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Welcome to THE SACRAMENTO Z NEWSPAPER (online edition)

Please Select the edition/article of THE Z you wish to read


In this edition:


oil explosion CITIES THAT WAIT TO DIE  

There is no way these rolling bomb-cars be made safe to run through our most densilypopulated or environmentally sensitive areas. More talk about "training first-responders", or "upgrading tank cars" or "getting more information" will not make things one iota safer for our cities and towns. We said so last novemeber, and we're saying it again.

The West Virgina explosion is just an opening act, and the train-wrecks that are coming to California cities and towns are as inevitable as they are tragic. Yet, as The Z has pointed out, there is a way to make rail transport of dangerous and volatile materials like bakken crude risk-free and 100% safe for our communities. Will the industry implement it? Not unless our public officials begin to have the real conversation and stop scheming in the back rooms of their city halls...

...not unless ordinary citizens like yourselves compell them to pay attention: West Virginia is just a wake up call, count on it.

MRAP PHOTO DAVIS, MRAP FLAP!  

So is Davis, CA now completely defenseless? Will pepper spray be enough the next time invaders plant their improvised butts on some path to nowhere? Can Davis repel the next foreign incursion?

General Andy Jones doesn't think so, and he put his poetry in his boots and his boots on the ground to prove "It just Ain't so." (We've got those boots in this issue of The Z just in case you're one of those 'show-me' skeptics.)

Not to worry though, Davis. You've got allies. Boy, do you got allies.

no-earth sign WRINGING IN THE HOMELESS  

Our brilliant legal system, once again proves stupidity is an equal opportunity employer. The court has declared it's ok to bust people for public displays of "camping paraphernalia*, just as long as you equally apply your "anti-camping" ordinances to the rich and poor alike (and where have we heard something like that before?). Yeah, maybe someone (Mark Merin?) will be able to wrestle a smudge of humanity through the eye of that needle, but I wouldn't count on it. The footnotes that play "City-Council" have no end to what they can pull out of their socks just to make something seem to be something else.

Meanwhile, some guy named Orwell figured it out almost a hundred years ago, but we still don't seem to get it, do we? The Z covers that & Orwell, too, in our continuing coverage of this unending sorrow.

[* & doncha just love that word, 'paraphernalia'. Something to do with rising above the phernalia of life I suppose. Sounds positively Buddhist, yes?


Uncle Sam poster THE Z CALLS ON THE U.S. MILITARY  

Never thought we'd hear ourselves asking to call in the troops, but this is one item that nobody else can manage. So we'll ask our friends in the service to take this one on. They're really the only ones who can do the job. It's their own house that's been occupied.

broken scales of justice OUR NOT-SO-GRAND JURIES  

Your editor was a ready as anyone to pick up a pitchfork and go after our Grand Jury system, until I realized how little I knew about Grand Juries and what they were really put in place to do. Now it looks like we may be in serious danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

And this is one baby we may regret throwing out. Beginning this edition, we will be doing a series on Grand Juries in hopes that a little knowledge will be worth a whole lot more than a lot of misplaced anger.

cal expo big-fun poster CAL EXPO, BACKWARD TO THE FUTURE?  

Who cares about Cal Expo? Why bother? Most of the property is neglected blight, so why not sell off what's not used, fix up what is and have a little Big Fun?

Well, that is just the reality some very unimaginative Expo Directors and managers, a handful of public officials and their political ouija boards, and a few greedy 1%ers in the wings would like us to buy into.

The Z-axis eye sees it quite another way and, if we let it happen the way the power elite would like it to happen, our children and many generations of children may not thank us much. See why in our story, 'Shame on Cal Expo'.

homeless photo - m. swisher MARY SWISHER'S
PHOTOGRAPHS
 

Sacramento's own Mary Swisher has been creating photographs of such exquisite power that it is very difficult to turn away from them without an eerie feeling that one has been haunted by strange ghosts as if they drift from her images through an uncanny fog of nature and nurture to take up residence in the viewer's mind.

The works she has invited Z readers to experience are doubly potent. These ghosts emerge from our pages driven by important social as well as natural forces. 'Haunting' is really the best word one can use.





AND A WHOLE LOT MORE...