<br /><br />The bishops can see everything we do. </strong><br />
<br />
I was pressured into stopping City of Angels Blog by an ongoing onslaught. I was under attack from all different directions, in subtle ways that you can't quite pinpoint, but that add up to intimidation. In one last gasp, I wrote <a href="http://cityofangels11.blogspot.com/2011/04/chicago-archdiocese-tries-to-silence.html">this post in April 2011</a> that had to be removed and then <a href="http://cityofangels12.blogspot.com/2012/04/chi-archdiocese-tries-to-silence-cofa.html">updated here</a> in April 2012. The message I was getting was the more I produced the blog, the more the scare tactics would increase.<br />
<br />
[UPDATE: Someone <a href="http://cityofangels15.blogspot.com/2014/04/that-spider-bite-could-have-killed-me.html">even tried to poison me in 2011</a> in West Virginia. This is a true story. It is now September 2014 and I still have the weird symptoms and no doctor can find the cause.]<br />
Believe me, I know writing The Other SNAP Story makes me look like a paranoid or jealous saboteur, that's part of how perfect their scheme was. Anyone who starts to see the scheme and point it out looks like a paranoid or jealous saboteur. Stranger yet, several other victims share my feelings that, if nothing else, something is not right with SNAP. But it's all set up so people are afraid to criticize, and those who do point out something is wrong get shunned and ostracized instead of heard. Just like the Catholic Church. The pedophile priest movement was manipulated so the victims see the leaders as saints who can do no wrong, even while they are doing wrong... sound familiar?<br />
<br />
There's no point in me being silent about this. City of Angels Blog was on the verge of being a source of real networking and exposure of the pedophile priest epidemic in the Catholic Church and how the bishops covered up the crimes. The only thing that stopped the blog from growing was SNAP's work behind the scenes to destroy the blog. And as CofA Blog developed, SNAP's efforts to kill it became more forceful.<br />
<br />
Apparently what I was seeing as I produced the blog was exactly what SNAP was working so hard to keep me, or anyone else, from being able to see. So now, I have to write about it, and what have I got to lose, I'm already ostracized.<br />
<br />
In the first two years of the blog, my phone was ringing all day, my email was full every day. But eerily, the more I worked, the less response I'd get. Strange things would happen to me and I realized the only explanation was that SNAP was sabotaging me behind the scenes. At first I did not want to think SNAP was the cause of the problem, but by early 2010 it became blatantly obvious. The story of counter-intelligence work of SNAP is now, to me, more important to write than details of the priests' crimes.<br />
<br />
***<br />
As to what is posted here, this really did happen, I really did see these things. I had a unique perspective as a result of producing City of Angels Blog from 2007 to 2011 where I interviewed pedophile priest crime victims and their families and lawyers around the country. Individual victims kept volunteering to me problems they had with SNAP preventing their efforts to work at a local level, when I was calling them about something else. At the same time, "something" was beating down my efforts to do the blog and making it almost impossible for me to continue: getting me removed from other sites, intervening, putting up obstacles, obstructing. The one common denominator throughout the experience was SNAP.... So I started writing this, in Feb. 2010.)<br />
******************<br />
<br />
<strong>With a hundred thousand victims of pedophile priests in the USA, isn't it strange that only a handful appear at any SNAP event?<br /><br />The pattern is new arrivals participate enthusiastically, then a few months later get discouraged and disappear.</strong><br />
<br />
Although they call themselves a network, SNAP works hard to prevent victims from developing a real network, to keep us from finding and talking to each other, all while putting an image out to the public that they were "giving voice" to victims. SNAP often describes itself as "The oldest" and now "the only" organization that has developed in the pedophile priest crime community, which is true, because SNAP makes sure no other groups are able to form and grow.<br />
<br />
No matter how much I tried to focus on stories about the sex crimes of the priests, whoever I was interviewing would want to tell me about the strange things SNAP had done in their towns. I know that my phone was tapped, you could literally hear the clicking noise. In a phone conversation, every time I'd say the word "bishop" or "pedophile priest" the clicking noise would start. Then, a few days later, whoever I was talking to would suddenly, out of the blue, be contacted by SNAP and steered away from me.<br />
<br />
Somehow SNAP found out who I was talking to and then they would intervene.<br />
<br />
SNAP's obstruction became so obvious that after a while I would just wait for it to happen. I'd track down and interview a pedophile priest crime victim, then wait to see how long it would be before that victim would be contacted by Clohessy or Blaine and be convinced not to talk to me anymore. Soon the phone stopped ringing and the emails stopped coming. Then the victim I was writing about would show up front and center at a SNAP media event that suddenly took place in their town.<br />
<br />
By mid-2009 it became almost like a game. I'd be working on a story by phone with a victim, then I'd just wait for the intervention to happen, and sure enough, next time I called them they'd have some explanation for why they could not continue to work on a story with me, and the explanation always involved some interaction they'd just had with SNAP.<br />
<br />
(INSERT HERE: the Chicago pizza joint coincidence.*)<br />
<br />
A guy in San Diego was real bad at subterfuge. In the middle of a phone call he said, Whoa, wait a minute, are you that Kay and hung up on me. The behind the scenes maneuverings became real obvious to me.<br />
<br />
A survivor in New Mexico spent hours on the phone with me, for a story I was to publish two weeks later when he had one final piece of information. In our conversation he assured me that since he was an active member of AA, he knew how important it was to "be there" when someone called. He said, "Call anytime, I'll drop everything and talk to you, as a group we need each other." He also had a conversation coming up soon with Clohessy. I called him two weeks later for that last bit for the sorry and he would not take or return my call. What was said to him between the two phone calls?<br />
<br />
That happened over and over again, a pattern, and soon every story I developed, I ran into an obstruction.<br />
<br />
So for now, I figure, I have nothing to lose. I still wake up in the middle of the night today (October 2011) with a strong message, I need to tell this story. I have to not care whether everyone hates me for saying it, I need to write it here, and let people find it, and if they hate me for it, oh well, that's life. So here goes:<br />
<br />
*******<br />
<br />
Victims come and go regularly, but "survivors" rarely stay involved with SNAP for a long period of time. Still the founder and the director of the group, along with a handful of new victims, manage to be front and center dominating the coverage<br />
<br />
Wherever and whenever the story of pedophile priests is breaking in the news, there is David Clohessy's sound byte that says nothing more than what is already in the news, yet it's repeated over and over by copy and paste journalists.<br />
<br />
The outflow of facts gets contained.<br />
<br />
Does SNAP do advocacy for pedophile priest victims, or was SNAP really created in the 1980s to run damage control for the Catholic Church?<br />
<br />
*****<br />
<br />
It's now Fall of 2011 now and as I look back, it makes me so sad.<br />
<br />
Imagine how wonderful City of Angels Blog could have been if there were a genuine support network for pedophile priest victims, but instead I was doing it all alone, with "someone" making sure I got as little recognition or cooperation as possible.<br />
<br />
Imagine how effective the movement could have been, if we'd had a real national support network for survivors.<br />
<br />
Considering there are a hundred thousand Catholic clergy abuse victims in the USA alone, imagine how effective the activism could have been, if there had been an aggressive, inclusive, genuine network that actually worked the way a network should work, encouraging everyone who had an idea, linking groups around the country, keeping us all involved, informed, "networked."<br />
<br />
Instead we got and endless stream of media events, mostly saying the same things, (the bishops are "reckless and callous") with Barbara Blaine and David Clohessy appearing on camera. No matter where the story broke or what priests were accused of what crimes, there would be Barbara and/or David, in the news, saying the same banal sound bytes, dominating the story, making it theirs. When victims participated, they could do no more than stand behind a SNAP leader and hold up the SNAP 800 phone number. Then the SNAP leaders fly home and, in most cases, the local victims and local news reps, never hears any details of the crimes or how the crimes affected the crime victims.<br />
<br />
All those calls to the 800 number? The information drops into a sinkhole somewhere between Chicago and St. Louis, never to be heard again. The details of the crimes and how they affected the victims' lives remain untold.<br />
<br />
SNAP is not advocacy, it's damage control.<br />
<br />
SNAP is a handful of people who co-opted any movement survivors were trying to start at a grass roots level in the USA. They assured that all news queries on the topic of pedophile priests would go to SNAP, which gives an appearance of SNAP employees hard at work, but the result is no other victims' voices are heard.<br />
<br />
*******<br />
<strong>Things that caused me to question SNAP from the beginning:</strong><br />
<br />
<em>The word Counter intuitive comes up often</em><br />
<br />
I broke a story about Fr. Gus Krumm at City of Angels Blog, and Gustavo at OC Weekly picked it up. SNAP arrived a few days later in Orange County doing a press event referring reporters to Gustavo's story and repeating the story I broke at City of Angels as their own sound bites. Not once at the press event did SNAP mention City of Angels Blog, written by one of the survivors SNAP says it represents, me, left out of the loop in L.A. SNAP did not even let me know they were doing the press event until a few hours in advance.<br />
<br />
On another occasion, I tracked down the new home of Father Michael Wempe when he got out of prison, and SNAP ran a press event, demonstrating outside the gated community. SNAP got their name in the news again based on a story I discovered and broke, again not including City of Angels in the event, let alone mentioning the blog as the source of the material.<br />
<br />
Whenever SNAP came to L.A. in the four years I was doing CofA Blog, I never got a heads up in advance that they were coming, what the subject of their media event would be, or any acknowledgement at all of the work I was doing, even though I broke a lot of stories at CofA that were not covered anywhere else in the news. As late as Spring 2010 after I met with a SNAP leader visiting from St. Louis and I thought fences were mended, SNAP showed up a few weeks later and repeated the same isolationist pattern, leaving CofA Blog out of the loop.<br />
<br />
If I mention it by itself, being ignored by SNAP doesn't seem like much, it's the combination of four- to five-years of weird treatment that resulted in this story.<br />
<br />
But from the beginning, SNAP acted as if City of Angels Blog was not even there, and bulldozed over the blog whenever the opportunity arose.<br />
<br />
*********<br />
<br />
As I produced City of Angels Blog, my intent was to tell the story of a hundred thousand crime victims and coverups by the Church. But soon it became apparent, that the real story here is the counter-intelligence, the fake network that the Church or the Vatican or "someone" created in the mid-1980s. To the public they appear to be advocating for the crime victims, but SNAP's real purpose was to keep us all in line, under control, while managing the news story wherever it broke. . . to keep the Church as adored and powerful today as it was when the story first began to break.<br />
<br />
<em>Through SNAP, no more damage got done to the Church than the minimal amount that was inevitable, as news stories broke across the USA past two decades. No more of the story got out than would inevitably get out, and damages to the Church were kept to a minimum.</em><br />
<br />
When I was writing CofA stories, I'd call a victim to find out how their project was going and without my even asking, they'd end up telling me, SNAP ruined it. SNAP showed up late, or even worse, SNAP showed up to run a different event at the same time in a nearby location thus destroying the grass roots local effort. Or another outright evil tactic: SNAP stepped in and took over the microphone, keeping the original organizers and local survivors from being able to speak.<br />
<br />
*****<br />
<br />
If I were the only victim to have a bad experience with SNAP I would not write this post today. (Insert here, what happened to Robert Costello's project when the Pope visited New York; the way SNAP defeated efforts by survivors to hold a vigil in Chicago Easter Weekend 2006; what SNAP leaders said to and about Jim Robertson after he made widespread news by handcuffing himself to Cardinal Mahony's throne at the L.A. Cathedral, thus stopping any other victim from doing any activism outside SNAP's control; and finally re The Hague, since German lawyers were already working to prosecute the Pope at the International Criminal Court, and efforts were already underway to have victims contact the ICC, why didn't SNAP mention any of that work in progress in their Sept 2011 media blitz?)<br />
<br />
*****<br />
<br />
I remember the moment, Spring 2006, SNAP was holding a vigil in Pershing Square while the U.S. bishops held their annual meeting in the L.A. Biltmore across the street. I was disheveled, bloated, fat, bent-backed, a person with no self esteem at all.<br />
<br />
Barbara Blaine sat next to the L.A. SNAP leader Mary Grant and I finally got a chance to talk to them. I was in awe of them, gazing up at them, probably looked pretty pathetic.<br />
<br />
I said, "It feels so good to be able to send out a letter to the editor and sign it Kay Ebeling, SNAP Los Angeles."<br />
<br />
Blaine and Grant looked at each other then looked at me, and said simultaneously:<br />
<br />
"You can't."<br />
<br />
They may have explained why I couldn't say I was a member of SNAP but I really don't remember what the reasoning was. Just that I gave them the authority, figured they must know what they are doing, so they must be right, and I left the event defeated.<br />
<br />
That vigil in Pershing Square was also one of the first experiences I had with Blaine's snarling glare. At that time in spring 2006 I was all gaga over SNAP, thinking the leaders of the group were true heroes. So when I got close enough to talk to Blaine I gushed, "Wow, how did you manage to go to law school at the same time as running this organization?"<br />
<br />
Instead of an answer, Blaine became silent, and fixed me with an intimidating glare that said, "How dare you ask me that question." I shriveled up and stayed quiet.<br />
<br />
Stayed in my place and did not ask questions, just the SNAP was set up to affect the victims.<br />
<br />
It was all part of the plan back in the mid-1980s, when "someone" created SNAP to run the movement and manage the message, that the victims would stay in their place and not ask questions.<br />
<br />
(INSERT here: As I wrote City of Angels, every time I'd hint at questions about SNAP in blog posts, immediately my email would fill up with messages from Tom Doyle and Bob Schwiderski intercepting, making sure I did not pursue the questions any further.)<br />
<br />
****<br />
<br />
Still back in 2006, I didn't drop out of the movement, and kept trying to find other survivors who lived in the part of L.A. that I lived, Hollywood, by going through SNAP. I kept not getting my phone calls returned. Finally at an event, I asked Grant, "Why don't I start a support meeting for SNAP in Hollywood? I'm sure there are other victims in that part of town." Grant took me off to the side to say to me privately, "Kay we think you are too sick to run a support group."<br />
<br />
Again, I felt defeat. I was so certain the people who ran SNAP knew what they were doing, they were the authorities that I left that event and went home and indeed got sick, a depression-fueled sick, and stayed sick almost not functioning for a good six months.<br />
<br />
****<br />
<br />
Instead of walking away from the movement, I started City of Angels blog in January 2007.<br />
<br />
INSERT: Angelic intervention:<br />
<br />
SNAP tried to stop me from pursuing journalistic inquiries the beginning.<br />
<br />
I posted on SNAP message board that I'd be attending a Jan 2007 hearing, the first I found out about. Immediately Mary Grant slammed me an email. "Don't attend that hearing, the survivor whose case it concerns does not want you there and if you write anything about it, you will hurt his case."<br />
<br />
Angelic intervention.<br />
<br />
Through the SNAP message board I'd met a few survivors around the country, one of which was the victim whose case was going before the court in a hearing that date, Jan 16, 2007. Out of a thousand or so victims in Southern California with cases going through pre-trial development in 2006, I knew that one plaintiff, Michael Schumacher in Arizona. So I called Mike and asked him, "Is it true you don't want me to cover your hearing? Because SNAP tells me I'll be hurting your case if I go cover it."<br />
<br />
"Hell no," Mike told me. "I've never talked to anyone at SNAP about it and I Do Want you to go to the hearing, write about it, let me know what is going on."<br />
So in spite of SNAP's warning me that I'd be "Hurting a Survivor" by covering his hearing, I went anyway, and the result was the <a href="http://cityofangels3.blogspot.com/2007/01/as-i-sat-down-to-write-this-kjlh-102.html">first post ever published at City of Angels 3</a>, Jan. 17, 2007.<br />
<br />
City of Angels Blog was born in spite of SNAP, thanks to angelic intervention.<br />
<br />
*****<br />
<br />
And as I wrote City of Angels Blog I inevitably began to learn how SNAP works, which is probably why they tried to discourage and sabotage me to begin with.<br />
<br />
No matter where in the country I was doing a story, the anti-network efforts on the part of SNAP would loom over the interviews. I began to realize the efforts of SNAP ended up deflating any real efforts at advocacy or prosecution on local levels, not blatantly, just always behind the scenes. Defeating words whispered into a survivor's ear as they were just about to speak in public, SNAP showing up late and unprepared, so guaranteeing the failure of a local SNAP event, media announcements at way too short notice, with just enough errors in them to deter any real news from being developed.<br />
<br />
Then after each event around the country, SNAP takes the media and new survivor contact information back to St. Louis or Chicago, so local grass roots efforts can never get off the ground. They don't share that information with the local leaders. Why do they share it with?<br />
<br />
********<br />
<br />
<strong>Compassionate Coercion</strong><br />
<br />
When I tell people my observations that SNAP is really working for the Catholic Church, many argue, "but SNAP is in the news all the time, it sends out press releases every day."<br />
<br />
Look closer. Those media releases never say more than what is already in the news. And as a result, nothing more ever gets revealed.<br />
<br />
Damage control.<br />
<br />
OR<br />
<br />
Indirectly, Blaine and Clohessy deliver a message from the Church.<br />
<br />
This compassionate coersion tactic is hard to pinpoint, but it emanates from SNAP press statements.<br />
<br />
First time I noticed it was in July 2007, after the L.A. Archdiocese settlement hearing. Of course Clohessy was all over the news in L.A. Maybe two L.A. plaintiffs were also able to speak to the press, (persons approved by SNAP only) but mostly it was Clohessy. The SNAP executive director always jets in to take charge wherever the story of pedophile priest crime breaks, to control the message.<br />
<br />
A local radio show had Clohessy in a phone call talking about the L.A. cases. Over the air, Clohessy's voice said something like, "Whenever victims come forward, the Church will be there to fight them." (I did not write down the exact quote at the time, wish I had, but it had to do with how the Church will react when victims come forward, and it sent me chills, because the message was, if you call the church what will happen to you will not be plesent.<br />
<br />
When I heard Clohessy say that on the radio, I got chills. Clohessy was delivering the message from the Church. He wears the disguise of a concerned caring individual, but the truth is, he's carrying the Church's water, under his shirt.<br />
<br />
In that L.A. interview, Clohessy was warning victims that when they come forward, the Church will be there fighting them every step of the way.<br />
<br />
It's hard to explain how this double talk works, it's very subversive.<br />
<br />
A more recent example is from September 2011 . <a href="http://www.snapnetwork.org/pope_at_german_bundestag_clergy_sex_victims_disappointed">Blaine posted on the SNAP website</a> a typical emotion-filled SNAP statement about European victims.<br />
<br />
(ALSO INSERT HERE CLOHESSY'S STATEMENTS RE THE KANSAS BISHOP, repeated everywhere, saying very little about a case where the bishop is only being charged with a misdemeanor)<br />
<br />
Another compassionate coercion statement:<br />
<br />
"It’s sad that in Germany, where hundreds of brave, wounded child sex abuse victims have spoken up in the last year, the pope can’t bring himself to openly address the most devastating crisis in modern church history. If he can’t even talk about it, there’s little chance he can fix it."<br />
<br />
There once again is the Church's message costumed as the words of a concerned social working advocate.<br />
<br />
Blaine tells us, the Pope is not going to talk about it and he's not going to fix it. Indeed, the Pope even has this pseudo-support group leader deliver his message to people, disguised as sympathy.<br />
<br />
<em><strong>I know this sounds crazy, and extreme.<br /><br />But look at who the bad guys are here.<br /><br />And think of the lengths to which the Catholic Church has gone throughout history to stay in power.</strong></em><br />
<br />
Blaine has gotten "arrested" twice in the last five years while holding press events outside The Vatican. This makes her appear as a brave hero. Especially when she comes out of The Vatican a few hours later and makes the inevitable statement to the press, full of coercive compassion.<br />
<br />
But think about it.<br />
<br />
When the DEA makes a drug bust, they always arrest the undercover agents along with the criminals.<br />
<br />
Then the "arrested" agents can go off to an office, unobserved, and talk to their handlers.<br />
<br />
When Blaine gets arrested at The Vatican, it's like they are "bringing her in" so she can talk to her real bosses.<br />
<br />
Okay, that may be extreme.<br />
<br />
But look again at that statement Blaine made in Germany September 2011. By side tracking us into emotion, we don't take the action we should take. The aggressive action survivors want to take gets mushed down and instead we have victims at home alone crying.<br />
<br />
I'm not "sad" about the pedophile epidemic in the Catholic Church, I'm outraged and want legal action. Why even bother following the Pope around holding press conferences? The Pope is never going to change. SNAP always calls victims who come forward "brave" getting the message to us that there is something to be afraid of, and words such as "wounded" are another backhanded way to put us in our place.<br />
<br />
Something is not right with SNAP and it shows up between the lines of their press statements. I mean, Blaine is traveling all over the world, "speaking for victims" and all she can say is "it's sad"?<br />
<br />
Put emotion all over it and water it down, show up at every possible occasion with an entourage thus keeping anyone outside your group from being heard, take center stage and then waste the opportunity to say, "I feel your pain."<br />
<br />
This is not the aggressive activism that hundreds of thousands of pedophile priest victims need. This is<br />
<br />
Damage Control.<br />
<br />
****<br />
<br />
I would have let these negative experiences with SNAP slide and not dwelled on them, except as I started finding out about this story across the country, I interviewed dozens of survivors, and found out many other victims had eerie, unexplainable defeating and dejecting experiences when they reached out to SNAP. I found out SNAP often steps in and usurps work victims were doing locally as advocates.<br />
<br />
And the more City of Angels grew, the more SNAP worked behind the scenes to keep the blog from being successful.<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
Thank God for people like Cindy, one of the more vocal L.A. victims.<br />
<br />
In early 2007 Cindy emailed me saying something like, "Mary Grant from SNAP told me to stay away from you, so I knew something was up, and decided to contact you right away. Let's get together." Cindy was the first victim to inform me that SNAP was down-rapping me to other victims, in effect sabotaging City of Angels Blog, telling victims not to talk to me. Apparently SNAP told Cindy, Stay away from Kay Ebeling, she's just a crazy lady in Hollywood. I later learned SNAP warned several survivors in L.A. not to cooperate with me for one of my blog posts, which makes no sense. In early 2007, I was saying nothing but glowing words and praises about SNAP, and publicizing their media events.<br />
<br />
It makes no sense unless SNAP's goal was to keep City of Angels Blog from developing.<br />
<br />
SNAP did not want anyone to interview too many victims and figure out what SNAP was really doing and publicize it.<br />
<br />
Today, Cindy has been my dear best friend for more than four years.<br />
<br />
But there is still so much unresolved about SNAP.<br />
<br />
Imagine what the survivor movement could have been if our "advocacy group" hadn't been working behind the scenes to defeat us, assuring that no grass roots activism ever took place.<br />
<br />
Imagine what City of Angels Blog could have been if SNAP had supported it instead of sabotaging it.<br />
<br />
*****<br />
<br />
I am a journalist by profession, so when word trickled out in 2006 that in L.A. there were hundreds of lawsuits going forward, I wanted to find out more to "write something," yet L.A. SNAP leader Mary Grant kept telling me there was nothing going on in court. I knew that could not be true, so I finally approached her at a moment when she was standing with a VOTF woman, because everything Grant said to me, she'd say when no one else was around. As the VOTF woman stood stunned at my rudeness to interrupt them, I said, "Mary, with all the new victims coming forward in L.A., there must be something going on in the courts, pre-trial motions?" Grant bristled, but since the VOTF woman was standing there, Grant could not get away with the diversion she had been carrying out. Grant had to tell me the truth. "Yes," she said, "there's something going on in Superior Court." I kept asking Grant questions even though she'd turned her back on me, and finally I squeezed the name of an attorney out from between Grant's clenched teeth. Finally I had the name of a contact. I called the attorney and discovered there had been pretrial hearings in L.A. Superior Court going on for months, two or three of them a week. I started attending the hearings and found a huge story there.<br />
<br />
And City of Angels Blog was born.<br />
<br />
In spite of SNAP.<br />
<br />
And the blog grew, thanks, in many cases, to what I came to call "angelic intervention."<br />
<br />
******<br />
<br />
When SNAP calls itself is a "support network" it is making two false statements. The support is not really there. And the network does not exist at all, it's a hologram.<br />
<br />
I know people are rankled at me for down-rapping SNAP but as long as it's impossible to point out anything SNAP does wrong, they will continue to do things in "the way we've always done it," and the same mistakes will get made, with the end result that in spite of a hundred thousand victims in the USA and close to ten thousand priests identified, the bishops are still in power, and Americans think the pedophile priest crime victims or "survivors" are this small fringe group of people who just wants to destroy the church.<br />
<br />
*****<br />
<strong>Revealing experience at a SNAP conference</strong><br />
<br />
Through the blog I was able to raise funds to attend a SNAP conference, in July 2008 and what an empowering experience that was. Everywhere I went in that Chicago hotel meeting area, people would say, "That's Kay Ebeling, she started City of Angels Blog." The survivors and advocates loved the blog, I was getting accolades like I'd never gotten them before. Everyone at the conference was happy to see me<br />
<br />
Except<br />
<br />
Over on the sidelines I'd see David Clohessy and Barbara Dorris, just standing there glaring at me, shooting darts with their eyes. I talked to Barbara Blaine and she was civil, but I sensed she was bristling as we spoke. Everyone at the SNAP conference welcomed me, except the people who ran SNAP.<br />
<br />
Meanwhile I was flying high at the conference on all the positive feedback I was getting, until I went to the Saturday night breakout session, a women's support group.<br />
<br />
(I need to work on this, to describe how weird, in fact surreal, this experience was.)<br />
<br />
<strong>Thrown out of a Saturday night women's group<br /><br />Tossed into hallway with door slammed behind me.<br /><br />This is support?</strong><br />
<br />
I was overflowing with enthusiasm at the 2008 SNAP conference, so when someone in the women's Saturday night support group outbreak session said something shocking, I let an audible burst of breath come out of my mouth. The "facilitator" stopped the session and told me I was too disruptive. Then she physically removed me from the group, pushed me into the dark hallway, and slammed the door on me. The way that ejection was carried out deflated any self-esteem I had gotten from the conference, instead I spent the next six months thinking there was something inherently wrong with me...<br />
<br />
Again, calculated efforts to defeat survivors who are activists working outside of SNAP.<br />
<br />
Before the women's Saturday night group started, someone, in my memory she looks like Barbara Blaine, but I can't say for sure, was talking to the facilitator. Then as soon as the group started, the facilitator was harassing me, interrupting me, snarling at me every time I squirmed or coughed, waiting for the right time to eject me from the group.<br />
<br />
To be honest, I still am not sure what that sequence of events meant, but the end result was my going to the SNAP conference left me feeling the same lowness that I felt after Blaine and Graint told me I couldn't sign letters to the editor as a member of SNAP.<br />
<br />
Dejection, defeat, from an organization that proclaims itself as "giving voice to victims." In spite of all the positive response from people at the conference, the experience of being thrown out of the support group and left standing by myself in a dark empty hallway had a real bad effect on me. Again it was six months before I got any real self esteem back, instead I spiraled into a depression, certain there was something inherently wrong with me.<br />
<br />
I later realized these were calculated moves, for some reason SNAP discouraged me from the start from participating, but I persisted, and found out SNAP did the same thing to many other victims.<br />
<br />
I came to call them the anti-network. As in there is gravity and anti-gravity. There is the idea of a support group and there is the anti-support group...<br />
<br />
************<br />
NO ONE is above criticism, not even SNAP. Many of the victims I've talked to around the world agree with me, that some of the things SNAP does, <a href="http://cityofangels2.blogspot.com/2010/05/i-will-not-be-silent-snap-leafleting-at.html">such as leafletting at First Communion ceremonies</a> make victims look bad in the end. SNAP performs like a counter-network, takes counter-intuitive steps, and takes on projects that eliminate most victims from participating.<br />
<br />
For example, leafleting outside churches. Many pedophile priest victims have physical reactions when they go near Catholic icons like statues and cathedrals, so we cannot even participate in SNAP media events outside churches. Yet no matter how much we request leafletting somewhere else, SNAP ignores our input and just keeps going back to cathedrals to leaflet. No matter what the victims say from the grass roots, SNAP has an agenda, written by "someone," and SNAP does what it does, ignoring the suggestions of its "members."<br />
<br />
And looking back now, in 2011, it's obvious to me.<br />
<br />
By arranging for all our protests to take place outside church properties, SNAP is doing the church's bidding. Every time SNAP met outside the Cathedral in Los Angeles to conduct a media event, the cardinal's security guards were there watching everything we said and did. Security cameras were pointed at us so that anyone inside the cardinal's office, even Roger Mahony himself, could see what victims showed up for the SNAP event, what we said, what we did.<br />
<br />
By holding events at churches and no place else, SNAP assured that the bishops knew everything the survivors said and did.<br />
<br />
While putting out a public image of advocacy for victims, SNAP was working for the Catholic Church all along.<br />
<br />
**************<br />
<br />
The thing is, if SNAP told me lies, misdirected me from the moment I started asking questions, and I'm one journalist / survivor, how many other writers and reporters were misdirected by SNAP, and why?<br />
<br />
If anything, I know making these statements makes me look petty in some people's eyes. If it was about me-me-me, believe me, I would not have posted this story.<br />
<br />
It's about me not wanting to see the same mistakes and screw-ups continue, which is apparently part of the SNAP plan, screw up continuously, so it looks like they are doing advocacy work, when what they are really doing is keeping a lid on the story, as much as possible.<br />
<br />
When I suggested an idea, SNAP leaders contacted me and said I was whining or sitting on a pity pot. One of SNAP's most vocal midwest spokesmen hounded me with great vigor.<br />
<br />
And the "selfish, Me-Me-Me" idea I proposed:<br />
<br />
Set up a trust, a fund made up of donations from settlements, and let survivors who did not get settlements apply to the fund for grants.<br />
<br />
What's wrong with that idea? How is that just caring about me-me-me and being on a pity pot?<br />
<br />
I think it's a damn good idea, and something SNAP should have done and still couuld do.<br />
<br />
But there's Snap-Minnesota screaming at me that I'm on a pity pot and all I care about is me-me-me if I say why not set up a trust for the rest of the victims.<br />
<br />
Knee jerk reaction.<br />
<br />
*****<br />
<br />
<em>(The following was written in Feb. 2010, when SNAP Minnesota had ramped up his online harrassment of me.)</em><br />
<br />
Having the strangest experience.<br />
<br />
It's over. I think...<br />
<br />
I doubt I'll post another word at City of Angels.<br />
<br />
I did what I came for. I identified the problem and wrote about it, reported it here.<br />
<br />
Now, I can't hang around while almost everyone else working in this area is not only drinking the Kool-Aid but drunk on it.<br />
<br />
If people prefer to believe what they are told instead of what they see, there's not much more I have to write on this topic.<br />
<br />
I'm a chameleon, always have been, and it's real obvious, the way I feel, that another change is coming, and City of Angels is done.<br />
<br />
I did what I came here for, identified the problem, and until the rest of us see and deal with the problem, I can't function in this "community."<br />
<br />
City of Angels was run from the beginning on nudges. They're gone now. They left this morning.<br />
<br />
There's nothing more to say. Until other people see what I see, there's nothing more I can say.<br />
<br />
I am also, I will admit, going a little nuts. I don't just think David and Barbara are from the Church. I'm getting so every person I talk to on the phone or through email through this blog is an undercover agent from the church, or from David and Barbara.<br />
<br />
Maybe if I just write here for a while and stop answering my phone...<br />
<br />
****<br />
<br />
<strong>I Ended Up Having to do the Blog All Alone<br />I Thought It Was Me, Something Inherently Wrong With Me, that caused other victims to run the other direction.</strong><br />
<br />
<em>Then I realized<br />Whenever I interviewed victims by phone, at first they would be enthused and ready to continue developing their story with me.<br />Then next time I called, they would not take my call.<br /><br />I anguished over that, it hurt, it defeated me.<br /><br />Then I realized there was always one common denominator, one thing that each of those persons did in between the first and second call.<br /><br />They had contact with David or Barbara, executives from SNAP. </em><br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
(From Feb. 2010:)<br />
<br />
There has also been this eerie strange experience I've had since first starting City of Angels blog back in Jan. 2007 (in spite of SNAP's obstruction.<br />
<br />
Not long into working on the blog, I'd have this experience, at first I noted it and kind of was left with this, what happened, feeling. When it happened 12, 15 times I began to really notice it and make note of it. Now it happens all the time, with about two exceptions.<br />
<br />
I'm talking to a survivor somewhere in the US over the phone, we are getting along great. We make plans to talk again about this or that at a time in the future. I call that person when we are supposed to talk again, and they will not return my call, ever...<br />
<br />
Okay, one of the very first times this happened was early in the life of the blog, I was talking to a survivor in New Mexico, his case was current so we could not post the details, but he talked to me at length. He told me he also was real active in AA as a sponsor.<br />
<br />
He said, "If you ever need to talk to me about anything, especially these issues, call anytime, because I know how important that contact with another human being is, so I'll return your call no matter what I'm doing, as soon as possible."<br />
<br />
Okay that's not a direct quote. Point is he emphasized he would call me back.<br />
<br />
He also was very close and in regular contact with David Clohessy.<br />
<br />
I called back when we had arranged, he would not return the call. I tried a few more times, then gave up, and took it personally. In early 2007 I was not the self contained person I am today even. Three years back i was barely able to get a sentence out of my mouth...<br />
<br />
Okay. It happened then again in states and regions all over the country, the exact same pattern. When a survivor who I'm talking to is in the middle of working with me on a story for the future at City of Angels, or even we are just talking as I need human contact SO BAD in my life right now.<br />
<br />
We'll be goign along fine.<br />
<br />
Then there is that interaction on their end with SNAP.<br />
<br />
From that time on, the person will not call me back again.<br />
<br />
This has happened now so many times that what I do now is I wait and see how long it will be before it happens. It happens ALL THE TIME.<br />
<br />
Either someone is getting to survivors and telling them not to talk to me, which I know happened in Los Angeles in 2006, SNAP leaders in L.A. have been quoted to me saying, "Don't have anything to do with that crazy lady in Hollywood" to most people in SNAP. I still am stymied by that as well...<br />
<br />
Off topic.<br />
<br />
At first when people stopped calling me back, I took it personally. Then it became obvious something was going on.<br />
<br />
My favorite was on the SNAP cruise, where about six antagonistic people went to Ensenada and back in 2008, it was supposed to be a fund raiser but there was -- six people or so went.<br />
<br />
This one guy, he spent two to three hours telling me his whole life story and how it was affected by serial sodomy rape by a sickening German surnamed priest who is among the L.A. perpetrators.<br />
<br />
We had this long talk. Plus the guy was my age, educated, I thought we really connected. We sat there both of us crying on a chaise lounge on the cruise ship.<br />
<br />
Then he goes off to do something with SNAP which I think had to do with money management, as it was mostly people who had just gotten settlements who were the target of the cruise.<br />
<br />
I got to go on the cruise because someone gave me his ticket, he could not refund it, he'd already paid for it then had to work, so I got to go on the cruise.<br />
<br />
Boy was I not welcome there, but I tolerated it to experience a cruise one time.<br />
<br />
Okay.<br />
<br />
That night at dinner I see the guy who had just poured his heart out to me, bonded with me on a shared serial child rape basis.<br />
<br />
I say the beginning of one sentence to him and he turns his back, abrupt, says something like, I don't want to talk to you about this anymore, totally shines me on.<br />
<br />
I sit there with this person near me at the dinner table who is bristling angry at me, and have no idea why.<br />
<br />
****<br />
<br />
The first time it happened and I knew I was not imagining it, was a phone call I was having with this one guy from Southern California in the 2006-7 settlements who was also real active in SNAP. We were talkign along, talkign along, making plans to meet soon, sharing our archdiocesical rages.<br />
<br />
Then in the middle of a sentence he goes, "Wait, oh, wha- wait, you're that Kay, you're that Kay? Oh, hold on, I gotta go."<br />
<br />
And he never spoke to me again.<br />
<br />
Lucky for me, he was not good at subterfuge at all. It was so blatant that someone had told him not to talk to me. That is the moment when it became more of an experience than a hurtful thing. I could be objective.<br />
<br />
But still to this day is this niggling feeling inside, what is wrong with me. My personality is so bad that 99 percent of the survivors I talk to who are involved with SNAP do not call me back after they talk to someone at SNAP about me?<br />
<br />
Is it that I am so disgusting that no one wants to talk to me after the first time?<br />
<br />
Or is it SNAP telling them to have nothing to do with me.<br />
<br />
I mean which makes more sense to you. Or SNARL as I dubbed them in the Fiction piece over Christmas, and I hope now people who read this will start to understand how I came to the place where I started calling them SNARL instead of SNAP.<br />
<br />
Actually look at the comments Bob Schwiderski put on the Sunday post at City of Angels 8. He is snarling right there in print, not much different from emails I used to get from Mary Grant.<br />
<br />
The nudges are back.<br />
<br />
********<br />
<br />
Cut from opening:<br />
<br />
Thing is as long as I feel this way about SNAP I can't function in the "survivor community" as 80 percent of survivors tell me they are having a good experience with them. I don't know what the criteria is for who gets treated well by SNAP and who doesn't, I just know that the line is definitely drawn, and a lot of people get this same, they don't want me around feeling that I used to get in 2006, I just am so persistent, and yes, it struck me as ... so counter intuitive, for an organization that is supposed to be empowering crime victims to treat some of the victims so bad.<br />
<br />
In some cases we are the wildest weirdest ones, the survivors who don't look good on camera, as I was in 2006. Thing is now that I've been doing City of Angels for three years, I've turned into this confident person. In reality it's the most damaged, broke, half homeless ones who need the most support and attention, yet we are the ones who get snubbed the most.<br />
<br />
I used to think it was about money, the survivors who get treated well are the ones who have active cases that are going to end up in big settlements.<br />
<br />
I don't know that for sure, because EVERY TIME I've been in conversation with survivors who are heading for big settlements, this David Clohessy or Someone intervention takes place.<br />
<br />
I doubt it's the Church intervening. Most survivors would not listen to what a representative of the Church tells them to do.<br />
<br />
But they will enthusiastically and reverently do what Clohessy or one of the others in the SNAP regional heirarchy tell them to do....<br />
<br />
All this stuff I'm writing here is how I came to the conclusion that at the top, out of St. Louis, SNAP is run by the Roman Catholic Church, and the survivors have just been through years of Crowd Control, and News Information Management.<br />
<br />
The only thing they screwed up with this plan is they did not count on the Internet, and survivors finding each other<br />
<br />
IN SPITE of SNAP.<br />
<br />
And me. I kept digging. And I kept trying to tell myself I was imagining it until it was SO RIGHT IN FRONT OF MY FACE, I could not see it as anything else.<br />
<br />
So when survivors are still in that place where they have given a kind of Saint-quality to the individuals who run SNAP, they cannot understand how I could bad rap them.<br />
<br />
It's the ones who call me with this same complaint that stymies me, as the weird treatment of survivors by SNAP is almost the same in every city.<br />
<br />
<strong>In fact</strong>, when I first wrote about that strange snub in Fall 2009, where SNAP held a Gus Krumm press event in Orange County without mentioning that City of Angels broke the story, I got several emails from people who have been around a long time, old Linkup Members, and phone calls too, telling me, honey, SNAP has done that to so many survivors, you are not all that weird, don't feel like the Lone Ranger<br />
.<br />
<br />
I do feel alone with it right now, as I'm still only one of about three who is willing to say it in print, and use my name, from the dozens of victims I've spoken to who see that SNAP is a sham.<br />
<br />
But right now there are so many survivors and advocates angry with me for writing this, that I can't even make a phone call to develop a story.<br />
<br />
Thing is, as long as I keep researching, this niggling thing comes up. Something is wrong with SNAP and maybe I haven't figured it totally out, but there is definitely something wrong. And now that I've gone this far, I'm not going to stop, until someone looks into it.<br />
<br />
There's more.<br />
<br />
For those survivors who are already in a perplexed state like I was in 2006-2008 when I just couldn't figure out why SNAP does what it does, try this formula.<br />
<br />
Take all your confusion about SNAP and add one element to the equation, that they are doing it on purpose, that they want to screw up press events and want to discourage survivors from continuing to participate.<br />
<br />
Then all of a sudden all your confusion and questions are answered, as it all falls in place. If they really are counter-espionage, created by the bishops as far back as the late 1980s as a way to keep the lid on this story.<br />
<br />
Add that concept into your experience with SNAP and suddenly- it's like reconciliation.<br />
<br />
Everything falls into place.<br />
<br />
Everything makes sense.<br />
<br />
They left the survivors standing on a sidewalk with no one in washington and Florida? The way they tried to stifle me from covering L.A. Clergy Case hearings.<br />
<br />
Just apply the idea that SNAP is really from the Church to your experience so far.<br />
<br />
See if the same thing doesn't happen to you.<br />
<br />
Suddenly it all makes sense, it all adds up.<br />
<br />
And there was only one group of persons in the mid-1980s who knew how many crime victims there were, who knew they had to do something to keep us from really becoming a powerful force, who knew they had to insinuate themselves into the group of survivors who were already starting to find each ohter.<br />
<br />
Only one group knew in advance how many of us there are and that they had to do something to contain us:<br />
<br />
The US Conference of Roman Catholic bishops.<br />
<br />
************<br />
<br />
Oh yeah, David Clohessy. When I was in SNAP San Francisco in 1995, a leader there was confused, "Who the hell is this guy?" he said about Clohessy who seemed to appear out of the blue to take over the job of executive director and run SNAP.<br />
<br />
Turns out David's brother Kevin was an accused pedophile priest, who secretly entered rehab for pedo priests in St. Louis (Probably the Paracletes).<br />
<br />
Father Kevin Clohessy secretly entered rehab about the same time, mid-1990s, as David Clohessy was placed in his position as Director of SNAP.<br />
<br />
I find that fact very revealing.<br />
<br />
In the years I tried to write this blog, I came up against obstruction over and over, not from the Church, but from SNAP, particularly Clohessy. Today I think it is no coincidence that David's brother Kevin went into secret treatment for being a pedophile priest at the same time David took over as "director" of this counter-intelligence organization SNAP.<br />
<br />
I think SNAP was created by the American bishops in the mid 1980s to run "damage control." They appear to be doing advocacy for victims, what they really are doing is keeping the victims under control, stepping in to run the story wherever it breaks in the USA, and beating down any survivors who seem determined to do advocacy above and beyond what SNAP is doing, with the agenda it has, an agenda created by God only knows who.<br />
<br />
With the advent of the internet in the mid-1990s, whoever runs SNAP decided they needed a second "leader" in place besides Barbara Blaine, so they brought in Clohessy. From St. Louis, Clohessy intervenes whenever the pedophile priest story breaks in the news, anywhere in the USA. Before a second story gets into the news, Clohessy has established himself as the "spokesman" the press should go to for the story.<br />
<br />
And all they ever get is the same bland quotes. Clohessy has been saying the same quotes about "protecting kids" and "callous behavior" of the bishops for more than 15 years. Quotes from Clohessy never say more than what has already been reported in the news.<br />
<br />
Or my favorite, SNAP will criticize the Church for being "too secretive" and for responding to the clery abuse scandal with "more of the same" when being secretive and churning out more of the same is exactly what SNAP does.<br />
<br />
It's damage control, calculated and carried out very cleverly.<br />
<br />
SNAP is not an advocacy group, it runs damage control for the Church.<br />
<br />
The main reason City of Angels is not publishing much anymore is if SNAP sees a survivor who is vocal and determined to be an activist in spite of SNAP, they will find ways beat you down and beat you down until you finally have no choice but to stop.<br />
<br />
Then over the figurative beaten down body of the one activist survivor, SNAP will hold another press event and the world will hear about all the great work they are doing.<br />
<br />
Oh if only some reporters with real curiosity would uncover this whole truth.<br />
<br />
How did Clohessy end up as director at the same time his brother secretly went into therapy as a pedophile priest, for example.<br />
<br />
Why does almost every survivor who is vocal and active in the "movement" end up disappearing and fading into a depressed silence while the handful of people who run SNAP keep going and going with all the resources they need for every trip and media event? (I've spoken to several of the victims who dropped out of the movement. Guess what? They felt in many cases that they were "vibed away" by Blaine and Clohessy. Surprise surprise)<br />
<br />
Meanwhile expect a few more years of press statements calling the Church "reckless and callous" when the Church is actually a criminal enterprise. But if its victims are willing to stand behind "reckless and callous" then no one will see a need to prosecute.<br />
<br />
Expect a few more years of press events taking place in front of cathedrals and Catholic offices, so the Church's security can watch and record everything the victims do when they get together there.<br />
<br />
Expect a few more years of SNAP breezing into towns to conduct media events, gather up all the names of new victims and press contacts, then breeze back out of town leaving the local victims with no new information. Then all that contact information, names of new victims and reporters interested in doing stories, goes back to St. Louis and we never hear anything about them again.<br />
<br />
All the names and media contact information ends up in a sinkhole somewhere between Chicago and St. Louis and all hundred thousand victims are left with no real voice, no real advocacy, and no stories developed in the media beyond the flurry of shallow responses covering SNAP's media events.<br />
<br />
Same thing they were doing in the late 1990s, they are still doing in the 2010's, giving the appearance of advocacy, when in reality they are conducting damage control.<br />
<br />
********************<br />
<br />
Response to one of many recent emails:<br />
<br />
They lied to me about the L.A. Clergy case pretrial hearings. They tried to divert me away from covering them. Clohessy tap dances instead of answering questions<br />
<br />
I didn't stumble in here stoned and get mad 'cause no one liked me.<br />
<br />
I was pulling on my Journalism skills from one of many careers I sabotaged to try to get this story out.<br />
<br />
SNAP was diversionary and untruthful to me As A Journalist not only as a Survivor.<br />
<br />
How many other reporters have gotten that same treatment? Makes me wonder if that's why this story has fizzled when it should ahve exploded.<br />
<br />
I have many damn good reasons for being suspicious of them, please read what I am writing at <a href="http://cityofangels2.blogspot.com/">http://cityofangels2.blogspot.com/</a> before telling me this is internal bickering or me being upset about being snubbed.<br />
<br />
How can it be internal bickering when there is nothing to be inside of? The "survivor community" is a hologram. Great image, but when you reach out for it, there is nothing there.<br />
<br />
***********<br />
<br />
Too many unanswered questions and too much power (The Vatican) behind them for one lone blogger to uncover on her own. I feel a lot safer if I just drop it. I did not feel safe towards the end of City of Angels Blog's life. I felt like the more I wrote, the harder they would fight me to stop me.<br />
<br />
I honestly became afraid to continue.<br />
<br />
**********************************<br />
<br />
I know what I am saying is really far out and unbelievable. But think of who the bad guys are in this story...<br />
<br />
************************************<br />
<br />
God, this is unfolding in layers. As soon as one element gets out and written down another one comes up.<br />
<br />
Pacing around my home in early 2009, really working at calling lots of survivors around the country to develop stories for City of Angels.<br />
<br />
I actually hollered into the phone, "God, no, I don't want to talk about that.<br />
<br />
"Don'tn tell me that. Don't tell me it happened to you, no not again." Still the conversation would inevitably go there.<br />
<br />
The obstacle that always ended up being up in front of us was SNAP in St. Louis, the support organization that was supposed to be making things happen.<br />
<br />
"No, I really don't want to hear that," I said many times, "or bring that up again, it makes my blood pressure rise too much."<br />
<br />
I didn't set out with City of Angels to write this part of the story, it just became to me, the most important story to tell.<br />
<br />
It would always come up. The thing that stopped us, the thing that kept the project from being a success. It was always SNAP.<br />
<br />
Obstructionist was the word that I kept writing in notes around mid-2008.<br />
<br />
In early 2009 when it seemed everywhere I looked I'd see more signs that something was wrong at a shadow level with SNAP, it even affected me physically. I started shaking uncontrollably and it lasted days. I laid in bed shaking, taking muscle relaxants to keep from flying over the edge of the balcony.<br />
<br />
Shaking.<br />
<br />
Then with time it stopped, and I went back to telling myself, it can't be true. No one could be that sinister, devious, evil.<br />
<br />
yes they can.<br />
<br />
*****<br />
*<br />
I CAN'T STOP LAUGHING<br />
<br />
One of my most prolific critics says I'm after David Clohessy's job. No. I would never want to run a nonprofit, I'm not a hand-shaker, I don't mix, I don't even like most humans anymore and look forward to leaving the planet soon.<br />
<br />
I didn't have any agenda when those posts came out Sunday, they just came out. It's my experience, i didn't make it up. Maybe I should deny what happened to me and pretend it didn't so people will like me better?<br />
<br />
My critic snarls that I'm jealous because "Clohessy is the most quoted man in the clerical child abuse movement" and that made me laugh so hard and so long out loud.<br />
<br />
My critic revealed the problem.<br />
<br />
"Most quoted man"?<br />
<br />
Good PR results in a change in public thinking and policy.<br />
<br />
That emailer was so totally from some other place and time, that I laughed so loud and so long...<br />
<br />
**********<br />
<br />
I CAN'T STOP LAUGHING<br />
<br />
*****************<br />
<br />
I've had this experience before, as a journalist, in fact I'm lucky I have, as the scars are all calloused from those times and this one I can just take.<br />
<br />
I'd write a column saying something I saw and the result was outrage from the readers. Letter writing campaigns against me. Other columnists writing columns about how wrong I was.<br />
<br />
Ostrasizing even.<br />
<br />
Then five years later pretty much everyone knows and is saying the same thing that got me ostracized.<br />
<br />
If anyone questions what I wrote Sunday and since, just look at this weird reaction I'm getting, it kind of proves what I wrote.<br />
<br />
I mean Minnesota SNAP produced a video to snarl at me and sent it to five hundred people. And I'm not surprised. It's the level of intimidation a lot of survivors experience with them, and this is what will happen if you dare to criticize SNAP.<br />
<br />
They really do Snarl.<br />
<br />
***********<br />
<br />
The Unfolding Continues<br />
Brain still processing...<br />
<br />
I'm even beginning to think the Support Group experience Summer 2008 at the SNAP conference ties into this scheme to beat me down. The time I was left standing alone in the hallway door slammed on me, thrown out of the Women's Saturday night breakaway event. Left feeling two inches high because of a support group? And all SNAP did about it was keep me from writing about it, that night.<br />
<br />
It took me six months at least to recuperate.<br />
<br />
Now I'm beginning to think that experience tied in somehow as well, it was a very strange thing.<br />
<br />
Another Unfolding:<br />
<br />
One of the highest Snappers said something very strange to me at the conference that did not make sense, and it's niggled at me now and then, but I've tried not to dwell on it. Then I realized he was so tied into thish effort to slam me down. He might even be the one writing the script.<br />
<br />
All of a sudden that weird thing he said to me a year and a half ago makes sense.<br />
<br />
Because that person is in the middle of it.<br />
<br />
I'm standing today in my kitchen or wherever and these added elements pop into my head and I go, hmm, yeah, now it makes sense.<br />
<br />
Another thing that same very high level SNAP person who is also an attorney said was, "Every time you put a post up at City of Angels, I go there right away and read it from beginning to end."<br />
<br />
I thought he was complimenting me, now I see he was telling me, I'm an attorney, and I'm reading every single line you write, carefully.<br />
<br />
I thought it was a friendly remark.<br />
<br />
Since then he hasn't been too friendly. So it was another thing that just didn't make sense.<br />
<br />
Until now.<br />
<br />
Now that I realize he might be the one writing the script, I'm looking at both his comments a different way.<br />
<br />
Things that didn't add up for so long.<br />
<br />
Suddenly do.<br />
<br />
Reconciliation<br />
.<br />
****<br />
I'm still working this out in my head. What I'm trying to explain is I think SNAP has had a full out effort going from the beginning to keep City of Angels from happening. It just got so bad that I could barely develop stories for the blog, because so many people would not call me back. Plus, the repeated stories from around the country that I wasn't soliciting. Instead it was more like people felt so glad they finally had someone they could pour out to the bad experiences they had with SNAP.<br />
<br />
I stuffed this part of the story down for three years for the exact reasons Bob Hoatson and Tom Doyle got on me for writing it, because I thought it would be bad for the "movement" to put this in print. But truth is there really is no movement to hurt, and that's my point.<br />
<br />
What movement?<br />
<br />
I've been reeling in the middle of this so long it did not add up in my head. Spewing it all out in a blog on Super Bowl Sunday has... repositioned me. Now I'm looking at all this stuff, and I don't doubt for a minute that I've pointed out something seriously wrong. Don't know if it's the bishops who are writing the script and doing everything they can to keep survivors on point and in line.<br />
<br />
But someone is.<br />
<br />
*************<br />
<br />
Strangest of all in all this week's stuff is no one has validated the weird experience I had or helped explain what happened. It wasn't fun going through this the whole last three years, and the harangue from Minnesota from Sunday seems to have finally stopped on Friday morning. (Except now he's just emailing me.) Kind of proved my point.<br />
<br />
No one has explained that maybe I misunderstood and SNAP wasn't trying to steer me away from covering the Clergy Cases in L.A. and then when I persisted anyway, they weren't trying to intimidate me into not covering the hearings. They haven't said, no, Kay, we haven't done that, we aren't trying to stifle City of Angels with contacts around the country.<br />
<br />
Just show me I'm wrong, I'll write a mea culpa.<br />
<br />
Instead there was a four-day effort to scare me into silence.<br />
<br />
Oh, by the way in the two in depth interviews on the story of David C's life that have showed up this week, he doesn't mention his brother the pedophile priest again. I still think that is very weird, it's a major part of the dynamic of his work at SNAP, whether he even realizes it.<br />
<br />
It would make his story more interesting even.<br />
<br />
If there really was a network of support, all the survivors in far flung places who have tried to start things on their own would be part of it, and a network would really be great because we could reach out and encourage each other, share resources. None of that is happening in SNAP. Instead survivors like me who try to do something on their own are left all alone to do it with out even a nod of acknowledgement from SNAP. Then our projects are either usurped or smothered.<br />
<br />
I wrote it all at City of Angels 2.<br />
<br />
Funny, when i first arrived here in 2006 and was finding people at the SNAP message board, there were a couple of guys there that were like madmen. They kept hollering, SNAP is the bishops SNAP is the bishops. Now I too have degenerated into one of those insane survivors who are standing outside hollering, SNAP is the bishops, SNAP is the bishops.<br />
<br />
The end of the world is Ni.<br />
<br />
Soylent Green is People.<br />
<br />
If not the bishops, someone is writing a script and keeping anyone from deviating from it, and that's plain weird.<br />
<br />
*****<br />
<br />
They are determined to intimidate people into not talking. Donald Steier has been more decent to me than hierarchy from SNAP as I've done City of Angels the last three years. He's the lawyer who defends all the predator priests.<br />
<br />
The question no one seems to see I'm asking is, why did SNAP try to stop me from covering the LA Clergy cases in 2007, why did they tap dance or outright give me false information, trying to intimidate me then to not write about the cases.<br />
<br />
Wow, just realized, in Januray 2007, the tone of the emails from Mary Grant was exactly the same as these Snarls I'm getting now from Minnesota SNAP. Minneapolis SNAP.<br />
<br />
Wow, this is taking a turn I never predicted, I just knew I couldn't be silent any longer, I didn't wake up on Super Bowl Sunday saying, time to lash out. I woke up saying, I can't not write this and not post it any longer, when it comes up everywhere I loook and it is not going away.<br />
<br />
Readers can figure it out for themselves, just look at what is happening.<br />
<br />
SNAP does do a great job of getting plaintiffs to attorneys, and in that respect they do help survivors.<br />
<br />
But the lawsuits also keep the truth secret.<br />
<br />
************<br />
So SNAP doesn't deny all this happened. They just want me to stop writing about it.<br />
<br />
**************<br />
<br />
.<br />
I was wrong. Minnesota SNAP is still sending out the video, now in mac format for those who don't have PCs. He's calling it an "out-reach" [sic] video.<br />
<br />
Someone sicced this man on me and no one is stopping him. As totally out of line as what he is doing, and no one is telling him to stop.<br />
<br />
I'm telling a painful truth and they are doing everything they can to stop me.<br />
<br />
Just like SNAP's treatment of me Jan 2007 when they tried to stop me from starting then continuing City of Angels.<br />
<br />
They go behind the scenes and SNARL at survivors, freak most of us out so bad we run away and never come back.<br />
.<br />
***********<br />
.<br />
Now MN SNAP is emailing me that if I feel "ostrasized" it must be because it's true. Thanks, SNAP Minnesota for once again showing me, and now the world, the way SNAP treats many survivors.<br />
<br />
Bob's latest email:<br />
<br />
"How many times do you need to be ostracized (your word) before you stop - look - listen to what so many others are trying to tell you ? If none in a room full of people don't agree with you, stop - look - listen to them. Sadly, you look at a helping hand as being ostracized, stop - look - listen."<br />
<br />
There hasn't been anything even resembling a helping hand offered, but he sure is determined to shut me up.<br />
<br />
And where the hell is this roomful of people?<br />
<br />
SNAP in Minnesota is writing this to me.<br />
<br />
SNAP is saying: How dare you point out the nine thousand pound gorilla in the room?<br />
<br />
******<br />
Here's another of his emails, this yesterday:<br />
<br />
"If you feel intimidated it is because you are uncomfortable with the can of worms you have opened on yourself."<br />
<br />
I didn't arrive at this conclusion in a vaccum.<br />
<br />
Anyone who can has valid genuine contributions to make to the conversation, I will gladly listen to.<br />
<br />
But, Bob, only reason I'm going to open your emails anymore is to copy and paste them and post them here so everyone can see them.<br />
<br />
Just like I put my true feelings up here for everyone to see, even though I knew there would be responses like Bob's, I just did not expect it so blatantly from one of the SNAP official "leaders."<br />
<br />
The email to me from people who are just "people" has been more like Nine to One encouraging me and thanking me.<br />
<br />
That was a surprise. I thought I had self destructed by going public with this.<br />
<br />
So City of Angels is not Dead, it's just resting.<br />
.<br />
Good public relations would put our thousands of faces in the news media, and all our stories. What we have instead is "the most quoted man in the clergy sex abuse movement," brags Bob's video. I didn't listen to much past that, as it was not addressing what I wrote. Bob's video was a reaction wo what he thought I was saying, then he didn't bother to read the entire experience, just reacted to the first paragraph or so.<br />
<br />
It poured out over days, it will probably pour out more, there's a lot to the story of my weird experience with SNAP.<br />
<br />
As to ostracizing, I was ostracized already, before I wrote the stuff last week.<br />
<br />
And since when is Shunning a cool practice?<br />
<br />
And why are SO MANY people emailing me and thanking me for coming out with this?<br />
<br />
****************<br />
At least I put my allegations out in public, written here for everyone to read. The organization I criticize takes most its steps in secret. So which one would you believe?<br />
<br />
**********<br />
<br />
ALSO:<br />
Saturday, February 13, 2010<br />
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/" name="4860216461002958097"></a><br />
<a href="http://cityofangels8.blogspot.com/2010/02/city-of-angels-is-down-for-while.html">Docs in SNAP Group Leaders Packet 1997 scanned here</a><br />
.UPDATE: The group I ran in SF was 1997, not 1995, sorry for the error. Here are some docs that came with the Leadership Packet and a press release I sent out about the group I was running in the SF Public Library.<br />
<br />
***************<br />
<br />
I'm real busy at work, can't spend too much time on this right now, but two clicks at the IRS found me this, in FAQs<br />
<br />
Q: In general, what public disclosure requirements apply to tax-exempt organizations?<br />
<br />
A: In general, exempt organizations must make available for public inspection certain annual returns and applications for exemption, and <strong>must provide copies of such returns and applications to individuals who request them</strong>.<br />
<br />
Copies usually <strong>must be provided immediately </strong>in the case of in-person requests, and within 30 days in the case of written requests. The tax-exempt organization may charge a reasonable copying fee plus actual postage, if any.<br />
<br />
*****<br />
So why has SNAP always said to me, I'll get right back to ya, and then they never do?<br />
<br />
It's LAW they HAVE to show their financial papers.<br />
<br />
<strong>Click here for IRS policy</strong> on nonprofits reporting their finances to the public. By law they have to, simply because they are not paying taxes, no further conversation should be needed.<br />
<a href="http://www.irs.gov/charities/article/0,,id=214271,00.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.irs.gov/charities/article/0,,id=214271,00.html</a><br />
<br />
Yet David Clohessy tap danced instead of sending me these docs when I requested them over and over again for at least three weeks in Spring of 2008.<br />
<br />
He said, "I have no idea, I have nothing to do with the money," then said he didn't even know who on the SNAP staff to ask for the documents, he would find out and get back to me, but he was totally in the dark about money at SNAP.<br />
<br />
Did he really think I'm that stupid?<br />
<br />
?????<br />
<strong>*********************<br /><br />(A Lot of copy and pasting from here down in this post, a lot of redundancy. Someday I'll come back in here and clean this up, cut out the repetition, and fix the typos. Not today.)<br /><br />********************************</strong><br />
<br />
I remember the moment, in Pershing Square, a vigil while the bishops held their national meeting in the L.A. Biltmore across the street. I was disheveled, bloated and fat and self esteem? None. This was my second time finding SNAP. First time I'd been a warrior, moved a hundred miles to be closer to a SNAP meeting in Oakland, started a second daytime meeting in San Francisco. Wrote letters, started printing things out that I found on this new thing the Internet.<br />
<br />
Mid 1990s.<br />
<br />
Now it was 2006, there had been a murder in my family so I hadn't done SNAP for several years, now I could come back, all the chaos and insanity in that part of my life was finally ending and I could start paying attention to this priest thing again.<br />
<br />
Barbara Blaine who sat next to Mary Grant and I finally got a chance to talk to them. I was in awe of them, gazing up at them, probably looked pretty pathetic.<br />
<br />
I said, "It feels so good to be able to send out a letter to the editor and sign it Kay Ebeling, SNAP Los Angeles."<br />
<br />
Blaine and Grant looked at each other then looked at me, and said simultaneously:<br />
<br />
"You can't."<br />
<br />
Then they explained why I couldn't say I was a member of SNAP but I really don't remember what the reasoning was. Just that I gave them the authority, figured they must know what they are doing, so they must be right.<br />
<br />
So, for all the people who tell me, just do something on your own and call it SNAP like they did, you are forgetting that you started that in the 1990s or early 2000s.<br />
<br />
Apparently SNAP has changed since then, it's much more controlled from the top, there are a lot more secrets kept than were in 1995.<br />
<br />
So as I said, I'm writing what my experience was. Not to whine or ask for pity, but to point out that no one in this movement deserves sainthood. Everyone among us deserves to be criticized if they are putting out false information.<br />
<br />
Saying SNAP is a "support network" is two false statements. The support is not really there. And the network does not exist at all, it's a hologram.<br />
<br />
I know people are rankled but as long as it's impossible to point out anything SNAP does wrong, they will continue to do things in "the way we've always done it," and the same mistakes get made.<br />
<br />
NO ONE is above criticism.<br />
<br />
Even me. I hear it and consider it when it's legitimate.<br />
<br />
If SNAP told me lies, misdirected me, and I'm one journalist / survivor, it makes me really wonder how many other people were misdirected by SNAP, and why.<br />
<br />
If anything, I know making these statements makes me look petty in some people's eyes. If it was about me-me-me, believe me, I would not have posted this story.<br />
<br />
It's about me not wanting to see the same mistakes and screw-ups continue. It's about me saying, why doesn't someone go in and reorganize, update, and set genuine Goals at SNAP instead of just letting it continue in its constant state of disarray.<br />
<br />
How is that whining or pity potting. One of SNAP's most vocal midwest spokesmen is hounding me now that I'm on a pity pot.<br />
<br />
And my idea:<br />
<br />
Set up a trust, a fund from donations from settlements, and let survivors who did not get settlements apply to the fund for grants.<br />
<br />
What's wrong with that idea? how is that just caring about me-me-me and being on a pity pot?<br />
<br />
I think it's a damn good idea, and something SNAP should have done and still couuld do.<br />
<br />
But there's Mr. Snap from Minnesota screaming at me that I'm on a pity pot and all I care about is me-me-me if I say why not set up a trust for the rest of the victims.<br />
<br />
Knee jerk reaction.<br />
<br />
Nothing will improve until we fix the broken parts.<br />
<br />
Having the strangest experience.<br />
<br />
It's over. I think...<br />
<br />
I doubt I'll post another word at City of Angels.<br />
<br />
I did what I came for. I identified the problem and wrote about it, reported it here.<br />
<br />
Now, I can't hang around while almost everyone else working in this area is not only drinking the Kool-Aid but drunk on it.<br />
<br />
If people prefer to believe what they are told instead of what they see, there's not much more I have to write on this topic.<br />
<br />
I'm a chameleon, always have been, and it's real obvious, the way I feel, that another change is coming, and City of Angels is done.<br />
<br />
I did what I came here for, identified the problem, and until the rest of us see and deal with the problem, I can't function in this "community."<br />
<br />
City of Angels was run from the beginning on nudges. They're gone now. They left this morning.<br />
<br />
There's nothing more to say. Until other people see what I see, there's nothing more I can say.<br />
<br />
ke<br />
****<br />
<br />
I am also, I will admit, going a little nuts. I don't just think David and Barbara are from the Church. I'm getting so every person I talk to on the phone or through email through this blog is an undercover agent from the church, or from David and Barbara.<br />
<br />
Maybe if I just write here for a while and stop answering my phone...<br />
<br />
****<br />
<br />
There has also been this eerie strange experience I've had since first starting City of Angels blog back in Jan. 2007 (in spite of SNAP's obstruction, which I already wrote about here yesterday).<br />
<br />
Not long into working on the blog, I'd have this experience, at first I noted it and kind of was left with this, what happened, feeling. When it happened 12, 15 times I began to really notice it and make note of it. Now it happens all the time, with about two exceptions.<br />
<br />
I'm talking to a survivor somewhere in the US over the phone, we are getting along great. We make plans to talk again about this or that at a time in the future. I call that person when we are supposed to talk again, and they will not return my call, ever...<br />
<br />
Okay, one of the very first times this happened was early in the life of the blog, I was talking to a survivor in New Mexico, his case was current so we could not post the details, but he talked to me at length. He told me he also was real active in AA as a sponsor.<br />
<br />
He said, "If you ever need to talk to me about anything, especially these issues, call anytime, because I know how important that contact with another human being is, so I'll return your call no matter what I'm doing, as soon as possible."<br />
<br />
Okay that's not a direct quote. Point is he emphasized he would call me back.<br />
<br />
He also was very close and in regular contact with David Clohessy.<br />
<br />
I called back when we had arranged, he would not return the call. I tried a few more times, then gave up, and took it personally. In early 2007 I was not the self contained person I am today even. Three years back i was barely able to get a sentence out of my mouth...<br />
<br />
Okay. It happened then again in states and regions all over the country, the exact same pattern. When a survivor who I'm talking to is in the middle of working with me on a story for the future at City of Angels, or even we are just talking as I need human contact SO BAD in my life right now.<br />
<br />
We'll be goign along fine.<br />
<br />
Then there is that interaction on their end with SNAP.<br />
<br />
From that time on, the person will not call me back again.<br />
<br />
This has happened now so many times that what I do now is I wait and see how long it will be before it happens. It happens ALL THE TIME.<br />
<br />
Either someone is getting to survivors and telling them not to talk to me, which I know happened in Los Angeles in 2006, SNAP leaders in L.A. have been quoted to me saying, "Don't have anything to do with that crazy lady in Hollywood" to most people in SNAP. I still am stymied by that as well...<br />
<br />
Off topic.<br />
<br />
At first when people stopped calling me back, I took it personally. Then it became obvious something was going on.<br />
<br />
My favorite was on the SNAP cruise, where about six antagonistic people went to Ensenada and back in 2008, it was supposed to be a fund raiser but there was -- six people or so went.<br />
<br />
This one guy, he spent two to three hours telling me his whole life story and how it was affected by serial sodomy rape by a sickening German surnamed priest who is among the L.A. perpetrators.<br />
<br />
We had this long talk. Plus the guy was my age, educated, I thought we really connected. We sat there both of us crying on a chaise lounge on the cruise ship.<br />
<br />
Then he goes off to do something with SNAP which I think had to do with money management, as it was mostly people who had just gotten settlements who were the target of the cruise.<br />
<br />
I got to go on the cruise because someone gave me his ticket, he could not refund it, he'd already paid for it then had to work, so I got to go on the cruise.<br />
<br />
Boy was I not welcome there, but I tolerated it to experience a cruise one time.<br />
<br />
Okay.<br />
<br />
That night at dinner I see the guy who had just poured his heart out to me, bonded with me on a shared serial child rape basis.<br />
<br />
I say the beginning of one sentence to him and he turns his back, abrupt, says something like, I don't want to talk to you about this anymore, totally shines me on.<br />
<br />
I sit there with this person near me at the dinner table who is bristling angry at me, and have no idea why.<br />
<br />
****<br />
<br />
The first time it happened and I knew I was not imagining it, was a phone call I was having with this one guy from Southern California in the 2006-7 settlements who was also real active in SNAP. We were talkign along, talkign along, making plans to meet soon, sharing our archdiocesical rages.<br />
<br />
Then in the middle of a sentence he goes, "Wait, oh, wha- wait, you're that Kay, you're that Kay? Oh, hold on, I gotta go."<br />
<br />
And he never spoke to me again.<br />
<br />
Lucky for me, he was not good at subterfuge at all. It was so blatant that someone had told him not to talk to me. That is the moment when it became more of an experience than a hurtful thing. I could be objective.<br />
<br />
But still to this day is this niggling feeling inside, what is wrong with me. My personality is so bad that 99 percent of the survivors I talk to who are involved with SNAP do not call me back after they talk to someone at SNAP about me?<br />
<br />
Is it that I am so disgusting that no one wants to talk to me after the first time?<br />
<br />
Or is it SNAP telling them to have nothing to do with me.<br />
<br />
I mean which makes more sense to you. Or SNARL as I dubbed them in the Fiction piece over Christmas, and I hope now people who read this will start to understand how I came to the place where I started calling them SNARL instead of SNAP.<br />
<br />
Actually look at the comments Bob Schwiderski put on the Sunday post at City of Angels 8. He is snarling right there in print, not much different from emails I used to get from Mary Grant.<br />
<br />
The nudges are back.<br />
<br />
********<br />
<br />
Cut from opening:<br />
<br />
Thing is as long as I feel this way about SNAP I can't function in the "survivor community" as 80 percent of survivors tell me they are having a good experience with them. I don't know what the criteria is for who gets treated well by SNAP and who doesn't, I just know that the line is definitely drawn, and a lot of people get this same, they don't want me around feeling that I used to get in 2006, I just am so persistent, and yes, it struck me as ... so counter intuitive, for an organization that is supposed to be empowering crime victims to treat some of the victims so bad.<br />
<br />
In some cases we are the wildest weirdest ones, the survivors who don't look good on camera, as I was in 2006. Thing is now that I've been doing City of Angels for three years, I've turned into this confident person. In reality it's the most damaged, broke, half homeless ones who need the most support and attention, yet we are the ones who get snubbed the most.<br />
<br />
I used to think it was about money, the survivors who get treated well are the ones who have active cases that are going to end up in big settlements.<br />
<br />
I don't know that for sure, because EVERY TIME I've been in conversation with survivors who are heading for big settlements, this David Clohessy or Someone intervention takes place.<br />
<br />
I doubt it's the Church intervening. Most survivors would not listen to what a representative of the Church tells them to do.<br />
<br />
But they will enthusiastically and reverently do what Clohessy or one of the others in the SNAP regional heirarchy tell them to do....<br />
<br />
All thish stuff I'm writing here is how I came to the conclusion that at the top, out of St. Louis, SNAP is run by the Roman Catholic Church, and the survivors have just been through years of Crowd Control, and News Information Management.<br />
<br />
The only thing they screwed up with this plan is they did not count on the Internet, and survivors finding each other<br />
<br />
IN SPITE of SNAP.<br />
<br />
And me. I kept digging. And I kept trying to tell myself I was imagining it until it was SO RIGHT IN FRONT OF MY FACE, I could not see it as anything else.<br />
<br />
So when survivors are still in that place where they have given a kind of Saint-quality to the individuals who run SNAP, they cannot understand how I could bad rap them.<br />
<br />
It's the ones who call me with this same complaint that stymies me, as the weird treatment of survivors by SNAP is almost the same in every city.<br />
<br />
<strong>In fact</strong>, when I first wrote about that strange snub in Fall 2009, where SNAP held a Gus Krumm press event in Orange County without mentioning that City of Angels broke the story, I got several emails from people who have been around a long time, old Linkup Members, and phone calls too, telling me, honey, SNAP has done that to so many survivors, you are not all that weird, don't feel like the Lone Ranger<br />
.<br />
<br />
I do feel alone with it right now, as I'm still the only one of about three willing to say it in print, and use my name.<br />
<br />
But right now there are so many survivors and advocates angry with me for writing this, that I can't even make a phone call to develop a story.<br />
<br />
Thing is, as long as I keep researching, this niggling thing comes up. Something is wrong with SNAP and maybe I haven't figured it totally out, but there is definitely something wrong. And now that I've gone this far, I'm not going to stop, until someone looks into it.<br />
<br />
There's more.<br />
<br />
For those survivors who are already in a perplexed state like I was in 2006-2008 when I just couldn't figure out why SNAP does what it does, try this formula.<br />
<br />
Take all your confusion about SNAP and add one element to the equation, that they are doing it on purpose, that they want to screw up press events and want to discourage survivors from continuing to participate.<br />
<br />
Then all of a sudden all your confusion and questions are answered, as it all falls in place. If they really are counter-espionage, created by the bishops as far back as the late 1980s as a way to keep the lid on this story.<br />
<br />
Add that concept into your experience with SNAP and suddenly- it's like reconciliation.<br />
<br />
Everything falls into place.<br />
<br />
Everything makes sense.<br />
<br />
They left the survivors standing on a sidewalk with no one in washington and Florida? The way they tried to stifle me from covering L.A. Clergy Case hearings.<br />
<br />
Just apply the idea that SNAP is really from the Church to your experience so far.<br />
<br />
See if the same thing doesn't happen to you.<br />
<br />
Suddenly it all makes sense, it all adds up.<br />
<br />
And there was only one group of persons in the mid-1980s who knew how many crime victims there were, who knew they had to do something to keep us from really becoming a powerful force, who knew they had to insinuate themselves into the group of survivors who were already starting to find each ohter.<br />
<br />
Only one group knew in advance how many of us there are and that they had to do something to contain us:<br />
<br />
The US Conference of Roman Catholic bishops.<br />
<br />
************<br />
<br />
Response to one of many recent emails:<br />
<br />
They lied to me about the L.A. Clergy case pretrial hearings. They tried to divert me away from covering them. Clohessy tap dances instead of answering questions<br />
<br />
I didn't stumble in here stoned and get mad 'cause no one liked me.<br />
<br />
I was pulling on my J skills to try to get this story out.<br />
<br />
SNAP was diversionary and untruthful to me As A Journalist not only as a Survivor.<br />
<br />
How many other reporters have gotten that same treatment? Makes me wonder if that's why this story has fizzled when it should ahve exploded.<br />
<br />
I have many damn good reasons for being suspicious of them, please read what I am writing at <a href="http://cityofangels2.blogspot.com/">http://cityofangels2.blogspot.com/</a> before telling me this is internal bickering or me being upset about being snubbed.<br />
<br />
How can it be internal bickering when there is nothing to be inside of? The "survivor community" is a hologram. Great image, but when you reach out for it, there is nothing there.<br />
<br />
*****<br />
.<br />
I know what I am saying is really far out and unbelievable. But think of who the bad guys are in this story...<br />
<br />
Could be that things in SNAP have been so secretive and non-transparent that it makes a person inclined to suspect things are worse than they really are.<br />
<br />
Best if from the beginning there are no secrets.<br />
<br />
*****<br />
<br />
.<br />
God, this is unfolding in layers. As soon as one element gets out and written down another one comes up.<br />
<br />
Pacing around my home in early 2009, really working at calling lots of survivors around the country to develop stories for City of Angels.<br />
<br />
I actually hollered into the phone, "God, no, I don't want to talk about that.<br />
<br />
"Don'tn tell me that. Don't tell me it happened to you, no not again." Still the conversation would inevitably go there.<br />
<br />
The obstacle that always ended up being up in front of us was SNAP in St. Louis, the support organization that was supposed to be making things happen.<br />
<br />
"No, I really don't want to hear that," I said many times, "or bring that up again, it makes my blood pressure rise too much."<br />
<br />
I didn't set out with City of Angels to write this part of the story, it just became to me, the most important story to tell.<br />
<br />
It would always come up. The thing that stopped us, the thing that kept the project from being a success. It was always SNAP.<br />
<br />
Obstructionist was the word that I kept writing in notes around mid-2008.<br />
<br />
In early 2009 when it seemed everywhere I looked I'd see more signs that something was wrong at a shadow level with SNAP, it even affected me physically. I started shaking uncontrollably and it lasted days. I laid in bed shaking, taking muscle relaxants to keep from flying over the edge of the balcony.<br />
<br />
Shaking.<br />
<br />
Then with time it stopped, and I went back to telling myself, it can't be true. No one could be that sinister, devious, evil.<br />
<br />
yes they can.<br />
<br />
*****<br />
*<br />
I CAN'T STOP LAUGHING<br />
<br />
One of my most prolific critics says I'm after David Clohessy's job. No. I would never want to run a nonprofit, I'm not a hand-shaker, I don't mix, I don't even like most humans anymore and look forward to leaving the planet soon.<br />
<br />
I didn't have any agenda when those posts came out Sunday, they just came out. It's my experience, i didn't make it up. Maybe I should deny what happened to me and pretend it didn't so people will like me better?<br />
<br />
My critic snarls that I'm jealous because "Clohessy is the most quoted man in the clerical child abuse movement" and that made me laugh so hard and so long out loud.<br />
<br />
My critic revealed the problem.<br />
<br />
"Most quoted man"?<br />
<br />
Good PR results in a change in public thinking and policy.<br />
<br />
That emailer was so totally from some other place and time, that I laughed so loud and so long...<br />
<br />
**********<br />
<br />
I CAN'T STOP LAUGHING<br />
<br />
*****************<br />
<br />
I've had this experience before, as a journalist, in fact I'm lucky I have, as the scars are all calloused from those times and this one I can just take.<br />
<br />
I'd write a column saying something I saw and the result was outrage from the readers. Letter writing campaigns against me. Other columnists writing columns about how wrong I was.<br />
<br />
Ostrasizing even.<br />
<br />
Then five years later pretty much everyone knows and is saying the same thing that got me ostracized.<br />
<br />
If anyone questions what I wrote Sunday and since, just look at this weird reaction I'm getting, it kind of proves what I wrote.<br />
<br />
I mean Minnesota SNAP produced a video to snarl at me and sent it to five hundred people. And I'm not surprised. It's the level of intimidation a lot of survivors experience with them, and this is what will happen if you dare to criticize SNAP.<br />
<br />
They really do Snarl.<br />
<br />
***********<br />
<br />
The Unfolding Continues<br />
Brain still processing...<br />
<br />
I'm even beginning to think the Support Group experience Summer 2008 at the SNAP conference ties into this scheme to beat me down. The time I was left standing alone in the hallway door slammed on me, thrown out of the Women's Saturday night breakaway event. Left feeling two inches high because of a support group? And all SNAP did about it was keep me from writing about it, that night.<br />
<br />
It took me six months at least to recuperate.<br />
<br />
Now I'm beginning to think that experience tied in somehow as well, it was a very strange thing.<br />
<br />
Another Unfolding:<br />
<br />
One of the highest Snappers said something very strange to me at the conference that did not make sense, and it's niggled at me now and then, but I've tried not to dwell on it. Then I realized he was so tied into thish effort to slam me down. He might even be the one writing the script.<br />
<br />
All of a sudden that weird thing he said to me a year and a half ago makes sense.<br />
<br />
Because that person is in the middle of it.<br />
<br />
I'm standing today in my kitchen or wherever and these added elements pop into my head and I go, hmm, yeah, now it makes sense.<br />
<br />
Another thing that same very high level SNAP person who is also an attorney said was, "Every time you put a post up at City of Angels, I go there right away and read it from beginning to end."<br />
<br />
I thought he was complimenting me, now I see he was telling me, I'm an attorney, and I'm reading every single line you write, carefully.<br />
<br />
I thought it was a friendly remark.<br />
<br />
Since then he hasn't been too friendly. So it was another thing that just didn't make sense.<br />
<br />
Until now.<br />
<br />
Now that I realize he might be the one writing the script, I'm looking at both his comments a different way.<br />
<br />
Things that didn't add up for so long.<br />
<br />
Suddenly do.<br />
<br />
Reconciliation<br />
.<br />
****<br />
I'm still working this out in my head. What I'm trying to explain is I think SNAP has had a full out effort going from the beginning to keep City of Angels from happening. It just got so bad that I could barely develop stories for the blog, because so many people would not call me back. Plus, the repeated stories from around the country that I wasn't soliciting. Instead it was more like people felt so glad they finally had someone they could pour out to the bad experiences they had with SNAP.<br />
<br />
I stuffed this part of the story down for three years for the exact reasons Bob Hoatson and Tom Doyle got on me for writing it, because I thought it would be bad for the "movement" to put this in print. But truth is there really is no movement to hurt, and that's my point.<br />
<br />
What movement?<br />
<br />
I've been reeling in the middle of this so long it did not add up in my head. Spewing it all out in a blog on Super Bowl Sunday has... repositioned me. Now I'm looking at all this stuff, and I don't doubt for a minute that I've pointed out something seriously wrong. Don't know if it's the bishops who are writing the script and doing everything they can to keep survivors on point and in line.<br />
<br />
But someone is.<br />
<br />
*************<br />
<br />
Strangest of all in all this week's stuff is no one has validated the weird experience I had or helped explain what happened. It wasn't fun going through this the whole last three years, and the harangue from Minnesota from Sunday seems to have finally stopped on Friday morning. (Except now he's just emailing me.) Kind of proved my point.<br />
<br />
No one has explained that maybe I misunderstood and SNAP wasn't trying to steer me away from covering the Clergy Cases in L.A. and then when I persisted anyway, they weren't trying to intimidate me into not covering the hearings. They haven't said, no, Kay, we haven't done that, we aren't trying to stifle City of Angels with contacts around the country.<br />
<br />
Just show me I'm wrong, I'll write a mea culpa.<br />
<br />
Instead there was a four-day effort to scare me into silence.<br />
<br />
Oh, by the way in the two in depth interviews on the story of David C's life that have showed up this week, he doesn't mention his brother the pedophile priest again. I still think that is very weird, it's a major part of the dynamic of his work at SNAP, whether he even realizes it.<br />
<br />
It would make his story more interesting even.<br />
<br />
If there really was a network of support, all the survivors in far flung places who have tried to start things on their own would be part of it, and a network would really be great because we could reach out and encourage each other, share resources. None of that is happening in SNAP. Instead survivors like me who try to do something on their own are left all alone to do it with out even a nod of acknowledgement from SNAP. Then our projects are either usurped or smothered.<br />
<br />
I wrote it all at City of Angels 2.<br />
<br />
Funny, when i first arrived here in 2006 and was finding people at the SNAP message board, there were a couple of guys there that were like madmen. They kept hollering, SNAP is the bishops SNAP is the bishops. Now I too have degenerated into one of those insane survivors who are standing outside hollering, SNAP is the bishops, SNAP is the bishops.<br />
<br />
The end of the world is Ni.<br />
<br />
Soylent Green is People.<br />
<br />
If not the bishops, someone is writing a script and keeping anyone from deviating from it, and that's plain weird.<br />
<br />
*****<br />
<br />
They are determined to intimidate people into not talking. Donald Steier has been more decent to me than hierarchy from SNAP as I've done City of Angels the last three years. He's the lawyer who defends all the predator priests.<br />
<br />
The question no one seems to see I'm asking is, why did SNAP try to stop me from covering the LA Clergy cases in 2007, why did they tap dance or outright give me false information, trying to intimidate me then to not write about the cases.<br />
<br />
Wow, just realized, in Januray 2007, the tone of the emails from Mary Grant was exactly the same as these Snarls I'm getting now from Minnesota SNAP. Minneapolis SNAP.<br />
<br />
Wow, this is taking a turn I never predicted, I just knew I couldn't be silent any longer, I didn't wake up on Super Bowl Sunday saying, time to lash out. I woke up saying, I can't not write this and not post it any longer, when it comes up everywhere I loook and it is not going away.<br />
<br />
Readers can figure it out for themselves, just look at what is happening.<br />
<br />
SNAP does do a great job of getting plaintiffs to attorneys, and in that respect they do help survivors.<br />
<br />
But the lawsuits also keep the truth secret.<br />
<br />
************<br />
So SNAP doesn't deny all this happened. They just want me to stop writing about it.<br />
<br />
**************<br />
<br />
.<br />
I was wrong. Minnesota SNAP is still sending out the video, now in mac format for those who don't have PCs. He's calling it an "out-reach" [sic] video.<br />
<br />
Someone sicced this man on me and no one is stopping him. As totally out of line as what he is doing, and no one is telling him to stop.<br />
<br />
I'm telling a painful truth and they are doing everything they can to stop me.<br />
<br />
Just like SNAP's treatment of me Jan 2007 when they tried to stop me from starting then continuing City of Angels.<br />
<br />
They go behind the scenes and SNARL at survivors, freak most of us out so bad we run away and never come back.<br />
.<br />
***********<br />
.<br />
Now MN SNAP is emailing me that if I feel "ostrasized" it must be because it's true. Thanks, SNAP Minnesota for once again showing me, and now the world, the way SNAP treats many survivors.<br />
<br />
Bob's latest email:<br />
<br />
"How many times do you need to be ostracized (your word) before you stop - look - listen to what so many others are trying to tell you ? If none in a room full of people don't agree with you, stop - look - listen to them. Sadly, you look at a helping hand as being ostracized, stop - look - listen."<br />
<br />
There hasn't been anything even resembling a helping hand offered, but he sure is determined to shut me up.<br />
<br />
And where the hell is this roomful of people?<br />
<br />
SNAP in Minnesota is writing this to me.<br />
<br />
SNAP is saying: How dare you point out the nine thousand pound gorilla in the room?<br />
<br />
******<br />
Here's another of his emails, this yesterday:<br />
<br />
"If you feel intimidated it is because you are uncomfortable with the can of worms you have opened on yourself."<br />
<br />
I didn't arrive at this conclusion in a vaccum.<br />
<br />
Anyone who can has valid genuine contributions to make to the conversation, I will gladly listen to.<br />
<br />
But, Bob, only reason I'm going to open your emails anymore is to copy and paste them and post them here so everyone can see them.<br />
<br />
Just like I put my true feelings up here for everyone to see, even though I knew there would be responses like Bob's, I just did not expect it so blatantly from one of the SNAP official "leaders."<br />
<br />
The email to me from people who are just "people" has been more like Nine to One encouraging me and thanking me.<br />
<br />
That was a surprise. I thought I had self destructed by going public with this.<br />
<br />
So City of Angels is not Dead, it's just resting.<br />
.<br />
Good public relations would put our thousands of faces in the news media, and all our stories. What we have instead is "the most quoted man in the clergy sex abuse movement," brags Bob's video. I didn't listen to much past that, as it was not addressing what I wrote. Bob's video was a reaction wo what he thought I was saying, then he didn't bother to read the entire experience, just reacted to the first paragraph or so.<br />
<br />
Don't let them tell you we are all damaged survivors, and if you question them it's just because we have "Trust Issues" or you are trying to destroy the "movement." Point out to them that there really is no movement.<br />
<br />
Do you see why I no longer trust them?<br />
<br />
There's more...<br />
.<br />
<br />
You don't have to be a journalist to ask a person at a nonprofit for their financial papers and have them sent immediately, it's in the law.<br />
<br />
If you're an American taxpayer you have a right to know.<br />
.<br />
************<br />
<br />
This story poured out over days, it will probably pour out more, there's a lot to the story of my weird experience with SNAP.<br />
<br />
As to ostracizing, I was ostracized already, before I wrote the stuff last week.<br />
<br />
And since when is Shunning a cool practice?<br />
<br />
And why are SO MANY people emailing me and thanking me for coming out with this?<br />
<br />
****************<br />
At least I put my allegations out in public, written here for everyone to read. The organization I criticize takes most its steps in secret. So which one would you believe?<br />
<br />
&&&&&&&&&&&&&&<br />
<br />
Wow it's so obvious. SNAP wanted to keep me from starting and continuing City of Angels because What I Wrote Here the last three days is What They Did Not Want Me To Find Out.<br />
<br />
**********<br />
For a copy of financial papers from SNAP email snapadmin1@gmail.com, it says here in the <a href="http://www.snapnetwork.org/PDF_files/annual_report_012709.pdf">SNAP Annual report</a><br />
<br />
It's under the pie chart at the bottom of a list in about 2 point type but it's there...<br />
<br />
Every time I've emailed I've gotten the answer, "we will send it to you next week." Then next week never comes.<br />
<br />
Maybe other people will get a better response. I wish other people would email that address and see if you have better luck than I have ever had, getting to see a copy of their 2007-2008 income and outflow pages.<br />
<br />
I think it's strange that a nonprofit sidesteps inquiries about its finances, I mean they are not paying taxes, it's the public's money, we have a right to know.<br />
<br />
When David tapdanced with me over a six-week period refusing to answer any questions about money in early 2008 is when the red flags about SNAP really started being so much in my face.<br />
<br />
But I still gave them the benefit of the doubt, as long as I could - without turning into a PR writer and not a journalist.<br />
.<br />
We scanned the 2006 financial papers from SNAP here last December and they showed a half a million dollars was taken in and spent in that year. That was before California...<br />
<br />
Anyway, I don't think it's legal for a nonprofit to keep their financial papers secret.<br />
<br />
UPDATE:<br />
<br />
It may be easier for SNAP to hide its financial information since 2006 as they are now incorporated in Nevada, evidently moved from Illinois in 2007, but now they're a non profit registered in the Onetime Mob State to the East of L.A.<br />
<br />
There's a lot of dead bodies in that desert.<br />
.<br />
<br />
FINANCIAL DOCUMENTS SCANNED<br />
<br />
Financial documents from SNAP 2006 can be viewed full screen, click to enlarge, by following the headline below to City of Angels 11<br />
<br />
Monday, November 23, 2009<br />
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/" name="4404498855666870525"></a><br />
<a href="http://cityofangels11.blogspot.com/2009/11/snarl-financial-documents-you-decide.html">A guy handed me these papers begging me to post them. Here they are, if they are a smoking gun, please let me know...</a><br />
.<br />
(BELOW are some documents that were in a wad of paper a guy handed me two years ago. I feel a real need to get them online, but have hesitated, as I know some people among the crime victims will stop talking to me because I posted these. Oh well. If there is really nothing wrong here, I would love to hear it. Anyone can email me or call and tell me these docs below are not that revealing, please do. ...<br />
<br />
(((((((((((<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 130%;">Also:</span><br />
<br />
For a copy of financial papers from SNAP 2007, 2008, email<br />
<br />
<a href="mailto:snapadmin1@gmail.com">snapadmin1@gmail.com</a><br />
<br />
Here in the <a href="http://www.snapnetwork.org/PDF_files/annual_report_012709.pdf">SNAP Annual report</a> under the pie chart<br />
<br />
At the bottom of a list, in about<br />
<br />
<em>2 point type </em><br />
<em></em><br />
<em>but it's there...</em><br />
<br />
Email <a href="mailto:snapadmin1@gmail.com">snapadmin1@gmail.com</a> for financial documents from 2008, and I assume 2007.<br />
<br />
Every time I've emailed though, in the past year, I've gotten the answer, "We will send it to you next week." Then next week never comes.<br />
<br />
Now Word Comes to Me that sometime in the past two years SNAP moved its headquarters to Nevada, where as we in L.A. know, anything goes when it comes to law enforcement and oversight.<br />
<br />
Anyway, wish someone besides me would email them for financial docs and then post them somewhere or send them to me to post.<br />
<br />
I can't believe an organization that takes in millions (est.) in donation money to "help survivors" and then does almost nothing, can get away with not telling the press or publishing at their website the financial docs.<br />
<br />
A legitimate nonprofit would have their finances posted in their annual report.<br />
<br />
A legitimate nonprofit...<br />
.<br />
<br />
If anyone emails that address, please let me know what happens.<br />
<br />
ke<br />
<br />
**************<br />
<br />
<strong>AH,<br /><br />the Mystery of Memory</strong><br />
<br />
When you write one memory out of your head, it makes room for another.<br />
<br />
Scene was L.A. Criminal Courts, a hearing regarding Michael Baker. SNAP sent out notices and about 15 people would come.<br />
<br />
It was December 2006 or Jan 2007, I knew that with hundreds of lawsuits filed back in 2003 in California because of the one-year window, there had to be some activity somewhere in the Courts. My only connection to the information was Mary Grant, Regional Director from SNAP.<br />
<br />
Every time I asked, she'd shrug, say, no, nothing is going on. But at this Baker hearing I tried another tack.<br />
<br />
I waited until the other Mary, the woman from A Call to Action, was standing in conversation with Mary. I walked up and interrupted.<br />
<br />
"Mary, there's gotta be something going on with all those lawsuits that were filed in 2003, what's going on?"<br />
<br />
Grant bristled, face beating. Then with calculated control the words formed adn came out of her mouth. "Yes, there are hearings in Superior court."<br />
<br />
"Where in L.A. Superior Court, which building?"<br />
<br />
"I don't know."<br />
<br />
"Which judge, which department?"<br />
<br />
"I don't know."<br />
<br />
"When will be the next hearings?"<br />
<br />
"I don't know."<br />
<br />
"Well then who can I call who would know?"<br />
<br />
She had to tell me, because the other Mary was standing there. This was already more info that Mary Grant had been willing to divulge for the previous weeks. A name of an attorney doing the hearings.<br />
<br />
Grant gave me the name of Attorney Ray Boucher, and finally I had something. Then a woman in Boucher's office told me how to keep track of the hearings, that yes, there had been a few hundred pre-trial hearings so far in the past year. She told me which Superior Court, the name of the judge, where and how to find the Clergy Case Calendar online.<br />
<br />
Grant from SNAP had been telling me for months there was nothing going on.<br />
<br />
She knew I was a journalist, too, hadn't been published in a while, but anyone even then could find old articles I had written online.<br />
<br />
The only reason I got even that much information out of the only full time paid regional director from SNAP at the time was someone else was witnessing the conversation.<br />
<br />
I waited until someone else was talking to her and interrupted, it was the only way to force information out of her. She couldn't tell me another lie in front of Mary from A Call to Action.<br />
<br />
That is only one of many reasons I've come to believe SNAP has some other agenda than what they purport to the public.<br />
<br />
I'm seeing patterns and evidence enough to think SNAP has been run by the bishops since at least 1993 when they incorporated under the Dominican Sisters (see previous post).<br />
<br />
Meantime, I'm glad this is pouring out. People need to find out how much they tried to keep City of Angels from happening, whatever and whoever is the cause of it.<br />
<br />
If they were lying and diverting me from even knowing about the hearings, what else did they do to keep the press from writing about the Clergy Cases in L.A.?<br />
.<br />
<br />
<strong>NOT a SMOKING GUN, but something people said, yes, you should post, so I posted:</strong><br />
.<br />
I found this part of a SNAP incorporation paper in a file cabinet a few weeks ago. It doesn't conflict with half the stories I've heard about how SNAP started but it does conflict with the other half.<br />
<br />
At first I took advice not to post this, as people who've been around since 1993 or so don't see this as a problem, but new people are calling me and saying, what? No. Post it. It answers so many questions for me.<br />
<br />
Here it is in full size, below it is in closeup.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-gQ1q5KeYwjfphaHKlp9yy9a8SYWS5BQ3O5QcGnxjuBJ70CKSmCTkhaA5l1J10DKIVBZWHWgOf8Gw-SPdMo7w2C4q2yBDSfHPWlQ5divO2eqXbvS_Uj19v19Ur55KjBcvPUHnAsenZlk/s1600-h/snap+incorporating+paper.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-gQ1q5KeYwjfphaHKlp9yy9a8SYWS5BQ3O5QcGnxjuBJ70CKSmCTkhaA5l1J10DKIVBZWHWgOf8Gw-SPdMo7w2C4q2yBDSfHPWlQ5divO2eqXbvS_Uj19v19Ur55KjBcvPUHnAsenZlk/s400/snap+incorporating+paper.jpg" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5437816298351973442" style="display: block; height: 400px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 318px;" /></a><br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdPT7lB1B9CjU3EAdW0J4TZ1dhuYBeVuB7xK6_Dgo9rxseVSYeDpBsCagcqDKTj4T1u7i-d6nqBhvJQn8xolHmssK9rdxcrmkL2wS0bpWCar8ZrJ6TFLeMlVeO4HtMwn3Y5KVDYqW7i2U/s1600-h/snap+incorporating+close+paper.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdPT7lB1B9CjU3EAdW0J4TZ1dhuYBeVuB7xK6_Dgo9rxseVSYeDpBsCagcqDKTj4T1u7i-d6nqBhvJQn8xolHmssK9rdxcrmkL2wS0bpWCar8ZrJ6TFLeMlVeO4HtMwn3Y5KVDYqW7i2U/s400/snap+incorporating+close+paper.jpg" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5437774544937732594" style="display: block; height: 305px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 400px;" /></a><br />
<br />
I ran a SNAP group in San Francisco in 1995, that is when I received this document, then found it in a file drawer a few weeks back.<br />
<br />
Some of my friends are saying this is a smoking gun.<br />
<br />
I don't think it is, but other friends are saying, yes, do post it, because it answers a lot of questions I've had in my mind.<br />
<br />
SNAP incorporating paper, click to enlarge, they were set up in 1993 as "an institution of the Catholic Church":<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdPT7lB1B9CjU3EAdW0J4TZ1dhuYBeVuB7xK6_Dgo9rxseVSYeDpBsCagcqDKTj4T1u7i-d6nqBhvJQn8xolHmssK9rdxcrmkL2wS0bpWCar8ZrJ6TFLeMlVeO4HtMwn3Y5KVDYqW7i2U/s1600-h/snap+incorporating+close+paper.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdPT7lB1B9CjU3EAdW0J4TZ1dhuYBeVuB7xK6_Dgo9rxseVSYeDpBsCagcqDKTj4T1u7i-d6nqBhvJQn8xolHmssK9rdxcrmkL2wS0bpWCar8ZrJ6TFLeMlVeO4HtMwn3Y5KVDYqW7i2U/s400/snap+incorporating+close+paper.jpg" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5437774544937732594" style="display: block; height: 305px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 400px;" /></a><br />
<br />
<em>As I said, wherever I turn, even my own file cabinets, I find evidence that SNAP has been part of the Catholic Church all along.<br /><br />And the way some people reacted this week, I think part of their whole scheme from the beginning was to get us all into a state of awe over the persons who run SNAP at a national level.<br /><br />So today it is shocking, sinful almost, to criticize SNAP, or publish a "screed" as I've been told by too many people using that same word "screed."<br /><br />Starting from the day they created SNAP, they wanted us to be afraid to ask questions.<br /><br />It's the Bishops' MO too...<br />.</em><br />
<br />
**I haven't even written here yet, how Angelic Intervention in January 2007 showed me the truth, and how what SNAP was telling me was the opposite of the truth. That was the birth of City of Angels, coverage of a hearing Jan. 16, 2007, when SNAP emailed me warning me not to go to the hearing, not to write about it, because the plaintiff did not want any news coverage and it would "ruin his case" or words to that effect.<br />
<br />
I think it was angelic intervention that the one plaintiff SNAP was talking to me about was the one and only person from the Southern California cases who I had met, even made good friends with, through the SNAP online message board, which they have since discontinued. So I called the plaintiff and asked him, is that true? You don't want me to cover your hearing? He answered, hell yes I want you to write about it, I never even talked to anyone from SNAP.<br />
<br />
So I went ahead and started City of Angels, in spite of SNAP, and the rest is history. It's all here. What I found out, and how it took them three years, but they succeeded and got me silenced.<br />
<br />
Not the church, SNAP got City of Angels silenced. Now I'm observing from the sidelines as survivors around the country pop up on blogs and in Comments saying, well SNAP are just a couple of survivors who are dysfunctional like the rest of us, and if SNAP won't let me in, I'll just start something on my own. I'll observe, like others- old-timers around the country who have given up- do, as SNAP sabotages another survivor trying to do something on their after being shot down too many times by SNAP, I'll be on the sidelines at the same email address as always, waiting for someone with some power and force to step in and stop this incredible re-victimization and fraud that has been purported onto the pedophile priest crime victims by the Roman catholic bishops.<br />
<br />
Sleazy underhanded back door counter espionage with absolutely no concern for how it hurts the already damaged crime victims, brought to you by the same persons who transferred pedophiles from one parish to another leaving them free to prey on children in their churches. They created SNAP back in the 1980s to dominate the nascent crime victim "community" and keep us all silent and in line as this story broke in oe city after another across the country.<br />
<br />
As a result, news came out about these thousands of organized pedophile crimes, and no one is up in arms, no one is crying for prosecution. Because no one really heard the story of what happened to us. The crime victims were kept controlled and silent, by an organization that sells itself as the "support network" for the survivors.<br />
<br />
I'll just have to be on the sidelines watching for now, waiting and waiting for other people to "get it."<br />
.<br />
Kay Ebeling<br />
.<br />
****<br />
POST NOTE 1:<br />
Sept. 30, 2011<br />
<br />
Blaine is in Rome, getting ready to follow the Pope into Germany with what Irish Times identifies as her "lobbying organization." Now the reporter could have gotten it wrong, but if not, it is illegal for a nonprofit in the USA to engage in lobbying... but who cares about a little thing like IRS laws?<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/world/2011/0921/1224304482480.html">Abuse lobby urges Pope not to meet victims in Germany</a><br />
<br />
Story will also make you laugh when it quotes Blain criticizing the victims meeting because writes the Irish Times:<br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote>
The Pope will again meet what the survivors’ lobby calls “a small, handpicked group” of victims</blockquote>
<br />
Hello? SNAP is run by and for a hand-picked group of victims.<br />
<br />
Another quote from this article:<br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote>
Survivors’ lobby director Barbara Blaine argued that such high-profile meetings between the Pope and victims represented little more than “good PR” for the Holy See.</blockquote>
<br />
Well, yeah, like SNAP is nothing more than PR.<br />
<br />
Blaine also says in the Irish Times piece:<br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote>
"In the long term, [victims meeting with the Pope] will only add to the sense of betrayal and disappointment that millions – inside and outside of the church – feel about this pontiff and this crisis."</blockquote>
<br />
My friend Jim Robertson of L.A. thinks this current SNAP campaign to focus all the guilt on the Pope is another Catholic bishop-backed effort, as once this Pope dies, there will be no one else left to blame.<br />
***<br />
<br />
Pope Benedict is a fall guy.<br />
<br />
And Barbara Blaine does not speak for the American victims. Who she speaks for is a question, but the audacity she displays claiming to be "lobbying" for us (illegally) is astounding.<br />
<br />
*****<br />
<br />
POST NOTE 2:<br />
<br />
The result of SNAP's counter-intelligence is the people in the pews and most priests are able to go on with life in the Church as if none of these crimes ever happened. SNAP managed to keep the damage done to the Church down as low as possible by keeping any real grass-roots activism from ever getting started, and creating an image of victims as money-grubbing anti-Catholics.<br />
<br />
So we end up like stories like this from Philly Dot Com on Oct. 5, 2011:<br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote>
<a href="http://www.philly.com/philly/news/pennsylvania/131114868.html">Msgr. Lynn got standing ovation at Chaput dinner, say those at event</a><br />
<br />
By John P. Martin<br />
Inquirer Staff Writer<br />
<br />
Msgr. William J. Lynn, the former church official awaiting trial for allegedly protecting sexually abusive priests, drew words of encouragement from Philadelphia's new archbishop and a standing ovation from scores of priests at a private gathering last month, according to people familiar with the event.<br />
<br />
During the invitation-only dinner for Archbishop Charles J. Chaput at a parish hall in Montgomery County, Chaput singled out Lynn in the crowd and noted how difficult the ordeal has been for him, according to one priest who attended and two people briefed by others at the gala...</blockquote>
<br />
If there had been a genuine movement among the hundred thousand pedophile priest victims, and real activism had taken place, the Church would have been damaged, the priests who committed the crimes and bishops who enabled them would be banished. Instead they get standing ovations and most of the victims have been marginalized.<br />
<br />
Limited damage is exactly what the Church wanted when they created SNAP to divert and destroy the nascent survivor movement as it was starting in the mid-1980s.<br />
<br />
******<br />
<br />
Notes: Next Add: The Message Board and "Other States" notes<br />
<br />
*******<br />
<br />
* Work on this:<br />
<br />
<strong>The Chicago Pizza Joint Coincidence</strong>.<br />
<br />
(Details have been changed to protect Rob’s identity. Rob is not his real name.)<br />
<br />
It's hard to write this, as Rob is such a dear person, he works so hard at keeping victims informed through regular emails. But again, this really happened, and I have to not care who hates me for writing it and just write it.<br />
<br />
In 2009 I was determined to move to Chicago and “work on my story” which would include trying to find other victims of Father Thomas Barry Horne, who is a perpetrator from the Chicago Archdiocese in the case involving me and my sister from the early 1950s.<br />
<br />
In 2009 I were having regular phone conversations with Rob in Chicago. He was going to help me find my way around when I got to his city, we were bonding. Rob and I were talking two or three times a week, and thanks to our growing friendship, moving to Chicago would happen more smoothly for me than if I just came there not knowing anyone.<br />
<br />
Then one day when I didn't hear from Rob for a while, I called him, and he said, “You'll never guess who showed up in my pizza joint the other day,” he said, then, “Out of the blue, Barbara Blaine comes in for a slice.”<br />
<br />
My heart sank, because by then the intervention pattern had been happening with other victims. Rob had told me before that even though they were in the same city, and Rob is a well known long time active person in the pedophile priest movement, he said he never interacted with Blaine, never sees her or hears from her. Now here she was walking into his South Side pizza joint. I knew right away the intervention was happening again and my Chicago plans were about to go downhill.<br />
<br />
And sure enough:<br />
<br />
Before that very phone conversation was over, Rob added, “Barbara told me she’s got big plans for Chicago and she wants me to be a big part of them. So now we've got a big project in the works for this city.”<br />
<br />
I asked him to elaborate and Rob, hesitating and awkward as if he wasn’t sure how to tell me, said:<br />
<br />
“Well we really don't want anyone from the outside to be involved."<br />
<br />
He was repeating to me what Blaine had said to him.<br />
<br />
I tried to protest, "Rob, I'm not from the outside," but he continued.<br />
<br />
"We've got a special thing going on here in Chicago now, and it's just not a good idea to involve anybody from outside this region in these plans we've got coming up.”<br />
<br />
After that I was cut off. Rob stopped calling me back, like so many other victims, after an interaction with one of the big three who run SNAP, Rob suddenly did not want to work with me.<br />
<br />
Needless to say, in the following months, that “big project for Chicago” never materialized.<br />
<br />
I really doubt it was just a coincidence that Blaine showed up in Rob’s pizza joint. She never had before and never has again since then.<br />
<br />
I think that what happened was SNAP found out City of Angels Blog had plans to come to Chicago and get some real work done, they realized I was going to dig up the answers to some real questions.<br />
<br />
So once again, SNAP intervened. This time it was Blaine, convincing Rob to cut off communications with me, and my plans to come to Chicago came to a standstill.<br />
<br />
That’s how SNAP works, they carry out sabotage activities behind the scenes, then make sure the press keeps reporting that SNAP does great work for survivors.<br />
<br />
SNAP’s advocacy for victims is an image created for the news media. In reality the survivors network is a hologram, something you can see, but nothing for victims to really hold onto.<br />
<br />
Damage control.<br />
.<br />
<strong>Developing:</strong><br />
<br />
SNAP is a counter intelligence group designed to look like they are anti-Catholic, but run by people who are sincerely Catholic. The end result is confusion on all levels.<br />
<br />
So adamant Catholics charge SNAP with trying to "destroy" the church> http://www.osv.com/tabid/7621/itemid/8341/Report-questions-motives-of-clerical-sex-abuse-vic.aspx And one real good point they make is asking the question, Why does SNAP keep saying the Church hasn't done enough? More than a billion dollars has gone out in settlements, when you think about it, Roger Mahony was one of the most generous and caring persons in this crisis. But SNAP keeps standing up to say, The Church has not done enough.<br />
<br />
The end result is SNAP makes victims look like we are only motivated by money or a desire to destroy the Church.<br />
<br />
Clohessy is quoted as saying to Our Sunday Visitor (Sept 11 2011) "The single fact is our movement is providing the Church an incredible gift, and helping to expose and purge the Church of devastating criminals.”<br />
<br />
SNAP has provided the Church a gift all right, and its truth slips out between the lines when Clohessy speaks. From the beginning SNAP's purpose has been to sabotage the victims while putting a face in the media of being a support organization.<br />
<br />
(The reason I'm not promoting this CofA 2 post yet is I'm still working this out. But truth is, adamant Catholics like David Pierre of The Media Report http://www.themediareport.com/ and even the imprisoned priest Gordon MacRae with his blog "These Stone Walls" http://www.thesestonewalls.com/gordon-macrae/snap-judgements-part-ii-ground-zero-of-the-catholic-scandal/ also see that something is wrong with SNAP. Unfortunately they conclude that SNAP is some organization, part Nazi part left-wing (left wing Nazis?), out to destroy the church, while working secretly for greedy lawyers.<br />
<br />
No, that's just the layer you are supposed to see, as the PR project that is SNAP was set up to make people see pedophile priest victims as an angry mob attacking the church for selfish reasons. That's why so many victims sense something wrong and drop out after one or two SNAP events, thinking, They Don't Represent Me. Most of us don't want to attack the church, we just want justice, and we haven't gotten it, instead we've gotten years of redundant media events.<br />
<br />
I am convinced SNAP is really counter intelligence, created to make survivors look bad while SNAP's founders actually love the Church, and love the personal aggrandizement they've experienced as a result of running SNAP the way they've run it.<br />
<br />
Even the money settlements for victims were designed to tear the movement apart.<br />
<br />
Only a fraction of victims got money from the church for damages. Some got ludicrously high amounts, some got mid-five figure amounts, and some, like me, got nothing at all. What better way to put a schism in the middle of a grass roots movement than to make half of them millionaires and leave the rest with nothing? Activists who used to be allies now move in totally different worlds, communications got cut off as, inevitably, those with settlements rebuilt their lives, and those without were left behind to struggle.<br />
<br />
And if you point out that settlements in the end actually hurt the "survivor movement," a SNAP leader will pop into your life and yell at you to stop whining.<br />
<br />
It will take me time to write this and for other people to understand it, but the truth of how SNAP sabotaged the survivor movement will come out eventually, probably not 'til after I'm dead, but this blog will still be here....)<br />
.<br />
-Kay Ebeling<br />
.<br />
cut but saved:<br />
Why does SNAP barely mention Bishop Accountability, in their Sept. 2011, letter to the international criminal court except referenced as “A prominent watchdog group in the U.S." Bishop Accountability is, however, source of several footnotes in the Hague presentations.<br />
<br />
MORE TO WRITE:<br />
**Sinkholes<br />
While turning their back on most individual "survivors," SNAP will select one or two victims and use them over and over in media events, with no concern for how the experience is affecting the victim, who is often self destructing off camera, as a result of the glare of their story in today's fifteen minutes of fame news world. As SNAP breezes from one town to the next they leave behind damaged victims on two different levels: the survivors who got ignored and sent away, as well as the survivors who got draped in front of cameras where their story was exploited and repeated, then ignored and sent away. At no time does SNAP meet with local activists to see what they want, SNAP just breezes in, does its media event, then breezes out. The two-three people who run this "network" take all the press and victim information with them when they leave.<br />
<br />
The stories and details and names of people who could really help gets dropped into a <strong>sinkhole</strong> somewhere between Chicago and St. Louis, never to be heard again ... then SNAP runs another media event to repeat the process.<br />
.<br />
<br />
TO COME<br />
Perpetual Victimhood<br />
No, the victims don't disappear from the movement because we are all too sick to function, even though that's the message we get from SNAP, that we are all hopelessly damaged.<br />
An amazing thing happened when I officially broke off with SNAP and started criticizing them and telling the story of my experience.<br />
I stopped feeling like a helpless victim.<br />
I stopped feeling like the pedophile priest experience was the cause of all my problems. It was liberating.<br />
Then<br />
As I deconstructed the whole experience internally I remembered: the first time I reached out to SNAP in Northern California in the 1990s, I was like a warrior at that time. It was at the SNAP support groups that I first heard I was a "survivor" who was damaged, and the more I attended those SNAP groups, which are structured on New Age (mind control) concepts from the 1970s, the more I gave in and became a victim.<br />
Breaking with SNAP was really good for my survival.<br />
.<br />
ADD:<br />
I worked hard to get CofA Blog picked up at other locations, like Examiner Dot Com and AlterNet, but someone would complain to their editorial board and soon the blog would be removed. With no one willing to be interviewed and no place to publish, and don't forget Google refused to allow their ads on my site --<br />
<br />
I felt like no matter what I did, I'd get beaten down. And, well, without a network of support...<br />
.<br />
<br />
After doing City of Angels Blog for four years, this story was all I could see or find, even without looking for it. Today [Fall 2011] I see so much good work done at a local level in SNAP, I think to myself, I must not have seen what happened clearly. Then I remember, the whole thing is set up to look from the outside like great work is being done, so now that I am standing outside, to me, too, it looks like good work is being done. Especially at a local level, SNAP works, as if some people got a network going in spite of the obstructions.<br />
<br />
I invite people to please email me and tell me what you think one way or the other: cityofangelslady@yahoo.com<br />
<br />
<b>May 8, 2013</b><br />
Once again SNAP only responds after a case is already in the news, a blatant example in today's news. In St. Louis, home of Clohessy, HQ of SNAP- or is that Chicago?- SNAP criticizes the Archdiocese for not knowing about these cases sooner:<br />
<br />
<h3 class="entry-header" style="background-color: #dfddbd; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', georgia, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 18.3999996185303px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">
<a href="http://www.snapnetwork.org/mo_archbishop_blasted_over_announcement_regarding_predator" style="color: maroon;">MO- Archbishop blasted over announcement regarding predator</a></h3>
<div class="entry-content" style="background-color: #dfddbd; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', georgia, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: small; line-height: 18.3999996185303px;">
<div class="entry-body">
MISSOURI<br />
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests<br />
POSTED BY DAVID CLOHESSY ON MAY 08, 2013<br />
A St. Louis priest has been “permanently removed from active ministry” - but apparently not defrocked - 31 years after the first of at least five child sex abuse accusations against him surfaced. And a local support group for victims is criticizing the archdiocese for not evidently supervising the cleric for the last 11 years and for what it calls “a hurtful and gratuitous announcement” about the defrocking.<br />
<br /></div>
</div>
<br />
<b>My question is:</b><br />
Why didn't SNAP know about these cases until they were reported in the news today? Things just don't add up. SNAP claims to take calls 8-10 hours a day, survivors of these crimes from all over the world call them to report pedophile priesrs. Surely some of these new victims in St. Louis have found the much quoted David Clohessy of St. Louis, so why does SNAP only tag along on this story when the story breaks in the news? Why doesn't SNAP originate thousands of stories like this?<br />
Thousands of pedophile priest victims have phoned or otherwise contacted SNAP with details of the most heinous crimes, in the last twenty years, told SNAP all the incidentals, and yet, we never get any reports of what happened in any cases, unless a mainstream media outlet breaks a story. Then SNAP jumps onboard. Why doesn't SNAP release info about the hundreds of thousands of sex crimes on which it has received reports? The writers of a SNAP document like that could easily change names and specific locations to protect identities of victims, even to protect identities of priests.<br />
Why is SNAP sitting on all the information it has gotten from survivors over the last twenty years? While at the same time assuring that all calls to report priest sex crimes come to SNAP/ Where did SNAP learn this kind of secrecy?<br />
Instead of aggressive action about hundreds of thousands of sex crimes against children by Catholic priests, all we get is SNAP responding to news as it breaks, and getting their name in print whenever a new case shows up in the news. So all the calls will then go to SNAP. Then everything stays secret.<br />
What are the people who run SNAP really doing?<br />
<br />
***<br />
Origins<br />
<br />
<table align="center" border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" style="width: 100%px;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><strong>Priest Accused of Abuse Was Given Parish Job</strong><br /><br />By Patricia Rice<br />Post-Dispatch<br />April 8, 2002<br /><br />A priest who is the younger brother of a national advocate for victims of clergy sexual abuse was accused of molesting a college student nine years ago.<br /><br />At that time, the Rev. Kevin Clohessy, brother of St. Louis-based advocate David Clohessy, was serving at a Catholic student center at Northeast Missouri State University in Kirksville, Mo. The university is now known as Truman State University.<br /><br />Kevin Clohessy, 42, is currently on leave of absence from the Jefferson City diocese. He most recently worked as executive director of Boone County Red Cross in Columbia, but resigned March 28 after 14 months at the nonprofit agency.<br /><br />Kevin Clohessy could not be reached for comment. In reply to a Post-Dispatch message left on the priest's answering machine, Jefferson City Diocese spokesman Mark Saucier said Clohessy declined to comment.<br /><br />In a letter to students explaining his departure, Clohessy wrote of being under considerable stress but did not mention the allegation against him, said Sister Ethel Marie Biri, chancellor of the Jefferson City diocese.<br /><br />The diocese sent the priest for treatment at the St. Jean Vianney Renewal Center in Dittmer in 1993 after substantiating the student's complaint that he had been a victim of sexual abuse by Clohessy, diocesan officials said.<br /><br />Just two years earlier, the relationship between Kevin Clohessy and his older brother, David, had become strained after David Clohessy filed a lawsuit against the Jefferson City diocese, alleging that another priest, the Rev. John Whiteley, had abused him when he was a teen-ager at St. Pius Parish in Moberly.<br /><br />The case was dismissed in 1993 because the statute of limitations had run out.<br /><br />Kevin Clohessy was released from treatment in 1995, Biri said. Based on advice of experts, he was then assigned to a parish - St. Francis Xavier in Taos, outside Jefferson City.<br /><br />In May 2000, Clohessy requested a leave of absence, Biri said.<br /><br />"When he left there, it was by his own choice," Biri said. "He has not officially resigned. He is still on leave of absence. He was not asked to leave."<br /><br />Early this winter, the diocese tightened its standards and reviewed all its files of priests with substantiated allegations of sexual abuse against minors who were in a parish and other public ministry. If Kevin Clohessy had not already been on leave, Biri said she expects he may have been removed from a parish since the case involved actions "very inappropriate" with a student.<br /><br />Diocesan records do not indicate whether the student was a minor, Biri said.<br /><br />David Clohessy said he learned about the abuse allegations against his brother in 1993, when the priest left Kirksville to obtain treatment in Dittmer.<br /><br />"I was already involved in victim's advocacy," he said.<br /><br />David Clohessy in 1991 founded an advocacy group for victims of clergy sexual abuse called Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests. The group, based in St. Louis, has more than 3,500 members nationwide.<br /><br />"I feel terribly sorry for anybody my brother victimized and for their families and for my family, especially my parents, and I hope that those people whom he hurt are able to come forward and get help," David Clohessy said.<br /><br /><em>Dawn Fallik of the Post-Dispatch contributed to this report.</em><br /><br /><em>Reporter Patricia Rice:<br />E-mail: <a href="mailto:price@post-dispatch.com">price@post-dispatch.com</a><br />Phone: 314-340-8221</em> </td></tr>
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(half-truths here as well)Kay Ebelinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13753284586265566961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5782652940285448862.post-1772077838204600702011-02-01T02:58:00.000-08:002013-03-27T05:10:44.415-07:00Through Angelic Intervention, CofA Blog is Born, in spite of SNAP attempts to kill it.<br />
Work in Progress<br />
<br />
(This is Chapter 2 OUTLINE <a href="http://cityofangels2.blogspot.com/2010/12/soundtrack-for-1969-chapters.html">Chapter 3 is here</a> and <a href="http://cityofangels2.blogspot.com/2011/09/whole-snap-story-from-city-of-angels.html">Chapter One here</a> and all of it is in progress as of Oct. 2011.)<br />
<br />
2006: Message Board already starting to not work<br />
Me frustrated every try I make to connect through SNAP in L.A.<br />
- They say “You're too sick.”<br />
- Or “You can’t say you represent SNAP." <br />
Both of which set me reeling. <br />
For months, the local SNAP director Mary Grant has told me, "nothing is going on with the L.A. cases," and I know that cannot be true. <br />
In fall 2006 SNAP calls a "meeting" for survivors at a Michael Baker hearing, although meeting in criminal court arraignments means we have to sit quietly and not speak.<br />
During a break, I “trap” Grant, getting her to talk to me while she is standing with a woman from VOTF. This way Grant has no choice but to tell me the truth. She can't tell me again that there is no courthouse activity right now concerning the hundreds of L.A. lawsuits with the woman from VOTF standing there. <br />
I interrupt them and say, "Mary, with hundreds of lawsuits filed in 2003, there has to be something going on in a courtroom somewhere about those cases."<br />
Through gritted teeth Grant tells me yes there are a few cases in court, and I say where, in which courthouse, and she finally mumbles the name of a plaintiff attorney for me to call for information about the L.A. cases. <br />
Next day I learn from the attorney’s office that hearings have been going on for almost a year and the lawyer gladly tells me how to track the L.A. Clergy Cases at the Superior Court website. The plaintiff law office tell me there have been pretrial hearings in L.A. Superior Court for about a year. <br />
Throughout her interaction with me, Mary Grant seemed conflicted, like what she was saying to me was what she was instructed to say. But as she carried water for SNAP she must have seen the damage she was inflicting. I was not the only one. Grant pulled a few other people aside and sent them packing, and at the end of the L.A. Cases, Grant was not in the best emotional shape. I think she was a decent person, doing what her bosses told her to do, and at the end of it, she was deteriorating in a sense of inner guilt. <br />
Those several instances in 2006 why did Grant tell me repeatedly that nothing is going on with the clergy cases when there were hearings revealing bizarre shenanigans carried out by Archdiocese defense lawyers. I wonder how many other reporters SNAP diverted away from covering the story, but in 2006-2007 I pushed down the idea, because like most survivors, in first dealings with SNAP I still thought the people who run SNAP were the equivalent of saints. <br />
<br />
That Christmas holiday a bunch of strange stuff happens personally between me and Grant, resulting in a stream of emails that for some reason I cannot find today. New Years 2007 as I'm still squawking at the monitor, my daughter points out to me, "Don't let them make you feel so bad." She says, "Look at who is sending you these emails." <br />
My intuitive daughter forces me to take an objective look at SNAP. Lizzie sensed something untrue and distrustful about the SNAP since the day we first connected with the local branch, a good two years earlier, my perceptive daughter. So Jan 2007, I ignore these niggering snippets coming in my email and plod on.<br />
Using instincts honed from 1976 to 1988 when I worked as a reporter and editor, one of my careers I destroyed, I decide on a hearing to attend on my own, and do a lot of praying in place of having an editor. <br />
MORE ANGELIC INTERVENTION<br />
I put a Notice on the SNAP Message Board that I'm going to a hearing in L.A. next Tuesday, anyone want to join me. <br />
Immediately SNAP is in my email trying to stop me from covering the hearing, strange since it is the first anyone from SNAP responded to one of my message board posts, and I’d been posting at the board that I wanted to connect with people for a year. <br />
Now after I invite readers to join me at a hearing and SNAP in an email tells me: “Don’t go to that hearing, you will be hurting this survivor and ruining his case." She attaches paragraphs from an email between her and the plaintiff attorney that do not really say that, and adds, "The survivor does not want you to go to his hearing and write about it." <br />
She repeats, "You will be damaging a survivor."<br />
ANGELIC INTERVENTION, <br />
The survivor in that one hearing is the one and only person from all the thousand plus Southern California cases who I have managed to meet, thanks to the message board. So I call him right away and he tells me, "Hell no, I never talk to SNAP and I would never say that. Hell yes, I do want you to cover my hearing, and I want you to write about it."<br />
(Later in 4 years of doing CofA Blog I find out many victims around the country, when proposing activism to SNAP central, are told the same phrase, "You will be hurting [or damaging] a survivor."<br />
Later I also learned that several survivors have had similar dis-spiriting words whispered in their ears by a SNAP leader as I had in 2006 ("You're too sick to run a SNAP meeting"). If I were the only survivor shut out by SNAP, I would not be writing this story. It was after plenty of interviews doing CofA Blog that I realized victims all across the country were having similar experiences to mine, with the end result them not being "empowered" as SNAP claims, but feeling beaten down by SNAP. I concluded the SNAP enigma is part of the pedophile Catholic priest story that has to be written.)<br />
<br />
***************<br />
<br />
<strong>January 2007 I cover the hearing, in spite of warnings not to from SNAP, and find an amazing story there, so <a href="http://cityofangels3.blogspot.com/2007/01/as-i-sat-down-to-write-this-kjlh-102.html">January 16, 2007, City of Angels Blog is born, thanks to angelic intervention and the message board. </a><br /><br />A few weeks later, SNAP deconstructs the message board, making it almost totally not work. </strong>.<br />
<br />
*********************<br />
Earlier on the message board I'd my first observed SNAP sabotaging supporters who try to get activism going on their own. A group of us organized among ourselves organized a vigil Easter 2006 to take place in Chicago. After ignoring our requests for help contacting the media and participants, SNAP showed up the day of the event, suddenly having its own idea to hold a vigil. Only SNAP's event is in a different location at a slightly different time. So SNAP detours news media and potential participants from the Vigil we organized, and even sabotages their own event by showing up in the wrong location, at the wrong time, making its announcement too late, a pattern repeated in each city where SNAP appears. <br />
The Chicago Vigil was sabotaged and it sapped the organizers' enthusiasm as well. <br />
<br />
These active energetic potential activists who organized the Chicago 2006 vigil were so hurt by SNAP's intervention and spoiler acts that they stop even participating in what's left of the message board. <br />
They drop out of the movement.<br />
Another pattern observed in city after city with SNAP. <br />
A few months later on the message board, SNAP locks the Chicago Archdiocese category at the message board, then two years later claims lawyers told them to take it down. <br />
City of Angels posts a mirror version of the message board. <br />
<br />
You can read the mirror version of the old SNAP message board at <a href="http://snapsurvivorsnetwork.yuku.com/directory">http://snapsurvivorsnetwork.yuku.com/directory</a> although the board is officially closed...<br />
<br />
*****<br />
This is the video that used to be on this link, which is now Chapter Two of The Other SNAP Story.<br />
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<br />
Video above is from Fall 2010. <br />
.Kay Ebelinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13753284586265566961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5782652940285448862.post-22705167751654259192010-12-15T05:34:00.000-08:002011-12-06T08:57:44.149-08:00Other States, SNAP curious pattern repeated all over the USA.<br />This is Chapter 3, <a href="http://cityofangels2.blogspot.com/2011/02/blog-post.html">Chapter 2 is here</a> and <a href="http://cityofangels2.blogspot.com/2011/09/whole-snap-story-from-city-of-angels.html">Chapter One here</a> and all of it is in process of being written now (Oct. 2011).<br /><br />***<br />We were happy the four or five of us that we had put together this media event on our own, that the Pope’s statements show so little concern about the kinds of sex crimes that had taken place against children in the Catholic Church, and how damaged we all were now as adults with that experience in our childhoods as a result of it. <br /><br />We were in front of the L.A. Cathedral and we thought we were spontaneous, a group of survivors who’d just gotten in touch with each other and decided to picket in the same place all the SNAP media events had taken place in the previous seven years, though the group had recently disappeared from Los Angeles. <br /><br />Finally maybe we'd get a chance to speak. <br /><br />Then as the hour drew near, to all of our dismay, a guy showed up from SNAP to make the “official press statement” and it was like the news media had been informed only to talk to him. <br /><br />I know this guy and only a week ago he had told me he hadn’t read anything about the pedophile priest issue in months maybe a year, he was so tired of it, and now here he was our designated spokesperson. Dutifully most of the survivors took a position behind him as he took the center stage, and all the news cameras and microphones pointed at him. We had announced the subject of the press statement was new victims coming forward in Europe and how these new allegations show that the Pope had been in collusion with the crime cover-ups for decades, each of us was brewing with rage and had plenty to say about it. <br /><br />The SNAP spokesman takes control of the event and reads from the prepared statement: “To all the victims in Europe. We feel your pain.”<br /><br />Not much more than that. “We feel your pain.” <br /><br />An audible groan came out of me, and I went off to a spot of shade on the sidewalk and dropped out of the event, which resulted in a watered down version of our outrage being broadcast in the news. The rest of the group gathered at the cathedral, most having been raised as good Catholics who don't ask questions, stood dutifully behind the spokesman as he read again, “We feel your pain.” I wasn't raised Catholic after age 13. <br /><br />****<br /><br />"Do NOT write church officials. At best, it’s a waste of time. At worst, information you provide might be used against you or others." (From SNAP Spring 2011 Open letter to concerned PA citizens & Catholics) <br /><br />They say "Do not write church officials" as they will use what you write to them against you. Instead write to SNAP.” <br /><br />Problem is then SNAP keeps everything as secret as the church. <br /><br />*********<br />If I were the only victim to have a bad experience with SNAP I would not write this story today.<br /><br />With about a hundred thousand victims in the USA of pedophile priests, why do only a handful appear when SNAP holds a media event? Where did everybody go?<br /><br />*****<br /><br /><blockquote>May 12, 2008 1:00 PM Harrisburg Pa, capitol rotunda<br /><br />Rally re HB1137 which will open a two window plus extend the SOL by 12 years. I called someone in PA:<br /><br />"My pet peeve is we have all these groups that speak out and when it comes time to actually do anything their actions are nil.<br /><br />"I called SNAP, I couldn't get anybody organized to go up there with me, if the people do not rally at the capitol, it will die in committee." (Ref WTFIT?) </blockquote><br />******<br /><br />(Insert here, what happened to Robert Costello's project when the Pope visited New York; the way SNAP defeated efforts by survivors to hold a vigil in Chicago Easter Weekend 2006; what SNAP leaders said to and about Jim Robertson after he made widespread news by handcuffing himself to Cardinal Mahony's throne at the L.A. Cathedral, and other ways SNAP stops any victims from doing activism outside SNAP's agenda and control.<br /><br />And finally re The Hague, since German lawyers were alreday working to prosecute the Pope at the International Criminal Court, and efforts were already underway to have victims contact the ICC, why didn't SNAP mention, in its September 2011 media blitz, any of that work to prosecute the Pope that was already in progress?)<br /><br />****************<br /><br /><span style="font-size:180%;">'SNAP tries to malign me, and as far as I'm concerned, tries to malign anybody that gets between them and a TV camera or microphone.'<br /><br /></span>(Once again, I find in my notes, I'm talking to a survivor about “our issue” and without provocation or prompting, the survivor starts talking about their problem with SNAP to me. I’ve changed the location of the interview quoted here, and hidden the speaker’s identity, because he relates an incident similar to what I heard from people in several cities.)<br /><br /><strong>A pattern repeated by SNAP in city after city:</strong><br /><br />Words of One Unidentified Survivor:<br /><br /><em>We have a very bad problem with SNAP so we created our own meeting, we call ourselves -------------<br /><br />One of the women that came to the meeting when it was a SNAP meeting wasn’t a survivor. She was very hostile towards members and when I brought this to the co-chair’s attention, I said, a lot of the members are complaining about this woman. But the co-chair wouldn't agree to tell her to stop coming.<br /><br />We had to start an additional meeting.<br /><br />Barbara Dorris came into the picture and said that's not going to happen. (Dorris, of St. Louis, is SNAP Outreach Director.)<br /><br />We said we voted on it.<br /><br />She said call yourself whatever you want but you're not SNAP, then she started to accuse us of tax evasion and misrepresenting ourselves as SNAP leaders.<br /><br />We're more about healing than hurting people.<br /><br />We don't want anything more to do with SNAP.<br /><br />We'll support them to out a priest but...<br /><br />COFA: WHO WAS THE WOMAN AT THE MEETINGS?<br /><br />This woman, she was part of Voice of the Faithful and I guess has a very big ax to grind with the Church and joined us because she felt SNAP was more involved in confronting the Church.<br /><br />Then in meetings she would challenge people, speak sarcastically to the survivors who were sharing.<br /><br />She’d taunt, I’d say, you gotta stop, if you don't agree, tell me or them after.<br /><br />The local SNAP leader then wouldn't do anything about it.<br /><br />It was just- we had to start a new group, we're still reaching out to other survivors.<br /><br />SNAP tries to malign me, and as far as I'm concerned, tries to malign anybody that gets between them and a TV camera or microphone.<br /><br />They're intimidated by people like you and me and others that speak out and sometimes speak out louder than SNAP does, SNAP doesn't like that. </em><br /><em></em><br /><em><strong>You have to realize who you're dealing with</strong>, I know enough about SNAP that I know I'm not going to align myself-<br /><br />Then on their website months later they still had the old meeting at a different place. I called Barbara Dorris, and said, you have survivors that could be going to the wrong building where we don't meet. She says, I’ll take care of it, but the thing is, the wrong address had been up there on the SNAP website for months.</em><br /><br />***************<br /><br />(From November 2007 interview with DOEM of Pennsylvania:)<br /><br />COFA: IS THERE AN ACTIVE SNAP GROUP BACK THERE?<br /><br />DOEM: You know what I initially met with the president when we were even heavier in the media, probably around 2002?<br /><br />COFA: BLAINE?<br /><br />DOEM: No it was Clohessy and I wasn’t very thrilled with his follow through as far as Pennsylvania, you know. But it’s an entity in itself and wherever their focus may be I don't know.<br />But<br />COFA: SO SNAP ISN’T PART OF YOUR STORY AT ALL?<br />DOEM: No, that's just it. I mean, I just recently discovered there was a guy that handled a chapter for SNAP and he went off and spun off his own, you know, survivor network you might say. It’s just I don't know. Hold on- [OFF TOPIC CONVERSATION]<br /><br />(DOEM in follow-up 2011: Re SNAP in pa, "There is no ongoing group, nobody has ever followed up with us.")<br /><br />...<br /><br />Woman survivor who had dropped out by April 2008:<br /><br />Sol in Ohio, their [SNAP] tactics wrecked it. They didn't do what they did in Boston. We wanted it abolished, but at least we got length of time extended,<br />But folks in Boston engaged all the groups who were victims...<br /><br />*****<br /><br />Also from April 2008:<br /><br />Spoke with GG, one of the L.A. plaintiffs, on April 16 in the evening. I called him as he was once an L.A. contact with SNAP. I wanted him to help me find persons involved with the Salesian trial. [GG is not his real initials.]<br /><br />We were talking about the upcoming trial when he volunteered almost off topic that he’d gotten a bad taste about SNAP. He’d been an activist with them for years.<br /><br />One Sunday evening a while after the settlements went out, he got a call from Clohessy and Blaine saying, hi, we just showed up at the airport, let’s meet someplace for dinner, you name the place.<br /><br />GG felt flattered that Clohessy and Blaine would be wanting to meet him, so packed up, left his family for the night, and met with Clohessy and Blaine for what turned into a sales pitch, complete with “So tell me how much will you be donating this evening,” type pressure used as a sales closing technique. [NOTE: L.A. plaintiffs got settlement checks in early 2008, averaging $1.2 million each.]<br /><br />GG felt it was Tacky and as he described it, so did I. So tacky it could have been designed to turn people off and be tacky. Clohessy and Blaine apparently raised little money on that trip, instead turned off GG. He said he made lots of recommendations on better ways to raise money and Clohessy and Blaine said, great, we'll meet soon and do all that, and never talked to him about it again, although he did make several appearances for SNAP, including travel at his own expense. They never entertained an idea he put forward.<br />.<br />*********<br /><br />The image of SNAP leaders appearing at plaintiffs' doors fundraising brought to my mind this image from The Others<br /><br /><iframe height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/yHL8TAeHUj0" frameborder="0" width="560"></iframe><br /><br />Then I started thinking, when people got settlements, SNAP would be there hands out almost demanding donations from the settlements. Then SNAP keeps its financial stuff pretty secret, you never really know how much comes in and where it goes...<br /><br />What a perfect setup for a crime syndicate. Pay out settlements in lawsuits to be forgiven your crimes, then strong-arm the plaintiffs for big chunks of that cash back, through an illusive and indistinct nonprofit.<br /><br />Get the cash back, as much of it as you can, like a Mario Puzo godfather...<br /><br /><iframe height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/icBp9PtqAAI" frameborder="0" width="560"></iframe><br /><br />*********************<br /><br /><strong>In a January 2008 interview (to be published early 2012) Jim Robertson told CofA:</strong><br /><br />SNAP was going to ask the cardinal to dedicate one of the chapels in the new cathedral to the victims.<br /><br />But the cardinal jumped the gun.<br /><br />He found out we were going to make a request, and he dedicated a chapel to the victims without talking to any victims.<br /><br />We went down to the cathedral and the cardinal is putting a cross in the chapel for victims but that's an event once again designed to make the church look good and nothing for us.<br /><br />That's when we started to get pissed off<br /><br />**********<br /><br />I asked Jim Robertson what happened with SNAP after he handcuffed himself to Roger Mahony’s throne in July of 2005 on the altar of L.A. Cathedral. Hearings about the misdemeanor Disturbing a Religious Gathering began two months later and Jim’s case was going set to go to trial in December.<br /><br />CofA: HOW SUPPORTIVE WAS SNAP?<br /><br />I was attacked for three hours on the phone by Mary Grant.<br /><br />8 AM the day after, I get a phone call -- I’d been getting lots of calls, in fact I’d been doing interviews, I did the early AM drive time radio interviews. There had been a camera crew there filming the Mass, and the incident was on CNN but I didn't know that would happen. Amy Berg was there interviewing for her film.<br /><br />Anyway, Mary Grant calls next day and says, I just want you to know you ruined the demonstration and so many people are angry<br /><br />She said, So many people are angry and they're never coming back because of what you did.<br /><br />Then David Clohessy wrote that this demonstration was spoiled by one person’s selfish gesture, and it was passed out at the next “support group” meeting at Grant’s house.<br /><br />They put this out about me after the event.<br /><br />Yeah, Grant calls me after the demonstration and her tirade goes on for three hours<br /><br />I mean.<br /><br />They were all cheering me when I passed by in the squad car.<br /><br />But here’s Mary Grant telling me I had fucked up.<br />Failed<br />Done a bad thing to the movement.<br /><br />I tried to reason with her, I had no idea all these people would show up. If anybody was offended, I'm sorry, but I had no idea they were offended.<br /><br />In the end, I said, if anybody needs me to apologize give them my phone number<br /><br />In the next three years no one ever, ever, ever told me they were angry at me for handcuffing myself to Mahony’s throne.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4MoRuDr7woLa4kAXHUSXp5zfqe-aHN4BXJNjO62F5ETteiGRCaIjL4f2apm0s73i0Emim36lPMun44i0-H1myWJEME6HvRsbi9dtQTRiYUabMgyaAmRVybx-Ctd3fXbTMFLnZZvkLBXY/s1600/Jim+Robertson+cuffed+to+Mahony+throne+2005.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 147px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 200px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5668956781974510482" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4MoRuDr7woLa4kAXHUSXp5zfqe-aHN4BXJNjO62F5ETteiGRCaIjL4f2apm0s73i0Emim36lPMun44i0-H1myWJEME6HvRsbi9dtQTRiYUabMgyaAmRVybx-Ctd3fXbTMFLnZZvkLBXY/s200/Jim+Robertson+cuffed+to+Mahony+throne+2005.jpg" /></a><br />A new friend in Albuquerque late 2010 is source of this exclusive photo at City of Angels Blog, from the day in July 2005 when <strong>Jim Robertson (pictured left)</strong> when he handcuffed himself to the throne-like chair on the L.A. Cathedral altar reserved for the Cardinal. The incident was part of demonstrations re the L.A. Clergy Cases, most of which settled in July 2007.<br /><br />Jim talks a bit about the experience in a 2008 interview quoted below.<br /><br />Photo comes by way of two plaintiffs in the L.A. cases, one lives in Albuquerque the other in L.A. (how those priests did get around). <a href="http://cityofangels8.blogspot.com/2010/12/photo-jim-robertson-cuffed-to-mahony-on.html">Read more here</a> http://cityofangels8.blogspot.com/2010/12/photo-jim-robertson-cuffed-to-mahony-on.html )<br /><br />*********<br /><br /><em>Me, I'm wondering, who gave SNAP authority? We had started out as a grass roots movement, but now these people from St. Louis are in charge? Who put them in charge and who is their boss?</em>.<br /><br />******<br /><br />Somehow the Cardinal in L.A. always knew in advance what SNAP would be doing. (Write here the CNN experience in 2010)<br /><br />*<br />The more I learned over four years interviewing pedophile priest victims,<br />the thought of how much evil it would take to pull off this entire false advocates scenario sickened me.<br /><br />***<br /><br />FOUND<br />November 2011<br />In CofA Blog notes from June 2008 or thereabouts:<br /><br />Can I run this?<br /><br />I don't think it’s any accident that the first time I broke through and wrote a negative paragraph about SNAP it was in the same post as <a href="http://cityofangels4.blogspot.com/2008/04/we-will-see-thousands-more-children.html">Thousands more children will be raped by priests</a> "<br /><br />In that post I wrote: “The organization that produced more than four thousand pedophile priest felons and is not being thoroughly investigated is the Catholic Church"<br /><br />In the same post I wrote: "But SNAP only appears to be there for those crime victims with lawsuits."<br /><br />BECAUSE both the Church and SNAP had the same goal in their efforts in the USA from the mid-1980s to present:<br /><br />In the end the civil lawssuits across the country made survivors look like we're all just out for money<br />In the end the persons who get money from the church retreat after being warned by SNAP about friends who come out of the woodwork, asking for cash, after you get a settlement.<br />In the end lawsuits pit plaintiff against plaintiff and plaintiffs against survivors not able to be a plaintiff, not necessarily a personality thing. It's just the difference in the financial status of victims who get settlements and those who don't that makes us not be able to interact with each other anymore.<br />In the end lawsuits perpetuate secrecy about these crimes<br />In the end lawsuits pit plaintiff against plaintiff as they ended up competing for their share of cash, so were afraid to let another plaintiff know how much cash they got, so dropped out of any movement that was developing.<br /><br />-- The reason both church and SNAP policy that hurt victims came up in the same story is they are connected<br /><br />At the top<br /><br />WHY CAN’T OTHER PEOPLE SEE IT????<br /><br />**************************<br /><br /><br /><object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/dWlLPJG9Cvg?fs=1&hl=en_US"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><br /><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/dWlLPJG9Cvg?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object><br /><br /><strong>Above:</strong> (Soundtrack for 1969 story that used to be at this link but has now moved to a work platform for rewrites.)<br /><br />********<br /><br />More stuff found in files: <br /><br />Not going to say who said this, but I can attest it was someone with a lot of experience.<br /><br />"1st SNAP convention 2003 was in a St. Louis hotel, Blaine et al stayed in a different better hotel, away from the bulk of survivors."<br /><br />***<br />Blaine was in Tampa with Dutch Film crew in 2010. (Doesn't any reporter think it's strange that she’s almost always standing there alone running a “network”? Where are the rest of the hundred thousand of us?)Kay Ebelinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13753284586265566961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5782652940285448862.post-78459389850922122482010-12-13T06:19:00.000-08:002011-10-19T05:05:11.137-07:00SNAP Half-Amped: My 2008 Conference Experience.<br />(TK Chapter 4 or 5??? the other SNAP conference story)<br /><br />******<br />The Post at this Link Used to Be:<br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><strong>Life in a Tupperware container, 1</strong><br /><br /></span>I was going to write about how great I'm doing. Finally I can go to sleep without television or radio on, after years of needing some media in my head until I fell asleep, otherwise my head would fill up with my own thoughts and I’d never get to sleep. For years, if I made the mistake of just lying down, or letting a video play out, before I knew it, I wouldn't be asleep, I’d be sitting up, clenched, squirting tears. My face goes into this total twist thing as I realize the horror and shock of my own life. Some incident will enter my memory and before I know it I'm running the details in my head, and that leads to all the physical stuff that comes with triggered memories. Total body pain.<br /><br />I was going to write that I'm Cured, it's stopped, but actually there have been two episodes now since I got to Albuquerque. Maybe it’s the sheer white of the Motel Six design style of my room, for some reason I'm real clear in here, when the episodes happen, when the line gets crossed between emotional and physical pain. I've experienced it live in person on myself here now twice in less than a month.<br /><br />Yesterday it was so weird, I totally understood the part about needing media to occupy my brain or else. It was Sunday and I don't like to have to work on Sunday but yesterday I had, instead, more work than usual, on the show "I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant," work that had to be done by early afternoon. So I got up my usual 4 AM and did it, transcribed at full attention at my little laptop, at my little perch on this tiny round table that is the only furniture in the room practically.<br /><br />The interview was an hour and a half of another one of these incredible undereducated,incurious women who end up being featured on "I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant," whose Season 4 now kept me tied to my laptop on Sunday. More than six hours straight listening to a monotone voice saying, I don't know, what do you mean, I don't think so. The new mother was so DUMB.<br /><br />Hey, realty TV keeps me working, I should be grateful.<br /><br />Anyway. Just at about two in the afternoon as I'm finishing up work, I'm thinking there is nothing I’d like more than to lie down and watch a movie, and the cable goes out, third or fourth day in a row, same time, just as I'm finishing work. But not being totally addicted to television, I thought, no big deal I’ll watch a movie on my laptop, nope, gave all the DVD’s to Lizzie when I left L.A. No problem, I thought, I’ll listen to the radio, but the connection was not good enough over the hotel internet ISP to get in the station I listen to on Sundays from L.A. KJLH<br /><br />So here I was in this blank white room with no TV, no radio, no one I felt like I could call*, and within an hour I was tearing myself apart. Squealing, twisting my face, crying so much that when I woke up later in the night, and saw myself in the mirror, I was shocked. The clouds of puffed skin all over the face, not just puffy eyes, but all the way down to the cheeks, just huge lumpy folds of creased puffs, with little slits at the top where the eyes would be, and from those slits my beady little eyes beamed out, looking angry. *Once an episode starts I can’t call anyone, that's part of the episode….<br /><br />Wow. No way I went out of the room looking like that.<br /><br />So cried in here because I'm so lonely instead.<br /><br />The first episode in this room was totally connected to the recent incidents in L.A. from living in an apartment owned by a slumlord. I don't think people realize how much having a slumlord for a landlord can affect a person, but it got me in ways I didn't realize until the second week I was here, when I asked the hotel people to let me move to a room on the top floor, so I could have a better view.<br /><br />It is a better view in this new room, lots of twinkly lights.<br /><br />But this is not the kind of hotel where a bellman shows up and packs your things and all you have to do is ride the elevator up one flight of stairs, tippling on four inch stilettos, petting a little Pekinese that lives in your handbag.<br /><br />No, here at the Motel Sic, I had to lug all my stuff to the elevator, wait, ride, lug all my stuff to the new room. I don't know how I managed in a week to acquire so much more stuff, more than the 70 and 58 pound suitcases I had to repack at Amtrak to get here. I had Amazon send a coffeepot, a hand-held vacuum (I'm too OCD to only have housekeeping once a week like they have in these hotels and a programmable coffee pot is mandatory when you get up at 4 AM for your job). After being here only a week, I’d acquired kitchen stuff, bags of it, from the Dollar General Store. Anyway, it took 2 hours of continuous pulling and packing and shoving and unloading to get my stuff up one flight of stairs, while the guys who run the hotel stood outside tapping their feet waiting, and I so wished I was at one of those other kinds of hotels….<br /><br />Not this lifetime.<br /><br />Anyway, inside the room I had to unpack everything again, so by nightfall I was wiped out, and only then realized the heater in the room was broken. I called and the maintenance guy came and said, it's not broken, sometimes with these heaters you think they're broken, but they aren't and I agreed, even said, hey you don't want a room to get too hot, it can ruin your computer equipment.<br /><br />But at one AM as I shivered in the little bed you get for $200 a week here, the heat didn't work, and I was more worried about the computer equipment freezing by that point,<br /><br />It was the first night this season that Albuquerque went below 30 degrees.<br /><br />My 4 AM I had pushed the little hotel room table into the hotel room kitchen where I kept the electric stove on all night by turning the timer back on every half hour.<br /><br />And I went into a total episode, this one trigged by slumlord landlord memories, thinking I was in the same mess now again, only now in a hotel in Albuquerque. From 2-5 or so AM, I relived everything we went through in L.A. with the guy who ran his rental business out of a high rise office building in Beverly Hills. There by the heat of two electric stove burners, I remembered how we went one whole summer of 2009 without an air conditioner, spending hours each day immobilized covered with sweat, in that apartment that cost me $1300 a month. When the slumlord finally replaced the AC, it still did not work, so I spent the summer of 2010 sweltering immobilized, not all day, just a few hours a day, but I was still at the mercy of this slumlord landlord who would respond to maintenance requests with months of arguments that made no sense.<br /><br />“We need pipes replaced in the bathroom.”<br />“Miss, Ebeling, it's come to my attention that you have a cat in your apartment, now that goes against your lease....”<br /><br />That kind of thing, fights back and forth with the landlord about total irrelevant topics, just to get basic maintenance done, after a while you stop bothering to even ask, just live with everything falling apart around you.<br /><br />I was so sure I'd left that all behind me.<br /><br />Then I sat here in this motel room with no heat remembering the months we lived with feces stains on our bathroom floor, in that apartment in L.A. When “maintenance” finally came in and fixed the pipes, they left the stained linoleum behind. I’d had to call the Health Department to finally get the bathroom floor replaced, but never stopped smelling feces coming from beneath the floor.<br /><br />Somehow the landlord from hell in L.A. tied in with today December 2010, in a hotel room in Albuquerque with no heat, and I turned back into this impotent, battered, broken woman who could do nothing but simper and whimper in the kitchen, waiting for the hotel office to open. Then at 7 AM or so the housekeeper knocked on the door, I was still in this oblivious state, frozen, immobilized, and told them about the heater,<br /><br />and<br /><br />Ta Da<br /><br />Within a half hour the hotel guy was there with a new heater, the maintenance guy took out the old one and replaced it with a new one, in seconds. And I had heat again.<br /><br />So I was going to write today about how much better I'm doing. I can finally sleep without media in my brain, but that's not true, because last night I didn't make it.<br /><br />The total body pain that started right in the middle of the episode yesterday, I felt it, the poison, go from my brain where it had me twisted, to everywhere else in the body, and I could not stop it.<br /><br />Now pain has got me slammed down here in Motel Sick for a couple days.<br /><br />Good thing the heater works.<br /><br />Life in a Tupperware container will be continued.<br />.Kay Ebelinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13753284586265566961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5782652940285448862.post-4399777483245359192010-11-29T07:30:00.000-08:002010-11-29T07:46:40.995-08:00I have to brag on my daughter a minute.<br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgebnrbs0iDA5xvur4jV6XROOJaTPJhC6tfR6Wc8NWJ_tkICJXTdpx0lBJQSh0wA9csocHGBDu3KibthtWyDFPa6EjBx_dnQhQhmkOPgaJChx0uIOp2ONNeoHQr_4mhVB_d_Sp_S7FKgnU/s1600/lizzie+age+2.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 110px; FLOAT: right; HEIGHT: 200px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5544995726561001986" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgebnrbs0iDA5xvur4jV6XROOJaTPJhC6tfR6Wc8NWJ_tkICJXTdpx0lBJQSh0wA9csocHGBDu3KibthtWyDFPa6EjBx_dnQhQhmkOPgaJChx0uIOp2ONNeoHQr_4mhVB_d_Sp_S7FKgnU/s200/lizzie+age+2.jpg" /></a>She toddled right up to each person at the meeting, held out her hand to shake theirs, went onto the next citizen, shook their hand, onto the next. Lizzie, barely walking yet, already knew how to work a room.<br /><br />When Lizzie was about age two we lived in Arcata. I had run away from L.A. when she was just weeks old to bring her up in small town Northern California, got a little job on the little weekly newspaper there, The Union, writing a column about being an ex-pat Angeleno. One night I was going to a political meeting, Concerned Citizens of Arcata, local Arcatans meeting in a community hall to share their irateness with Arcata’s liberals proclaiming the town a sanctuary in the Gulf War, refusing to participate in America’s war effort, I think Berkeley did it as well and Ann Arbor (?)<br /><br />For The Union I wrote a column on the editorial page so figured it was my beat to cover the meeting. As often was the case I had no babysitter for the evening, so brought toddler Elizabeth with me. At that age she was just walking. It must have been 1990 fall or 1991 winter, as those are the months of the Gulf War, and Lizzie was born in July 1988, so she was still very young the night of that meeting.<br /><br />When we arrived, most the people were sitting in chairs lined up along the wall. My toddler in leggings, a dress, and a head that had not yet sprung all its hair, pulled off my arms and climbed down to the ground.<br /><br />She must have seen a local politician doing it.<br /><br />It was like Lizzie knew exactly what to do.<br /><br />She toddled right up to the first Arcata resident sitting along the wall. Lizzie, put out her hand, shook the person’s hand, then walked down to the next person, shook their hand, then walked onto the next person. Of course, she must have seen someone else at this local political meeting doing the same thing, and she just jumped in and took on the behavior, but to everyone watching it was like it was what she was born to do.<br /><br />Several people in the room joked, laughed, “She’s a future politician this one.” A lot of comments like that went around the room. And it was true, my daughter just knew by instinct how to go in and work the room.<br /><br />Now I'm in Albuquerque and my daughter stayed behind in L.A., where she’s walked right into a world of comedy production, set design jobs, some costume design, some Production Assistant work, and taking improv classes. She’s also in that horrible city so I worry about her, but she’s doing what people stay in L.A. to do. As long as she’s entrenched in a population of colleagues, she’ll be okay. People who work in production in L.A. have fences and guards keeping everyone else from the city out, it's about the only way to live safe in that city anymore.<br /><br />So I know Lizzie will do well. I’ll be watching her on YouTube from a hotel room anywhere in the world I want to be.<br /><br />***<br /><br />Whew, just went to take an early morning walk and the amount of car exhaust in the air here is astounding, like walking out into an atmosphere of poison on a planet not meant for human habitation. I'm glad my hotel room encloses me as if I were in a Tupperware container. No air at all from outside gets in and the fan on the wall seems to filter out a lot of the muck, as honestly, as I ventured out this ayem, wanting to just take a sunrise stroll, I had to cower and run back for cover inside. I'm close to a freeway, it's not only sunrise, but also morning commute time.<br /><br />Sometimes I think I'm more Native American than a lot of Native Americans, just because I can’t take part in this car thing. When I see a freeway, I see concrete loaded down with roaring fossil fuel burning monsters. I feel like Earth cries out in agony in areas where freeways and overpasses pour the car people all over the place, and nowadays everyone must be burning cheaper gases, as the exhaust in the air is much more deadly than a decade ago.<br /><br />Like I said earlier, Albuquerque is like L.A. exploded and part of it landed here and became Albuquerque, with everything you have in L.A. but in microcosm (macrocosm?) form.<br /><br />*****<br /><br />Thinking a lot about my daughter and what happened in the 1990s that caused me to drop out of the movement, so to speak. I had been running a SNAP group that met in the public library downtown San Francisco at noon twice a month, and as a result I was getting the survivor phone calls. My daughter must have been hearing my conversations and picking up bits of information, she was middle school aged, nine or so.<br /><br />There on the wall of the hallway one day a friend of mine found pencil drawings of naked people. Lizzie had drawn naked dancing people in various forms of celebration and happiness bounding all the way down the hallway, a child’s imagination turned loose with the strands of conversation she was overhearing from me running a SNAP group.<br /><br />They were a lot like drawings I used to do as a child, and I was molested. So little Lizzie was experiencing part of the molest in my life, just by being around me at that time.<br /><br />My response was to stop running the SNAP group and drop out of things and I didn't come back until around 2006, when Lizzie was in her late teens.<br /><br />By the late nineties, Lizzie had seen more than I ever saw at her age, not because of pedophile priest stories, but because we always ended up living in slummy neighborhoods. In San Francisco it was Webster near the corner of Haight, very inner city. At that intersection, the projects were about to be torn down. They backed right up to our building, so from our apartment we listened and looked over the last straggling families that refused to move out of the empty projects, staying there as long as they could for free.<br /><br />They dealt drugs, loudly.<br /><br />They held dog fights.<br /><br />Lizzie and I had no choice but to listen to the sound of dog fights from our apartment.<br /><br />Two dogs would be snarling as they tore into each other, then one dog would squeal louder than the other, stop squealing, and become silent. Then male voices would cheer as the victorious dog howled.<br /><br />It was horrible. And it provided for me the backdrop, the soundtrack that ran in the background as I got these calls from survivors coming out for the first time as victims of pedophile priests in San Francisco.<br /><br />Still dog fights over the back fence were not the worst things Lizzie ever experienced; the worst was exposure to my oldest sister, who lived in a state of prolonged resentment that, I think, dated back to the early 1950s, the period when my middle sister and I were getting inordinate attention from Father Thomas Barry Horne-y.<br /><br />Oldest Sister did not suit the priest’s tastes. As a result, first-born grew up to be totally different from middle sister and me, the youngest, because she was cut off, separated from us in ways no one can ever explain. Middle sister and I were like a carbon copy of each other in everything we did, thought, believed. And then oldest sister was this oblique overweight awkward person, who by adulthood lived in a nonstop state of rage.<br /><br />Exposure to the antagonism of oldest sister in Orange County in 1998 was worse for the development of my daughter than listening to the dog fight sounds coming from the Projects in San Francisco a few years earlier. Indirectly it's all the fault of the Catholic pedophile priest epidemic.<br /><br />See, now to Oprah it sounds like like I'm stuck in the blame game. In the real world the blame game is real and denying blame exists allows perpetrators to maintain power.<br />.Kay Ebelinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13753284586265566961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5782652940285448862.post-65417842616817284482010-11-17T12:30:00.000-08:002010-11-17T15:43:49.661-08:00Thank God for Emails or the Mystery Lady would be Insane.<br />Adjusting to this life living in a hotel anywhere, it's so much more like I'm on a space station now than it was doing City of Angels Blog from L.A., because there, even though I was cut off from the world in the back of an apartment building, in the courtyard every day were these Armenian women drinking coffee, and gossiping. Their warbling soprano voices often would drown out the audio on the reality TV show videos I work on. Today I'm in a hotel room in any city anywhere, this month it's Albuquerque, working on the same reality TV show videos, just putting on a jacket when I go out to walk later in the day. <br /><br />Just south of here is Roswell, New Mexico, known for its residents who communicate with space aliens, and when you look at the topography of this area on a Google map, you can see why spacecraft would choose this site for landing. The private sector Go into Orbit for Vacation project is also nearby, the entrepreneur founder of Virgin finished building a landing strip for the venture just last month. Maybe in a few decades they'll actually launch. <br /><br />Point is I feel like I'm so much of a space alien myself, I fit right in here. As I ride around town staring at things I've never seen before, my little brain that never stops starts analyzing everything. You can see the Navajo influence, the Pueblo influence, feel its continued presence. <br /><br />Story continues after this picture of a downtown Albuquerque bail bonds shop a block from the courthouses.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfQuGN_ivP6vR-EpV1MCUsKS4jSoM-YREmHoR5YoursspUDbnbOLwpNGbJnVoKoMXsFjmOKQ0mKdfXuJfupYsOcKmuSpvGSXe-dv0CBhPkPR8mXYMRWGi9MjpVsuZeXZjpZM9YL9kTCvY/s1600/downtown+abq+by+kay+ebeling.JPG"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 246px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfQuGN_ivP6vR-EpV1MCUsKS4jSoM-YREmHoR5YoursspUDbnbOLwpNGbJnVoKoMXsFjmOKQ0mKdfXuJfupYsOcKmuSpvGSXe-dv0CBhPkPR8mXYMRWGi9MjpVsuZeXZjpZM9YL9kTCvY/s400/downtown+abq+by+kay+ebeling.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5540619244868430146" /></a><br /><br />Then as you ride around town, on the landscape is the aberration, the slick, clean, more wealthy than the entire rest of the neighborhood, Catholic Church. I rode by one where I know James Porter of Massachusetts fame was allowed to perpetrate freely while he was an out-patient with the Paracletes just yesterday while out riding the Number 10 bus, just to see where it goes. Need to go back there and take a picture soon… <br /><br />I went downtown to see the courthouses, one of which holds an archive of documents that I will dive into later on this trip. The real reason I went downtown yesterday was to see how people dress here as that's the kind of person I am, I don't want to show up looking all L.A. So I stood outside the courthouse yesterday to see what other women wear here, so I’ll know what to wear next time I come, as that's how space aliens blend in. I need boots and long skirts. <br /><br />URBANE LADY on an outpost in space<br /><br />I'm not really here, I'm just in a hotel, here to do my work, but still absorbing this geography at the same time I'm absorbing the horrible facts about what priests did to kids in this region, twelve-fold number of perpetrators per person compared to the rest of the country, at least it seems that way. More I learn about what really happened here in New Mexico, I can’t ignore the addition of a racist, who gives a damn about all these brown people, attitude that seemed to go with the turning loose of Servants of the Paraclete priests on these parishes. <br /><br />In my hotel I'm isolated, cut off more than ever, but it feels right. From here I talk by phone and email with the world, I'm even geographically closer to the center of the country. I need to get even closer to the center. Maybe next year I’ll make it to Illinois. <br /><br />Two or three times a week I file my report from the space station in the form of posts at City of Angels Blog. <br /><br />I noticed it when I looked in the mirror the other day, I even look more and more like a space alien. My eyebrows have disappeared as my hair has gotten white. The white hairs are of a nature that will not absorb color from dye or even darkening with eye brow pencil, the eyebrows just aren't there, making me bear a strong resemblance to ET, the character in the Steven Spielberg movie. <br /><br />My eyes now have this staring, penetrating, probing look to them that they never had before. <br /><br />I can make this whole experience even more fun by pretending to be a mystery woman, hiding out, “I ‘vant to be alone’ acting as I venture outside my hotel room like there’s someone I'm hiding from, someone looking for me. So have to keep my identity secret, keep my location secret, and when I go out, interact with hardly anyone, just walk to the bus stop listening to Randi Rhodes on my radio, ride the bus around town as Progressive Talk Radio KABQ 1350 that sounds eerily like KTALK Los Angeles goes on to Ed Schultz. I have this ongoing relationship with the world that goes on only internally. Back to my hotel room, I'm hooked up to the world by internet connection, but never feel the human sensation of touch. <br /><br />I'm that mysterious gray haired woman who around four AM you can see a glow of computer screen through her curtains. She has a job she does online, something to do with TV shows, working on videos that stream into her computer from Los Angeles. She’s done with her job around 10 in the morning, then spends a lot of time on the phone and riding around town taking pictures. That's her, walking with the hood from her jacket pulled over her face, always has earphones on which is another way to keep from making contact with anyone she passes. <br /><br />That's me right now, the mystery woman in Room ___ at Hotel _______ who spends long hours behind a closed door, her head in her laptop. Sometimes from outside the room you can hear her breaking into uproarious laugher, sometimes she throws herself on the bed spasming in tears. <br /><br />That's me right now, with this story to write. <br /><br />Meanwhile I'm scared to get into cars even of people who are my friends. Hey, no one said I was sane.Kay Ebelinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13753284586265566961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5782652940285448862.post-51384976767388376142010-11-15T08:51:00.002-08:002010-11-15T17:19:21.072-08:00Leaving L.A. was so hard, but so worth it.<br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLoEKfP35ArNcfZHpd7hTxW19YBEZ63A82GaeKD0sOM48sbtYoqEX3vEvDFV0rHS7_B-ErYQ4GZyep-u3t268hItEROcGO_kUKe8vjqmkZGV-3Liwzyhtmxz2SElSnu6lY7afON8FjssE/s1600/balloons+3.JPG"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 200px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 140px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5539825351202591650" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLoEKfP35ArNcfZHpd7hTxW19YBEZ63A82GaeKD0sOM48sbtYoqEX3vEvDFV0rHS7_B-ErYQ4GZyep-u3t268hItEROcGO_kUKe8vjqmkZGV-3Liwzyhtmxz2SElSnu6lY7afON8FjssE/s200/balloons+3.JPG" /></a>“You got a few dollars you can give me?”At the Amtrak station last week I heard, “I need ten dollars to catch a train to Oceanside.” Her voice came over my shoulder as I was bent over readjusting my pile of carryons. I looked up into a face you see a lot in Southern California, the aging crack head. Angular cheeks, rash-y skin, mouth indented due to missing teeth, a face that may once have been pretty but now reflects years of tricks at truck stops and Inland Empire street corners. She speaks with that accent you hear a lot in the lower rent areas of Southern California, the under-educated mangled word structures. Lots of “ain’t doing nothing’s” and “you know’s” and “I'm just saying’s.”<br /><br />She put her forearm in my face. “These abscesses hurt so much,” she says in a cooing voice, “they hurt so much,” she repeated and I stared at her forearm, lined with scars of a junkie. It like a shock choreography shot in a Tarantino film, right in my face. Some of her abscesses were healed and hardened, some recently scarred so still red and brown, some fresh and oozing. I stared and stared, then thanks to my survival instincts I looked down and realized-<br /><br />With her other arm the junkie was reaching for my laptop which was at my feet, as I’d been in the middle or readjusting my carry-ons when she approached me. I grabbed the laptop as her hand was just inches from it, put it back on my shoulder, and slipped out of the seat in the Amtrak waiting area to get away from her.<br /><br />It was about the fourth time someone had asked me for money as I waited for my train out of L.A. last week. I went over and joined a guy who later sat next to me on the train and I realized his way of avoiding ever getting up until he got to his destination was to wear adult diapers. Hmm.<br /><br />My departure from L.A. came with a comic routine as you can’t take bags on Amtrak that weigh more than fifty pounds. When I arrived I found out one of my bags weighed seventy something pounds, the other was 14 pounds over. So I'm on the floor in the Amtrak ticketing area, rearranging and rearranging my suitcases and everything got scattered, my clothes were thrown slipslod sloppy around in the suitcase and I think some stuff spilled out and got lost forever somewhere in the ether of the train station floor and people surrounding us. I ended up right there on the floor packing an extra bag that weighed forty pounds, and it would just cost ten dollars to send it extra, but then I couldn't check it because it was plastic, which they said would tear too easily.<br /><br />I said, no problem, I’ll just add it to my carry on. If all I had done is go sit in a chair and wait for my train to come, the extra 40- pounds of carry-on would not have been a problem. But I'm so neurotic and wasn’t wearing an adult diaper and wanted to get away from L.A. so bad, I asked my friend to deliver me to the train station four hours early just to get out of my apartment as quickly as possible because I hated that place so much. So I mean at some point I had to go to the bathroom. Then every time I walked, the pile of bags on the carry on cart kept toppling more to one side or the other.<br /><br />Why was I carrying so much weight with me?<br /><br />I packed the scanner and brought it with me to Albuquerque.<br /><br />I had packed my HP Inkjet 5600 in a large suitcase, and stuffed it tight with sweaters. Then in all the frenzy of getting the bags down to under 50 pounds, I threw the inkjet back into the suitcase without tightening the zipper tighter. So I spent four hours in the Amtrak station and later 16 hours on the train worrying that the scanner would be broken by the time I got to Albuquerque because it would be jiggling around, and it was all because I felt so rushed at the ticket station, when I shouldn't have felt rushed, I mean, I had four hours. If only I’d packed it tighter, if only.<br /><br />Damn should have tightened the zipper on the suitcase, I kept repeating to myself.<br />But it's fine as you can see from the post I am about to put up at City of Angels 8.<br /><br />I hate L.A. As I waited for my train, lugging around that extra 40 pound bag that kept overturning my whole carryon wheeler, five times someone came up to me asking me for money, not spare change but dollars. The woman who was telling me how much the abscesses on her arm hurt as she was using the other arm to reach down and grab my laptop was just the last person from L.A. I saw.<br /><br />After another foray around the Amtrak station forever rearranging my carryons, having them topple over in doorways landing me on the floor repacking, I'm daydreaming about the days you see in black and white films, when gentlemen would never walk by and leave a woman buried under heavy suitcases, but not today, not in L.A., in L.A. if people see you struggling, they stand alongside and watch, waiting for you to drop something, so they can scavenge it.<br /><br />At one point with that carryon that kept toppling over and I'm an old lady with gray hair and wrinkles, I was having so much trouble, all those people just kept walking by me, like I was invisible doing all that struggling. If only, if only there were some civility left in the world.<br /><br />“These abscesses really hurt,” she said and put her forearm in front of my face, so I was looking at these pussy scabs up and down her veins. Then my eyes were riveted, just like she wanted, with her other arm she was reaching down for the laptop I’d set on the ground next to me. Goodbye L.A.<br /><br />Now I've been in my Extended Stay room in Albuquerque for one week, and last night I wrote, “I'm so looking forward to getting up tomorrow morning, my coffee pot is set for four AM but I know I’ll be awake in the minutes before it begins to perk, just waiting for it. Here I am on my outpost, my space station, this splash of city thrown along a flat part at the foot of the Rocky Mountains.”<br /><br />I'm doing what I always wanted to do. I'm set up in a place where aside from my little transcribing job, I have nothing else to do but write. Part of that 40 pound overflow in my luggage was caused by the book manuscript I have with me now that just needs a good rewrite. It's all here beside me in boxes here in my hotel room in Albuquerque.<br />I feel so at home here, in a way I feel like I'm still in L.A., which is my hometown, like it or not. This little city Albuquerque is like a tiny L.A., so much is the same here, just cooler and smaller. I get on the city bus here and the same exact voice announces the next stop, and “Please use rear exit.” They have the same machines by the driver where riders press their passes on an electronic thing and it gives out the same exact “beep.”<br /><br />To me, Albuquerque looks like L.A. exploded and a splotch of it landed here at the foot of the Rockies and just kept on with daily life like nothing ever happened. But since from one end of the city to the other is only about 10 miles, it's like a little version of L.A. that's so much more manageable. I can get from one side of town to the other on the bus in an hour for 35 cents as they recognize I'm a senior citizen here, and they don't in L.A.<br /><br />So here I am in this nice clean hotel where I pay about 70 percent of what I paid to live in L.A. and I can still do my job, that's why I was able to make this trip, plus I took Social Security early retirement, no I didn't get a big chunk of cash from someone as people in my emails and phone calls seem to be inquiring.<br /><br />I can walk in this neighborhood without getting accosted.<br /><br />After being in Albuquerque less than a week, already something is changing in me. I'm eating breakfast. For years I couldn't get anything passed my clenched teeth until late in the afternoon every day. Three days in a row here in my little hotel room, I've not only gotten hungry but been able to eat in the morning. I think that's a good sign.<br />Can’t believe how hard it was to get out of L.A. I talked about it almost nonstop beginning about 2006. I finally did it.<br /><br />Here is another pic and a video from last Saturday. In Albuquerque riding hot air balloons is part of the lifestyle.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgj560i1b_MsZqN4ZXFQlYXf8yixTDmuQxIOqD7izmXZLJysitOR2ZoYlanA36VFsxdGjGSYo8oZOjrOqZvYumebTHiIVOflg56zvYWwXmYo21wunn52QbloHN7PhG0-1Q_FhBOzV-fn_Y/s1600/balloons+4.JPG"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 303px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5539825877317767730" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgj560i1b_MsZqN4ZXFQlYXf8yixTDmuQxIOqD7izmXZLJysitOR2ZoYlanA36VFsxdGjGSYo8oZOjrOqZvYumebTHiIVOflg56zvYWwXmYo21wunn52QbloHN7PhG0-1Q_FhBOzV-fn_Y/s400/balloons+4.JPG" /></a><br /><br />Watch the <a href="http://cityofangels2.blogspot.com/2010/11/albuquerque-sky-on-saturday.html">video of balloons going across the sky</a> posted earlier today.Kay Ebelinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13753284586265566961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5782652940285448862.post-15104750030234021962010-11-15T08:51:00.001-08:002010-11-15T08:51:45.898-08:00Albuquerque Sky on Saturday.<br /><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/Icep9XhkZxs?hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/Icep9XhkZxs?hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object><br /><br />I love it. Hot air balloons are part of the landscape.Kay Ebelinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13753284586265566961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5782652940285448862.post-2749640995577418162010-10-31T19:00:00.000-07:002010-10-31T19:07:28.534-07:00Walmart Zombie, Liz Ebeling Halloween Costume 2010.<br />She gnaws on a 99-cent store rubber foot. My daughter plays a Walmart Zombie employee named "Brains" this year. When Walmart asked her name, all she could say was, "Brains." Liz Ebeling on her way to an Improv Comedy Halloween party. <br /><br /><object width="640" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/7JGT-_UfnmI?fs=1&hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/7JGT-_UfnmI?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="640" height="385"></embed></object><br /><br />The WalMart Zombie stops when she sees her mother's camera, gnaws on the oozing foot in her hands, and snarls, then goes on to her Improv Class Halloween party<br /><br /><object width="640" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/kWcGJ5QSdyw?fs=1&hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/kWcGJ5QSdyw?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="640" height="385"></embed></object>Kay Ebelinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13753284586265566961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5782652940285448862.post-74681231132134292342010-10-23T10:40:00.000-07:002011-10-19T05:09:09.978-07:00Yikes Part 2: More HLR stories from the nineties by me.<br />I just realized (Oct 2011) there is another Human Life Review story I wrote in the 1990s that I did not copy in yet here. I will add it soon to this post even if I have to find the original and scan it over. -ke)<br /><br />(<a href="http://cityofangels2.blogspot.com/2010/10/yikes-ann-coulter-and-me-on-same-cover.html">Part 1 is here</a>) I wrote this story that was in Newsweek November 1991:<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKvWhzBqB4S97RIN6aBFS-pKEfh48PRgekOP8W04ivHbFJ90_H5Rual2mWt8lUDO7Vanp3uB2181TJK4_fCxwBIqUhoiY_y0-LnQz82m0npXv1KIi2SHhw__wfG8kGjkM9F4cyoLqGABw/s1600/Ebeling+Newsweek+Nov+1991.jpg"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 294px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 400px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5527318879959013954" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKvWhzBqB4S97RIN6aBFS-pKEfh48PRgekOP8W04ivHbFJ90_H5Rual2mWt8lUDO7Vanp3uB2181TJK4_fCxwBIqUhoiY_y0-LnQz82m0npXv1KIi2SHhw__wfG8kGjkM9F4cyoLqGABw/s400/Ebeling+Newsweek+Nov+1991.jpg" /></a><br /><br />Then wrote this piece for Human Life Review about the backlash to my Newsweek piece:<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKEllfbAzjMR2_7V0ySEOzjtVu2hmbJv2FoqApHdMuC4RmjEVpC-WUIFVT5VmxIL1G0vcsxCFJU7qmVHHhrpVamwyWa1Cb83gk-T20tA6kst2zcje7esCB_k8G5eio7fW5FVUnigflvjs/s1600/HLR2+p33.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 314px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKEllfbAzjMR2_7V0ySEOzjtVu2hmbJv2FoqApHdMuC4RmjEVpC-WUIFVT5VmxIL1G0vcsxCFJU7qmVHHhrpVamwyWa1Cb83gk-T20tA6kst2zcje7esCB_k8G5eio7fW5FVUnigflvjs/s400/HLR2+p33.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5531301040226987186" /></a><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7FsKokP8pjEA8r_Ct-dS2VDCoPF5p3AsDrFGQ_hyPeYdDs3tLISs_jfDcTgo9Zp3GaiIMcPAwQ5tjSK15LlLtupLnKETZvDMXbmpr_d_s4VAQP7JtwQM_caqPZSH7_OtgK3qVKZz95ow/s1600/HLR2+p34.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 305px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7FsKokP8pjEA8r_Ct-dS2VDCoPF5p3AsDrFGQ_hyPeYdDs3tLISs_jfDcTgo9Zp3GaiIMcPAwQ5tjSK15LlLtupLnKETZvDMXbmpr_d_s4VAQP7JtwQM_caqPZSH7_OtgK3qVKZz95ow/s400/HLR2+p34.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5531300807015342594" /></a><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDTHveb2owhhGoCGUFMivuqTtW8Y3LeYxda9TrVdssI79hDDlNUsreMM21ukBEV-4CVete4eIjj2USRNrtYaq9xXN25tSy8TqnMzOy2OYXo7_zpKIparutPTo7mHcef-yYWIU9QuJxtBs/s1600/HLR2+p35.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 307px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDTHveb2owhhGoCGUFMivuqTtW8Y3LeYxda9TrVdssI79hDDlNUsreMM21ukBEV-4CVete4eIjj2USRNrtYaq9xXN25tSy8TqnMzOy2OYXo7_zpKIparutPTo7mHcef-yYWIU9QuJxtBs/s400/HLR2+p35.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5531300795875349826" /></a><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh73rTrpMeRupl0VyMQ8VPUfUR9WLQWtJzeBmqSJ2Fsp5jiyFKm8-pBP44ay4uQqyQxSXZTjSUIF-b9Gg6wgfC5Ue-RBmvslHAL64AnzWzjNgQy7dbyM3-QBXLUgSlZobZivQfaa89K_nc/s1600/HLR2+p36.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 252px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh73rTrpMeRupl0VyMQ8VPUfUR9WLQWtJzeBmqSJ2Fsp5jiyFKm8-pBP44ay4uQqyQxSXZTjSUIF-b9Gg6wgfC5Ue-RBmvslHAL64AnzWzjNgQy7dbyM3-QBXLUgSlZobZivQfaa89K_nc/s400/HLR2+p36.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5531300786615780690" /></a><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhv4gZ-cP1jZQBmWpinaUooRcc1_rq10GQG7EZE7XF6RWlKMbL7VIs3KMNaeNqWDHiA05OWvp65fZ5DeqcfU_jaQ8D1bft31DsvuV4jXQ8JACW5grxNA4NwLctGAkZyIjgrwuTOx9ILGYc/s1600/HLR2+p37.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 284px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhv4gZ-cP1jZQBmWpinaUooRcc1_rq10GQG7EZE7XF6RWlKMbL7VIs3KMNaeNqWDHiA05OWvp65fZ5DeqcfU_jaQ8D1bft31DsvuV4jXQ8JACW5grxNA4NwLctGAkZyIjgrwuTOx9ILGYc/s400/HLR2+p37.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5531299438008381746" /></a><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7462I9d9VAYljZhRl-nu8K_4_xVIWnu0oMdgj7jV4L99JjJ9bC10GTsLV-UI77pumVOVMaTzormaEufU4w5FBlGmc14CzYk74-ytTHvYwiC7qlqAn40psDtTmGz9qY1hrcRbCYbNx2i8/s1600/HLR2+p38.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 300px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7462I9d9VAYljZhRl-nu8K_4_xVIWnu0oMdgj7jV4L99JjJ9bC10GTsLV-UI77pumVOVMaTzormaEufU4w5FBlGmc14CzYk74-ytTHvYwiC7qlqAn40psDtTmGz9qY1hrcRbCYbNx2i8/s400/HLR2+p38.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5531299428929607138" /></a><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgknmaG0u6jwV1mI1yVBDCcdmBwfkj2NTTNFHdoVxr9dXsFERnGjamV683fcm01dnHAI4TLp5tAjZ6UuPBJDGel4GfvhdCkK1NzmutMD2grARR2PzPUojySJGIA7xPdVbXbgKcUVcdAMRI/s1600/HLR2+p39.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 287px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgknmaG0u6jwV1mI1yVBDCcdmBwfkj2NTTNFHdoVxr9dXsFERnGjamV683fcm01dnHAI4TLp5tAjZ6UuPBJDGel4GfvhdCkK1NzmutMD2grARR2PzPUojySJGIA7xPdVbXbgKcUVcdAMRI/s400/HLR2+p39.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5531300351014687458" /></a><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvL6KEeQadO7azkzogu5243z2kGa2qedqi8_rthwtpo2XiE2t1ZEsTSPKwElU0uvw-Jsg3wCRDjmxZWS7yJA1fRiDob8xTgVpKfYyAIuSMAlp0l3oDKEU-NZNd2hS3BEieW0EF4gnI_7I/s1600/HLR2+p40.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 280px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvL6KEeQadO7azkzogu5243z2kGa2qedqi8_rthwtpo2XiE2t1ZEsTSPKwElU0uvw-Jsg3wCRDjmxZWS7yJA1fRiDob8xTgVpKfYyAIuSMAlp0l3oDKEU-NZNd2hS3BEieW0EF4gnI_7I/s400/HLR2+p40.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5531299949861995410" /></a><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6tqDSqL31FpDtJyYvimcKbNrJSwmzyN68QTNGdDf7yedN1_7qqPklFWZ6ffj3u7J89HXnvTioS8smP_X6gudneMoG3570XHY26AY76G0zCi3rSgGoc0beHoIkEwUXvW2_yVfkVVnwJ_M/s1600/HLR2+p41.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 290px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6tqDSqL31FpDtJyYvimcKbNrJSwmzyN68QTNGdDf7yedN1_7qqPklFWZ6ffj3u7J89HXnvTioS8smP_X6gudneMoG3570XHY26AY76G0zCi3rSgGoc0beHoIkEwUXvW2_yVfkVVnwJ_M/s400/HLR2+p41.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5531299946815728898" /></a><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6G8KFE528jd0cEHHvd5mhLiLRr4e8h_n_idmWPTOiAG9ogz2_IdcYW47ORrW1eYyEsOVpkzGLuI4wS4XlQiYwP0dxhQ4ejaWPM4xLppsd5Mrc9WxQA2TUirvY3DGIQ5VeBdkyCLRSspo/s1600/HLR2+p43.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 295px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6G8KFE528jd0cEHHvd5mhLiLRr4e8h_n_idmWPTOiAG9ogz2_IdcYW47ORrW1eYyEsOVpkzGLuI4wS4XlQiYwP0dxhQ4ejaWPM4xLppsd5Mrc9WxQA2TUirvY3DGIQ5VeBdkyCLRSspo/s400/HLR2+p43.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5531299936759700626" /></a><br /><br />HERE is cover and title page. All being scanned here as I continue to empty out the file cabinet and get ready to take City of Angels out of L.A><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqvz7ObS-_gBq4WLNCjwc_TZv-fNoDzI5aSaPC_nOOR0jjQf9R80yJMV2kaC8kxqMUrb2gcrBf1YGo_WsXRpRJOvA5Eo2jKRO7v9Z87-Ywoq1j72s3ScVYYhncKBBRzWAJIDeREELLbvU/s1600/HLR2+cover.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 286px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqvz7ObS-_gBq4WLNCjwc_TZv-fNoDzI5aSaPC_nOOR0jjQf9R80yJMV2kaC8kxqMUrb2gcrBf1YGo_WsXRpRJOvA5Eo2jKRO7v9Z87-Ywoq1j72s3ScVYYhncKBBRzWAJIDeREELLbvU/s400/HLR2+cover.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5531301067255117906" /></a><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyuVlCRa-JnHXfyqWSCHCqSm66Aqiy6jyqyiZhUfbx9zwceTTzicrOX7tqDFHy0SvnMkJMgo4CVVFZjtocoXHlXWSSwy5WPQcyHNGnbvfECVQ41yi-IhKqTyl5WDFro_PLxXvuSlkxHss/s1600/HLR2+Table.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 286px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyuVlCRa-JnHXfyqWSCHCqSm66Aqiy6jyqyiZhUfbx9zwceTTzicrOX7tqDFHy0SvnMkJMgo4CVVFZjtocoXHlXWSSwy5WPQcyHNGnbvfECVQ41yi-IhKqTyl5WDFro_PLxXvuSlkxHss/s400/HLR2+Table.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5531301057791178018" /></a><br /><br />OnwardKay Ebelinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13753284586265566961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5782652940285448862.post-31134953567750953892010-10-18T20:52:00.001-07:002011-10-19T05:10:05.737-07:00Yikes! Ann Coulter and Me on the same Cover (I was so confused those days).<br />I just realized (Oct 2011) there is another Human Life Review story I wrote in the 1990s that I did not copy in yet here. I will add it soon to this post even if I have to find the original and scan it over. -ke)<br /><br />**********<br />Packing to leave L.A. I found an article I got published in Human Life Review in 1992 in a file cabinet, here is the cover, article scanned in below:<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEN5VUk4YYPEkRrYE_ARZSm-E7bjzBfO_FZ9u-v5lUIhZN6cKu_3gn8BKwycUYGg2KHEiIfQGRaJ23Plg0fB77_MZsEZMg5mkVTwGRxzlxftK6K-lGAH8gFDQ50Q9g2kgXEPJcb2BxSFw/s1600/hlr+spring+2002+cover.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 334px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEN5VUk4YYPEkRrYE_ARZSm-E7bjzBfO_FZ9u-v5lUIhZN6cKu_3gn8BKwycUYGg2KHEiIfQGRaJ23Plg0fB77_MZsEZMg5mkVTwGRxzlxftK6K-lGAH8gFDQ50Q9g2kgXEPJcb2BxSFw/s400/hlr+spring+2002+cover.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5529599266986657298" /></a><br />.<br />Ryan Bingham is so right when he says, "Moving is Living," in the George Clooney movie "Up In The Air." <br /><br />My file cabinet is now empty. I'm about to move to Albuquerque to write about Servants of the Paraclete, and then go to points onward, to blog about pedophile priest crimes all over the country. So I have to keep my load light, scan in memorables, then trash them, like the story below I wrote for Human Life Review Spring 1992, and I see now, I shared the cover with an up and coming conservative journalist Ann Coulter.<br /><br />Yikes! I shared the cover of a conservative review with Ann Coulter in 1992: The apex of my confused era, before I realized it was the sexualization by a Catholic priest at age five that had screwed me up, not the feminist movement as I was trying to explain in muddled free lance articles I was writing at the time to support me and Lizzie, who was then about three years old. <br /><br />Last week, cleaning up, packing, I found this story among several I got published in HLR when we were living in the woods of Northern California.<br /><br />This was the period before my daughter turned five when we lived in an environment sterile with isolation. After the episode described in the article, I got clean and sober, then after two more years, my daughter turned age five. Then I remembered what happened to me when I was age five, that had made me this compulsive person from age five on. <br /><br />The months right before the repressed memory came in and totally changed my life, I was writing all kinds of weird political essays, trying to find some explanation in social sciences for the mess my life was in.<br /><br />One result was this story published in Human Life Review, below from spring 1992, which I forgot about until I just now found it, with me promoted on the cover along with another pretty much unknown writer at the time, Ann Coulter. HLR asked me to write a response to the Susan Faludi book Backlash, as I was in the "pro life" movement at the time. <br /><br />To this day I hate abortion, but today I realize the medical procedure has to be legal for women's protection and health, and am glad I have never personally been faced with a question of whether to get one. Right after Lizzie was born though, after so many people chided me for not getting an abortion as a forty year old single mom, I got adamant and anti-abortion for a period, even went to demonstrations and sought out work writing on the topic, hence the relationship with Human Life Review:<br /><br />Here is the story on Susan Faludi's book Backlash from HLR, more to come:<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidZtPbZ5oXoK7GMS7pB1ZGt7TEglJdo8oE2W5boLbvKK707u-I8nWnheegjO5lGP-NMuC5efV8GHIBVmJHzCiv1zgebumQRwcaA1H3-d901X5oJBm11R47LDmy7fCfLqdcUFYUdHas-tI/s1600/hlr+1+table.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 300px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidZtPbZ5oXoK7GMS7pB1ZGt7TEglJdo8oE2W5boLbvKK707u-I8nWnheegjO5lGP-NMuC5efV8GHIBVmJHzCiv1zgebumQRwcaA1H3-d901X5oJBm11R47LDmy7fCfLqdcUFYUdHas-tI/s400/hlr+1+table.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5529599078337340450" /></a><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPcvwjZ34FJKSa-cZaSbWB6O3Lv7ktNTpTc_NoFgWT9LZ6heIfppLQQ0OpKmKRRsrGxgeet2X-j33Y2Jt8_Dfi46VGcaYeYjSVEXG2Lb0gFvCJtvlz9KnPQFWa2Ksjuhg4u40eeLNCreU/s1600/hlr+1+p74.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 330px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPcvwjZ34FJKSa-cZaSbWB6O3Lv7ktNTpTc_NoFgWT9LZ6heIfppLQQ0OpKmKRRsrGxgeet2X-j33Y2Jt8_Dfi46VGcaYeYjSVEXG2Lb0gFvCJtvlz9KnPQFWa2Ksjuhg4u40eeLNCreU/s400/hlr+1+p74.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5529598879285887810" /></a><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_kezgwrHDKmC6Lc37SIozRdCo-BUtaAyNOh0aou2Ch4wgalJggOnqwXbGlr27AMzRYfQB0m273Z9v-jtZg5n_1lgih1LbNo6ufQv_nlOrVjPfhEx8BcHvosPOeBdOHcjC6eglgNGtIbQ/s1600/hlr+1+p75.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 332px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_kezgwrHDKmC6Lc37SIozRdCo-BUtaAyNOh0aou2Ch4wgalJggOnqwXbGlr27AMzRYfQB0m273Z9v-jtZg5n_1lgih1LbNo6ufQv_nlOrVjPfhEx8BcHvosPOeBdOHcjC6eglgNGtIbQ/s400/hlr+1+p75.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5529598495684539762" /></a><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTWw-BwbjTonWHEfz4z0eioIsu1wtoFTTs-krv3ayYu_Fr3jOKfjVQb5628nBpUMqqNt2CRQXdzQOrKWViuB-1289FTvv1ZCZRqnfUwSLBYw8N5qI26Luy2sf3u6fLbe2PXZ4sNXYwLKw/s1600/hlr+1+p76.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 334px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTWw-BwbjTonWHEfz4z0eioIsu1wtoFTTs-krv3ayYu_Fr3jOKfjVQb5628nBpUMqqNt2CRQXdzQOrKWViuB-1289FTvv1ZCZRqnfUwSLBYw8N5qI26Luy2sf3u6fLbe2PXZ4sNXYwLKw/s400/hlr+1+p76.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5529598367403415410" /></a><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlZPuAkOjmjIO2y0yWzM2rq2Zqg_QrW9OPaqgxzzFd9XrFfUoww5MzVHPs8Kc0QbOqGwBildKxCVo1z5PkwhWHKYy0NbK4AgP2IcilwW9h6gPWet7268og_6iJfidtSN3Jc4mx3rc_Zwc/s1600/hlr+1+p77.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 336px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlZPuAkOjmjIO2y0yWzM2rq2Zqg_QrW9OPaqgxzzFd9XrFfUoww5MzVHPs8Kc0QbOqGwBildKxCVo1z5PkwhWHKYy0NbK4AgP2IcilwW9h6gPWet7268og_6iJfidtSN3Jc4mx3rc_Zwc/s400/hlr+1+p77.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5529598236977986210" /></a><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgduqEQgDzltJbBHVWMFThXEv3rUZpvnTAILnOEfg8gp0zVQX_CHQDT340Fqg9ylW6Uwmh4F-xLRWXfG7C2JIhru0etr7MSZnhnqagJ7aE_A_LTMZDZY-KbdrKbvAaE2JlAOuGxUAoFwyw/s1600/hlr+1+p78.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 340px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgduqEQgDzltJbBHVWMFThXEv3rUZpvnTAILnOEfg8gp0zVQX_CHQDT340Fqg9ylW6Uwmh4F-xLRWXfG7C2JIhru0etr7MSZnhnqagJ7aE_A_LTMZDZY-KbdrKbvAaE2JlAOuGxUAoFwyw/s400/hlr+1+p78.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5529598101549383282" /></a><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_zeEAcF2_mkWaoOkpfx5zR2QurHOxkl0XNCHZzoj3Pe9Z-LvSARNDDFiZU53ED8Yd-O4pbfWpTJIW6JdSTYt2iIxC3YFXUdypUxqQixCbwUWtFyWeiCXK3bsDaUtNHNTjJQi1kNkuXcQ/s1600/hlr+1+p79.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 333px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_zeEAcF2_mkWaoOkpfx5zR2QurHOxkl0XNCHZzoj3Pe9Z-LvSARNDDFiZU53ED8Yd-O4pbfWpTJIW6JdSTYt2iIxC3YFXUdypUxqQixCbwUWtFyWeiCXK3bsDaUtNHNTjJQi1kNkuXcQ/s400/hlr+1+p79.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5529597975166531762" /></a><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioGHN-_8Umv7XE_GpLiXT7qKqZRQeSVQwf5EczBK4OceUQGUw-X3ZOtwfCO1ygeHSdPhVE0y85vn1ixJpQbE5hkJdzxGPvGISht31ucMFVRQvFRLpCv0J1f2HKmLCz5J0tEaByb1yn-vE/s1600/hlr+1+p80.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 340px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioGHN-_8Umv7XE_GpLiXT7qKqZRQeSVQwf5EczBK4OceUQGUw-X3ZOtwfCO1ygeHSdPhVE0y85vn1ixJpQbE5hkJdzxGPvGISht31ucMFVRQvFRLpCv0J1f2HKmLCz5J0tEaByb1yn-vE/s400/hlr+1+p80.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5529597139851134354" /></a><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEENfM0tqfqfajlt5f8rKZyt_Laldf1kY7cXZhwuFJuerDPwhVtJ3I8f8UnVnRqiEABcQJSM8keiUEeYttlCMUwjHb_X9I4HWu8oYxc2oy7-moyyL-YBb1H0lpMjaeiXJ5PKyORZEv_1M/s1600/hlr+1+p81.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 340px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEENfM0tqfqfajlt5f8rKZyt_Laldf1kY7cXZhwuFJuerDPwhVtJ3I8f8UnVnRqiEABcQJSM8keiUEeYttlCMUwjHb_X9I4HWu8oYxc2oy7-moyyL-YBb1H0lpMjaeiXJ5PKyORZEv_1M/s400/hlr+1+p81.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5529597135404140914" /></a><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1nqaN2dUbgYFefXG7uLYtpddaGSXqmvHFIAATS898Un8XZsJ9hb0q_ltUm8YhUEcbsi3Ry3T8axDvjIXcDOn3YAZLlgjEwSsXNktApEy2rChjR_kCmxlHiK8URSCy4JlW92MYDRLKzgQ/s1600/hlr+1+p82.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 331px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1nqaN2dUbgYFefXG7uLYtpddaGSXqmvHFIAATS898Un8XZsJ9hb0q_ltUm8YhUEcbsi3Ry3T8axDvjIXcDOn3YAZLlgjEwSsXNktApEy2rChjR_kCmxlHiK8URSCy4JlW92MYDRLKzgQ/s400/hlr+1+p82.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5529597133280362386" /></a><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlVVrUzgyIGOqtnLb3u0lfGdVBYXGFPRKsbOjKVklFlGlgZg6MBjSxOazDFgHE2M1P9jtOD4zE7EyKwjlIIIqVcbatBxDl7cJy2CpHu6kVQk4G7Bu0xe4CqTACoT_dNN-aEYsXnOos_jI/s1600/hlr+1+p83.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 350px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlVVrUzgyIGOqtnLb3u0lfGdVBYXGFPRKsbOjKVklFlGlgZg6MBjSxOazDFgHE2M1P9jtOD4zE7EyKwjlIIIqVcbatBxDl7cJy2CpHu6kVQk4G7Bu0xe4CqTACoT_dNN-aEYsXnOos_jI/s400/hlr+1+p83.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5529597121751134978" /></a><br />So glad I lived long enough to find out what the real cause of my problems was, and as a result, have this incredible story of pedophile priests in the Catholic Church to write... God is good, and all that jazz.<br /><br />How did I end up writing for HLR to begin with?<br />First, this article ran in Newsweek. I was trying to find a humorous way of blaming the world for my horrible circumstaces, and decided it was all feminism's fault, or at least thought it would be funny to say so, didn't really believe it, didn't believe anything at the time, I was so lost in these years. First the Newsweek piece I wrote that started the whole thread in HLR.<br /><br /><strong>Newsweek piece November 1991</strong><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKvWhzBqB4S97RIN6aBFS-pKEfh48PRgekOP8W04ivHbFJ90_H5Rual2mWt8lUDO7Vanp3uB2181TJK4_fCxwBIqUhoiY_y0-LnQz82m0npXv1KIi2SHhw__wfG8kGjkM9F4cyoLqGABw/s1600/Ebeling+Newsweek+Nov+1991.jpg"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 294px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 400px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5527318879959013954" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKvWhzBqB4S97RIN6aBFS-pKEfh48PRgekOP8W04ivHbFJ90_H5Rual2mWt8lUDO7Vanp3uB2181TJK4_fCxwBIqUhoiY_y0-LnQz82m0npXv1KIi2SHhw__wfG8kGjkM9F4cyoLqGABw/s400/Ebeling+Newsweek+Nov+1991.jpg" /></a><br />The Newsweek piece led to a relationship that developed between me and Human Life Review, through degrees of separation that may come up some other place in this story at City of Angels 2. <br /><br />Next assignment I had for Human Life Review was a story on the way the world reacted to the above Newsweek piece, which is scanned and posted at <a href="http://cityofangels2.blogspot.com/2010/10/yikes-part-2-more-hlr-stories-from.html">Yikes Part 2</a> at CofA2Kay Ebelinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13753284586265566961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5782652940285448862.post-85936169726406928162010-10-18T20:50:00.000-07:002010-10-24T05:48:57.409-07:00I Shared a Cover with Ann Coulter in Spring 1992, Yikes Again!<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEN5VUk4YYPEkRrYE_ARZSm-E7bjzBfO_FZ9u-v5lUIhZN6cKu_3gn8BKwycUYGg2KHEiIfQGRaJ23Plg0fB77_MZsEZMg5mkVTwGRxzlxftK6K-lGAH8gFDQ50Q9g2kgXEPJcb2BxSFw/s1600/hlr+spring+2002+cover.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 334px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEN5VUk4YYPEkRrYE_ARZSm-E7bjzBfO_FZ9u-v5lUIhZN6cKu_3gn8BKwycUYGg2KHEiIfQGRaJ23Plg0fB77_MZsEZMg5mkVTwGRxzlxftK6K-lGAH8gFDQ50Q9g2kgXEPJcb2BxSFw/s400/hlr+spring+2002+cover.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5529599266986657298" /></a><br />.<br />"Moving is Living," says Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) in Up In The Air. My file cabinet is now empty in preparation for my move to Albuquerque to write about Servants of the Paraclete, and then more moves to points onward, to blog about pedophile priest crimes all over the country. So I have to keep my load light, scan in memorables, then trash them, like the story below I wrote for Human Life Review in Spring 1992, and I see now, I shared the cover with an up and coming conservative journalist Ann Coulter.<br /><br />Oops posted this twice, <a href="http://cityofangels2.blogspot.com/2010/10/yikes-ann-coulter-and-me-on-same-cover.html">read this post here</a> Yikes! I shared the cover of a conservative review with Ann Coulter in 1992. The height of ...<br /><br />And <a href="http://cityofangels2.blogspot.com/2010/10/yikes-part-2-more-hlr-stories-from.html">Part two of this Story</a> was posted Oct. 23rd.<br />.Kay Ebelinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13753284586265566961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5782652940285448862.post-71075294337765444452010-10-17T06:15:00.000-07:002010-10-18T05:26:16.626-07:00Message Getting Out that Pedophile Priests are More than a group of perverts, re Aberration of the Bible.<br />"We see pedophile priests allowed to escape punishment, we see prosperity preachers telling us that if we just repeat a phrase about Jesus, he’ll make us rich and happy, just a tiny portion of what goes on in this world regarding the Bible and people who claim to follow it. It partially sums up what we, in our present culture, feel about the issue. It is a tragedy.<br />The whole thing seems like a big joke played on people for centuries. It has to be.<br /><br />"But it’s not.<br /><br />"None of the above represents God’s message in the Bible. None of it is what he said.... "<br /><br />(<a href="http://stevenreed.limewebs.com/?p=27">Continue reading here</a>)Kay Ebelinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13753284586265566961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5782652940285448862.post-43489587298167514762010-09-27T20:49:00.000-07:002010-09-28T09:31:59.104-07:00Yikes, Frying Planet, NWS device explodes in L.A. 3 hours before highest temp.<br />This really happened today: <a class="w_lnk" style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold; COLOR: #00c" onclick="m_110_navigateToCanvas(0);return false;" href="http://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8#">Los Angeles, CA</a><br />Monday<br />113° high temperature<br />67° low<br /><br />It's so hot the official thermometer broke. It might have been even hotter, as at 113 degrees the measuring devices shattered, per L.A. Times:<br /><br />"It was so hot Monday that it broke the all-time record — and the weatherman's thermometer.The National Weather Service's thermometer for downtown Los Angeles headed into uncharted territory at 12:15 p.m. Monday, reaching 113 degrees for the first time since records began being kept in 1877. Shortly after that banner moment, the temperature dipped back to 111, and then climbed back to 112.<br /><br />"Then at 1 p.m., the thermometer stopped working." (<a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-hottest-ever-20100928,0,329968.story">Read More</a>)<br /><br />Everyone who lives here knows, the heat just keeps getting hotter all afternoon, the hottest time of the day is around 4-5 PM then around six o'clock it finally starts to break, if it's going to break that night.<br /><br />So the high temperature Monday Sept. 27, 2010, in L.A. is unknown, three hours of frying hotter than at around 1PM when it reached 113 degrees and the measuring devices exploded.<br /><br />So glad City of Angels Blog is leaving L.A. soon.<br /><br />But where can you go to stay cool?Kay Ebelinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13753284586265566961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5782652940285448862.post-11552871758775247262010-09-23T04:58:00.001-07:002010-09-23T05:01:03.159-07:00It Never Fails to Happen, even among the dissenters.<br />People form groups to buck the system, and then as their group becomes successful, those same people take a big gulp and join up with the system. I've seen it happen a thousand times, dissenters in suits with designer briefcases, ending up in places the people they "advocate" for would not even enter. That's why I don't join anything to begin with.Kay Ebelinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13753284586265566961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5782652940285448862.post-7310290778457338202010-09-20T09:39:00.000-07:002010-09-21T07:39:13.037-07:00Another Eerie Thing found as I pack, from Austin c. 1975.<br />Going through files been carrying around for a long time, as I have to thin my load, I'm soon getting on the road. Found this, which eerily reveals facts about the "Taken" incident I wrote about on this blog <a href="http://cityofangels2.blogspot.com/2010/01/watching-taken-brings-up-time-i-got.html">here</a> a few months back. These pages I found as I pack to move, reminded me of two more incidents that I haven't revisited on these pages. <br /><br />So revealing of the effects being sexualized by a priest at age five had on my life, for decades. What gave me shivers as I read this was the "How Do I Forget" stuff at the end of page 2... and everything in between. <br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibLL9Wx1YQXil8xQV0c18J0PKKyNPGpQAYh92JuE6ANa33CecZ9HZI50RMPkE3YlSpHWNfFvJrYDiK_h1xIcPFhgYzEYB1vd2Tu5l1XW1d3AuCrKRLdkfggTksP85YB-M7uMYEqmWi8gI/s1600/1975+jot.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5519038989144578434" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 282px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 400px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibLL9Wx1YQXil8xQV0c18J0PKKyNPGpQAYh92JuE6ANa33CecZ9HZI50RMPkE3YlSpHWNfFvJrYDiK_h1xIcPFhgYzEYB1vd2Tu5l1XW1d3AuCrKRLdkfggTksP85YB-M7uMYEqmWi8gI/s400/1975+jot.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_TkaTVhu7KQziYVMg4xMeu71VGInB2B2clI5At5tLdJEa8CVZbgzcjYMGnPYbHThp7AITfVBoUJDbSIB74UpjY1RTI71yYJQzjpc7yxfiuM5uMUnIs_AS7YW_CPSabgQpBgUyNlDj61M/s1600/1975+jot+2.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5519038833279486402" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 308px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 400px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_TkaTVhu7KQziYVMg4xMeu71VGInB2B2clI5At5tLdJEa8CVZbgzcjYMGnPYbHThp7AITfVBoUJDbSIB74UpjY1RTI71yYJQzjpc7yxfiuM5uMUnIs_AS7YW_CPSabgQpBgUyNlDj61M/s400/1975+jot+2.jpg" border="0" /></a><br />THE RAPE BY FIVE INDIANS was on Mount Shasta 1969, in one of the other many times I've run away from L.A. From there it was Boulder for the Holy Man Jam (see previous post), which landed me in Texas. There was this transition I went through while I was in college in Austin. It seems to begin in this note to myself. <br /><br />It had to do with realizing my sexuality was so different from most people, and trying to live with it. <br /><br />I was so lonely and out of place in Texas.Kay Ebelinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13753284586265566961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5782652940285448862.post-76773009434678593802010-09-12T20:14:00.000-07:002010-09-12T22:26:22.505-07:00Boulder Whole Earth Festival 1970.<br />I was there, got hold of a typewriter soon after and wrote about it. Today, I found these pages as I started packing to take City of Angels out of L.A., and scanned them here to serve as a segue in my story, from 1970 California by way of Boulder, to Texas, where I ended up pregnant. Then I ran back to Northern California, but later back again to Texas to be with the baby's father, who took the baby away from me, so I went to college in Austin and really dug Astronomy, and that's how an ex-hippie named Sunshine ended up working at NASA. <br /><br /><em>And always, just under the surface, I was in pursuit of the priest.</em> <br /><br /><strong>This Really Happened:</strong><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVs4qUio81O-uwrXteSEywlvCcEe9NFxCBNXuY4j_lLNLMhcxFRmrlCzwHLu_3ycqzcW1D-g5MOd-UGK3i7ckZFVwlKLRgvsNqZnj0q6XYahBQ228GMNgP58YN0GlPE3OWgPnPs-V5kIc/s1600/scan0001.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 312px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVs4qUio81O-uwrXteSEywlvCcEe9NFxCBNXuY4j_lLNLMhcxFRmrlCzwHLu_3ycqzcW1D-g5MOd-UGK3i7ckZFVwlKLRgvsNqZnj0q6XYahBQ228GMNgP58YN0GlPE3OWgPnPs-V5kIc/s400/scan0001.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5516234143768655618" /></a><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhadXg5fdKhyphenhyphenZ1ontow81M5YLnw9yEyXXJcVGlUdMpN07x8D_ckO4sEqCGT5lKIq0qCYVNGHnjDkEQECWflSaaO6OEd6KIqPJJ66OyN6FYY0Ay6xiKyziJ8rHJYU9mcOwWpz_AnPT9NHQk/s1600/scan0002.jpg"><img style="display:block; 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margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 312px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrnj2JRaboiVfb3LmcMkKk66TfMBqNpsrqdnAGzLtrTHBmHh04reFZjxQ2nwGvPMT6wEU21zB0NOL33xUno-8B5i19Et7-i6j0Hrsd7f0HoUJ6qPXrim9VPfLyxJfwSEX6aG_hxvQp5tQ/s400/scan0012.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5516232342511790386" /></a><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZQJ9X2qvbZG5l8N-l1QA36ncbEWb5aRpW6LMbYVGHMN4wXrPi9RWS81ti2KFzhyBMCi1yIa6Mb9lG6695Wzed-8F6ZMb5scZjo_Klj0hanK9JE-zLd80sR_j7mtFzxlrm0KU_yJ27qIE/s1600/scan0013.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 312px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZQJ9X2qvbZG5l8N-l1QA36ncbEWb5aRpW6LMbYVGHMN4wXrPi9RWS81ti2KFzhyBMCi1yIa6Mb9lG6695Wzed-8F6ZMb5scZjo_Klj0hanK9JE-zLd80sR_j7mtFzxlrm0KU_yJ27qIE/s400/scan0013.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5516232198979545250" /></a><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikBXw2u3ZFWjGL_59ko6ghBdu-xkU_Ym5EOtUdjqN-XmteUNjl_-G6-RKWpLDMLSakO1nzMKY16gvrynRLiryR60cW4qIn82gt1YhQeBF7Cwhh86LlB9aVhOchxfYNvjkDyvOYFCSM9ZM/s1600/scan0014.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 312px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikBXw2u3ZFWjGL_59ko6ghBdu-xkU_Ym5EOtUdjqN-XmteUNjl_-G6-RKWpLDMLSakO1nzMKY16gvrynRLiryR60cW4qIn82gt1YhQeBF7Cwhh86LlB9aVhOchxfYNvjkDyvOYFCSM9ZM/s400/scan0014.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5516232043565162994" /></a><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-Nz8GGf3yB3gJZRMpAIneIIbgR4JdXXh-6_80cIm6x8HB0av9fDLIbAFn14giiEk91BmD1Gmc3mG5eIeYxgMT5v04nhkZDAOURNpCDV6bwu7HuZzEPbQKkTH8ld5HkoqKVB-oS1dzQXw/s1600/scan0015.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 312px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-Nz8GGf3yB3gJZRMpAIneIIbgR4JdXXh-6_80cIm6x8HB0av9fDLIbAFn14giiEk91BmD1Gmc3mG5eIeYxgMT5v04nhkZDAOURNpCDV6bwu7HuZzEPbQKkTH8ld5HkoqKVB-oS1dzQXw/s400/scan0015.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5516231912425932850" /></a><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNPXHSSX_uINRzsx9g_0LIl0utxz2tK461mjY2ro4_zy6Qh25zSfU4c6Mf2JIoHnVmxBy32xe18MFNjl8h7joku-HtnaWeIDe0dj-gJjtXQj0fB6Noazd_C1eJvkx6anpGK1YTr4kpjVA/s1600/scan0016.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 312px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNPXHSSX_uINRzsx9g_0LIl0utxz2tK461mjY2ro4_zy6Qh25zSfU4c6Mf2JIoHnVmxBy32xe18MFNjl8h7joku-HtnaWeIDe0dj-gJjtXQj0fB6Noazd_C1eJvkx6anpGK1YTr4kpjVA/s400/scan0016.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5516231740051261938" /></a>Kay Ebelinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13753284586265566961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5782652940285448862.post-53795109300121465082010-08-31T13:12:00.002-07:002012-04-03T12:57:20.298-07:00I Trained To Do This Blog At NASA.<br />I must have been living faster than the speed of life all the time by the 1970s. Otherwise how the heck would I have ended up at NASA in the first place? My job there was primarily editing the inhouse newspaper that went to 50 thousand or so employees and journalists, covering work at LBJ Space Center in Houston. So I'd gather news about the space shuttle and related projects and report on it to this wide but closely targeted audience, much like I did with City of Angels from Jan. 2007 until the blog fizzled and burned up in the atmosphere, pretty much, in 2010....<br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhS209jMVtdyXPW1pVQKPoY1YDCoIufcQj7KeptjZKCw2GckasKw7x0lDbxz2V7vzKzQXfwKZLD97u7ArWIIGxxtIbvxWSCC7HGFI3GghKNim8ujBfmfBTjB9UEJ3fziRCnzFvNeYtm_oM/s1600/kay+nasa+2.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 400px; HEIGHT: 269px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5511826584852019186" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhS209jMVtdyXPW1pVQKPoY1YDCoIufcQj7KeptjZKCw2GckasKw7x0lDbxz2V7vzKzQXfwKZLD97u7ArWIIGxxtIbvxWSCC7HGFI3GghKNim8ujBfmfBTjB9UEJ3fziRCnzFvNeYtm_oM/s400/kay+nasa+2.jpg" /></a><br /><strong>(Expect more of the story on the period I was at NASA in posts coming in 2013-2014)</strong><br /><br />I lived a life led by compulsions put in me when a Catholic priest "sexualized" me at age five. Promiscuity, or "sexual confusion," is an inevitable effect on the victim of child sex assault, as we grow up, when and if we make it to adulthood. Add to it that in my case the molester was a priest, God and the sky got added in to the confusion.... I ended up in my thirties chasing astronauts in Houston, and the period I worked at NASA, 1978-1983, is a time I remember in dark shame.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzJFsfEBxfaLhPG5VYbWvW1Oj_49W9DrsjwEW8g_Obkzq-eOcRM__fOtAIZK0QqBAlhtU-g0fDVOvmYA91mlFTfk3MF7xNnpjG_lSOoZMCL0y2rqoIqV6SMUfWTnz2LWCUjH0D18ztUcI/s1600/kay+nasa+9.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 289px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 400px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5511669903107567442" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzJFsfEBxfaLhPG5VYbWvW1Oj_49W9DrsjwEW8g_Obkzq-eOcRM__fOtAIZK0QqBAlhtU-g0fDVOvmYA91mlFTfk3MF7xNnpjG_lSOoZMCL0y2rqoIqV6SMUfWTnz2LWCUjH0D18ztUcI/s400/kay+nasa+9.jpg" /></a>This could be a comedy routine: Thanks to Fr. Horne-y, I had to be with men in high places, connected to the sky, so I went to work at NASA.<br /><br />The KC-135 aircraft on which we are flying in these shots was known as the "vomit comet" because the jet flew parabolas- up and down and up and down. Astronauts and techs tested equipment and ways for humans to endure low gravity in space by riding on these KC135 flights over the Gulf of Mexico.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbKtVkqFZl2bRV3GUmMyZM5J5c2VTvQHaSlUL2l8ViIKsP3sQlKEP4dLLfMlwNYdEjZZornGUVWC4teESRDUesqRmgTrPEIIVm2I548G2LfFagMPR7ohQBfRBmOjNAvjzYqZpwWOAH4H8/s1600/kc135+trajectory.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 320px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 250px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5518653886285417778" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbKtVkqFZl2bRV3GUmMyZM5J5c2VTvQHaSlUL2l8ViIKsP3sQlKEP4dLLfMlwNYdEjZZornGUVWC4teESRDUesqRmgTrPEIIVm2I548G2LfFagMPR7ohQBfRBmOjNAvjzYqZpwWOAH4H8/s320/kc135+trajectory.jpg" /></a>You got zero-gravity during the apex and double gravity while in the bottom half of the parabola (see illustration). Everyone throws up on the vomit comet, especially the first time they ride it. Me, I had no nausea at all, and I attributed it to the soda crackers in my flight suit pocket. But my t-shirt hidden under the zipper told the true story, "Better Living Through Chemicals," illustrated with a graphic leaf of fine cannibas.<br /><br /><p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyHn-vAxyFnI61aI2kUax7RfJqmFGuIBRJVZSlHmqxHzIGTXFRyakIqeu3QvbXDuGm5PI1FNI6xlBMGQsRuU9cOJiwysIXpf6bzms1ezpVo87EIxNEuqXfRRoW4aI6MzBG63gd4aZwaPU/s1600/kay+nasa+8.jpg"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 354px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 400px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5511670973183066066" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyHn-vAxyFnI61aI2kUax7RfJqmFGuIBRJVZSlHmqxHzIGTXFRyakIqeu3QvbXDuGm5PI1FNI6xlBMGQsRuU9cOJiwysIXpf6bzms1ezpVo87EIxNEuqXfRRoW4aI6MzBG63gd4aZwaPU/s400/kay+nasa+8.jpg" /></a><br />I knew is 1979 that cannabis was being used to stop nausea. It was Texas, easy to get weed, if you were fearless.... I mean, in that state in the 1970s they still put you in prison for possession of less than an ounce.<br /><br />For these zero-G trips, I drove onto the Air Force Base used by LBJ Space Center, parked, pulled out a baggie or unwrapped a hidden piece of foil, toked on the joint I'd taken out, then suited up for the flight. </p><p>Nothing could stop me by then. </p><p>I was impervious, having gotten into and survived several scrapes with death by 1979, <a href="http://cityofangels2.blogspot.com/2010/01/watching-taken-brings-up-time-i-got.html">such as this one</a> in 1966. So when I was at NASA, I could do anything, even toke up on pot on an Air Force base in my car, before getting on a test flight to cover experiments as a journalst.<br /><br />Plus, I was always in pursuit of the priest. There was always this underlying breathlessness as I confused sex with everything else in life, while trying to be straight and professional.<br /><br />My job on these flights was to take pictures and then do a story for release to media and for the inhouse newspaper, Space News Roundup. I had the journalist grad's dream job, and I literally screwed it up, by confusing men who had a connection to the sky with the priest I had been pursuing in compulsion since puberty.<br /><br /><strong>Here is the story that resulted from one of these flights:</strong> (Top and bottom half of P. 4, see front page below:)<br /></p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiievVAR3JEk973qAuV01USBkdFKleIDxQpg4ULp1-ulMwld4BCyyOPy2wNCvE_uylcGJFzpKVRivBfADZTDFEnRVy3OT926MQ4WjFNz8Hkukdc_FF9XLV1ZWkWSKk1EJfmr9HgjaSCELY/s1600/nasa+wow+1.jpg"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 312px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5511683428313227762" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiievVAR3JEk973qAuV01USBkdFKleIDxQpg4ULp1-ulMwld4BCyyOPy2wNCvE_uylcGJFzpKVRivBfADZTDFEnRVy3OT926MQ4WjFNz8Hkukdc_FF9XLV1ZWkWSKk1EJfmr9HgjaSCELY/s400/nasa+wow+1.jpg" /></a><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVDy08nyKbCcu7M2NBLlTrunKLzG0EQtfVN3-ppbvXXSMV6NTRoUsSJFlV4N0mFs-oMuIJO5dutXSZ1frHKsb2xVY92XgqOYU5nMBRxNFkcOHn6HnAnYpBKS-QhBloIzs9-UDQFNgkAZo/s1600/nasa+wow+2.jpg"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 277px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5511683255476847634" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVDy08nyKbCcu7M2NBLlTrunKLzG0EQtfVN3-ppbvXXSMV6NTRoUsSJFlV4N0mFs-oMuIJO5dutXSZ1frHKsb2xVY92XgqOYU5nMBRxNFkcOHn6HnAnYpBKS-QhBloIzs9-UDQFNgkAZo/s400/nasa+wow+2.jpg" /></a><strong>Page 1 of issue w/above story. </strong><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdAHMXYju7BwUWLk4VWCzvofpW8U3qzc17_xRqd-Zf4iNRf5NDNsredGxfbfj8N9rhiCRVW6pCzUjKuj2iv13TsxBdhzCoyhQhVSNq1Ei5sRlXursE8wBV27e90sEbhuRbHULCZOse9VQ/s1600/nasa+wow+3.jpg"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 300px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5511685354084741122" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdAHMXYju7BwUWLk4VWCzvofpW8U3qzc17_xRqd-Zf4iNRf5NDNsredGxfbfj8N9rhiCRVW6pCzUjKuj2iv13TsxBdhzCoyhQhVSNq1Ei5sRlXursE8wBV27e90sEbhuRbHULCZOse9VQ/s400/nasa+wow+3.jpg" /></a> <strong><span style="font-size:180%;">WOW!</span></strong><br /><em>Look what else I found!</em> I edited and recorded these updates of Skylab as it re-entered the Earth's atmosphere, remember that?<br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUuQTv1VuI0QWO8RtTax02movTg8BKC8kEyIzFNOi_OL8PkeglykFDaUW5sLmaopKvdpX8Leh9LEjOlgjeyrRJBdKtJlMRYKSS8w3me1f3yuwhf_8C6legaqyDmCXmSNBbeCDcl1GiZyU/s1600/scan0008.jpg"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 312px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 400px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5511688541922126578" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUuQTv1VuI0QWO8RtTax02movTg8BKC8kEyIzFNOi_OL8PkeglykFDaUW5sLmaopKvdpX8Leh9LEjOlgjeyrRJBdKtJlMRYKSS8w3me1f3yuwhf_8C6legaqyDmCXmSNBbeCDcl1GiZyU/s400/scan0008.jpg" /></a><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEHWf4PIZV1aLvmG1I163s8yD6ezW2Yf_5NK63QcCvW1iwxgX2r_G2mYNEwX3EjElWQg9N5QCy0CQbur20KgrV1TQs2b1AmIQhnMONgTNTFcK0qtXIQX1Tqb2vD9zHSTkmtpTtDCEpxds/s1600/scan0009.jpg"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 312px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 400px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5511688380472715154" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEHWf4PIZV1aLvmG1I163s8yD6ezW2Yf_5NK63QcCvW1iwxgX2r_G2mYNEwX3EjElWQg9N5QCy0CQbur20KgrV1TQs2b1AmIQhnMONgTNTFcK0qtXIQX1Tqb2vD9zHSTkmtpTtDCEpxds/s400/scan0009.jpg" /></a><br /><strong>EDITING NORAD?</strong><br /><em>Me? Kay Ebeling?</em><br />Who once passed a hasheesh pipe with Timothy Leary?<br />Man, what a pedophile priest affected compulsive pursuit in life can lead you into... <em>(PS: Never shared my scientific results, on the use of marijuana to prevent nausea in space, with NASA bosses at the time though...)</em><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnucyBLPrBYi5yKaig6TAKSxKoeN3bK_3uvpxqQuNpBD4xKWhyphenhyphenXxX4luTGbmM1jJuORKYnQ2ZoyPgSWmuHW9O6yYVuXwwNizsPFimcyhAXYeWZEzo0F0MD0rkAsNJomP4-w_1NqdPRA4E/s1600/kay+nasa+1.jpg"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 266px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5511826345334229010" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnucyBLPrBYi5yKaig6TAKSxKoeN3bK_3uvpxqQuNpBD4xKWhyphenhyphenXxX4luTGbmM1jJuORKYnQ2ZoyPgSWmuHW9O6yYVuXwwNizsPFimcyhAXYeWZEzo0F0MD0rkAsNJomP4-w_1NqdPRA4E/s400/kay+nasa+1.jpg" /></a>All this ability I had, all this skill, and I never experienced success, because of the compulsion. My sexual acting out, done almost by rote like I was pre-conditioned, always got me shunned and ousted. No matter how good a job I did, no matter how upright and disciplined and productive I made myself- I'd always get fired.<br /><br />Getting fired from NASA, now that's a story... More to come<br />...<br /><strong>MORE Skylab Re-Entry Copy:</strong><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgznHhlfK6affW8A40mBJMt6HOJjM7TN9qPP6G_EG4Np4WXP_OGIQbh0c0jKrPRiVaEVAcOfy1_hILbKx-bAMv3rvFsmA1tityjabAKtJDyNvY0FueBpbk4a8orBkvjrin4xWOTv7KlyJI/s1600/scan0011.jpg"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 312px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 400px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5511691980675196018" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgznHhlfK6affW8A40mBJMt6HOJjM7TN9qPP6G_EG4Np4WXP_OGIQbh0c0jKrPRiVaEVAcOfy1_hILbKx-bAMv3rvFsmA1tityjabAKtJDyNvY0FueBpbk4a8orBkvjrin4xWOTv7KlyJI/s400/scan0011.jpg" /></a><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtztIAsG1ML2sdhLHPu3PR9ygvaFzuI9gePRd3FQfcUKE_T0P8l-LmUyksXtVq91qAY0k8gEBEAW-mciq7vzNL3GR_UXukjCXEkqT4POg0JaRwwIBQ_leGRQV3bURNdFKqU7cvWlgfVCw/s1600/scan0012.jpg"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 312px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 400px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5511688229902634690" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtztIAsG1ML2sdhLHPu3PR9ygvaFzuI9gePRd3FQfcUKE_T0P8l-LmUyksXtVq91qAY0k8gEBEAW-mciq7vzNL3GR_UXukjCXEkqT4POg0JaRwwIBQ_leGRQV3bURNdFKqU7cvWlgfVCw/s400/scan0012.jpg" /></a><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5qCfV-PiwS09ewbAdABmF1SMBgz_V93ehxp5kSo6LAbKGytN_uDT4udGz2U4qKktPJZ46mk-7thcu_fAgo2Yn-khDVmOUAZYi4i_5jw4a4t842tFI2xd8Kg8jVT90SBYCE7XFdZ4VqU4/s1600/scan0013.jpg"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 312px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 400px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5511691635629925522" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5qCfV-PiwS09ewbAdABmF1SMBgz_V93ehxp5kSo6LAbKGytN_uDT4udGz2U4qKktPJZ46mk-7thcu_fAgo2Yn-khDVmOUAZYi4i_5jw4a4t842tFI2xd8Kg8jVT90SBYCE7XFdZ4VqU4/s400/scan0013.jpg" /></a><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiS1MHE-wqBhMh7L-6eaLISrtCgTSMVZaEDqBNvtvyXcXe3ukztXu5YA7bRhQY9W3-AipvK3AbgjRxLKCUi_BE0DYliDDi9tyOSLr6zNPIZP9lqCabcVQz4Yd0GekO6HpxTkUqYsrZFtuU/s1600/scan0014.jpg"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 312px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 400px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5511688034204810178" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiS1MHE-wqBhMh7L-6eaLISrtCgTSMVZaEDqBNvtvyXcXe3ukztXu5YA7bRhQY9W3-AipvK3AbgjRxLKCUi_BE0DYliDDi9tyOSLr6zNPIZP9lqCabcVQz4Yd0GekO6HpxTkUqYsrZFtuU/s400/scan0014.jpg" /></a><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJmcV9sA59e7-pKbjv6181oKkOVxy6bKWDSFjSdtltG8HnjmpPwE67keoZcCmNUYdYhlXgQRiPLnfbTbBgURdiOyCY5TH3OtzLGMDkNx6cetDSxcQUs9hGZQVpSZ9_QXO_xNQDdm7zpwc/s1600/scan0015.jpg"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 312px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 400px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5511687701818881890" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJmcV9sA59e7-pKbjv6181oKkOVxy6bKWDSFjSdtltG8HnjmpPwE67keoZcCmNUYdYhlXgQRiPLnfbTbBgURdiOyCY5TH3OtzLGMDkNx6cetDSxcQUs9hGZQVpSZ9_QXO_xNQDdm7zpwc/s400/scan0015.jpg" /></a> I think there was a call-in number for people to get updates, and it ran these recorded messages. We manned the newsroom 24-hours as Skylab re-entered, only mission I ever got to work on while I was at NASA....<br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaAt6woSQ5H8C7wKD0w7duRrL6q6yuN1muoHgUnDt02n_D-yEki25u3_F8z3AUpMwFMzlIwrOl6GEgXKA0jpqyytwk6og0zisW53BYTQHc54McpsfFPY2dlbWm8osVkO4Y3t7u09KRBNY/s1600/scan0016.jpg"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 312px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 400px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5511687545453748018" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaAt6woSQ5H8C7wKD0w7duRrL6q6yuN1muoHgUnDt02n_D-yEki25u3_F8z3AUpMwFMzlIwrOl6GEgXKA0jpqyytwk6og0zisW53BYTQHc54McpsfFPY2dlbWm8osVkO4Y3t7u09KRBNY/s400/scan0016.jpg" /></a><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikIUY_JXvFxIWaV2dzX6viAZo_R2c6k74hEe6RAhDzH5AHjLopyWzsMF6J-KFSR0f3U4xTVagVrrOrh6SQ0UITIlrq8EEZkgw-RoBjsNqCSv6-42d0BpHCUJZm45M3-YuGLO0daYez5Yg/s1600/scan0017.jpg"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 312px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 400px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5511687383153819890" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikIUY_JXvFxIWaV2dzX6viAZo_R2c6k74hEe6RAhDzH5AHjLopyWzsMF6J-KFSR0f3U4xTVagVrrOrh6SQ0UITIlrq8EEZkgw-RoBjsNqCSv6-42d0BpHCUJZm45M3-YuGLO0daYez5Yg/s400/scan0017.jpg" /></a>Kay Ebelinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13753284586265566961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5782652940285448862.post-22200435811731098022010-08-16T18:21:00.000-07:002010-08-17T10:21:14.354-07:00Like Everyone Else in L.A.?.<br />When I came back from Texas in 1983, I was so lost and demoralized, and once again found myself on Sunset Boulevard. That day I’d driven up from my parents’ house where they'd retired in South Orange County. <br /><br />I had the idea all I had to do was walk into a literary agency office, tell them, "I used to write for NASA Public Affairs," show them my portfolio of Space News Roundups from LBJ Space Center in Houston. Say, “I used to edit these, and 25 thousand people received them in their inbox every other Friday.” (Don't know what i planned to say if they ask me why I left NASA, as always I was going faster than the speed of life, did not stop to look at that problem.) <br /><br />Now that I was an out of work journalist in L.A, I had to get get an agent, I figured. So I got the address of an agency in about the 9200 block of Sunset, past Doheny, where it curves away from the Strip and starts into Beverly Hills. <br /><br />I’d been in Texas since about 1970. But still this street was home, not the whole city of L.A., not the east side suburbs where I grew up, but Sunset Boulevard. Last time I’d been a resident of Hollywood was in 1969. <br /><br />…<br /><br />Now I entered this glass slick building with no one stopping me in 1983 in the lobby, even though it was a Beverly Hills office building with all kinds of movie industry businesses inside, probably even celebrities. I just walked in and pushed the elevator button, went up a few flights, and walked into the office of Well Known Literary Agency. They had a phone listing with their address in the Yellow Pages that I’d read in my parents’ kitchen. <br /><br />I said, "I'm here, I want to get a job writing for television or films, so I need an agent," in my elongated A's of L.A. with acquired Texan twang. <br /><br />The receptionist stopped short, she was a city girl laughing at this Texas newcomer, even though L.A. is my hometown. She gave a grin meant for someone not me, and said, "No agent will talk to you unless you show up with a large body of work."<br /><br />I said, A large body of work? But I have these Space News Roundups full of stories I wrote.<br /><br />She shook her head. Doesn't matter. <br /><br />What's a body of work, I asked. She said:<br /><br />Like fifteen, twenty, completed full length feature film scripts, not just one novel but several novels you've gotten published. <br /><br />Oh, I said. <br /><br />I left the office, crossed the street, and sat on a bench, just sat, looking at the sleek office building I'd just left. Just sat there looking at it.<br /><br />Five years later I left L.A. with newborn Lizzie and moved to Humboldt County, convinced that a baby would keep me at home, plus moving to the country, I’d finally sit down and write that body of work. <br /><br />Never did. <br /><br />Ended up getting a job and entering the frenzy chaos and exhaustion of life as a single mother. <br /><br />In 1993 in Eureka I had this bizarre experience as my daughter turned age five. Right then and there I remembered what happened to me at the hands of Father Thomas Barry Horne of Bartlett Illinois when I was five years old myself. It all became clear and vivid as I looked at my daughter as I was hiding her from the front windows. <br /><br />And it came clear in my head because I hadn't been in the bars in two years. <br /><br />I confirmed what happened at the hands of Father Horne over the phone with family members. Then entered the world of hundreds of thousands of crime victims of pedophile priests all over the world, and all that has led to where I am today. <br /><br />To this day, when I look at my daughter, I see myself at her age. It’s hard right now that she’s age 22, as I did my worst… sexual confusion… acting out around that age. I want to move away from my daughter so I don't have to see those horrible years of my life every time I look at her. <br /><br />All those greasy body fluid filled nights...<br /><br />In 2007 I finally figured out how to start a blog and created one about pedophile priests, the crime victims, and the perpetrators. I found hundreds of stories, maybe thousands of stories, and started writing them. <br /><br />The other day I realized that now, without setting out to accomplish it, I have a large body of work to show to an agent. <br /><br />Wonder if that one literary agency is still in that building on Sunset Boulevard. Maybe I should look them up… wonder if I could get in the door in 2010. <br /><br />Should just go sit on that bench and look at the building again.<br /><br />-kay ebeling, todayKay Ebelinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13753284586265566961noreply@blogger.com0