Under the heading “Newspaper Lenders Turning Into Owners”, the report continues “Banks and other financial firms have taken over or are angling to take charge at dozens of newspapers, including four of the nation’s 15 largest - the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, the Star Tribune in Minneapolis and The Philadelphia Inquirer.

“The new owners face huge problems. Newspaper ad revenue, the industry’s main source of income, is on pace to total around $27 billion this year, about $22 billion less than three years ago. Newspaper circulation is falling faster than ever.”

WATCHDOG: Very sad. Growl.

Obesity isn’t caused by overeating, and it isn’t fixed by restricting one’s diet. It appears to have multiple causes. There is no eating plan, whether one calls it a “diet” or “a change in lifestyle” that results in significant permanent weight loss. In fact, of all those people who go on a diet this year, 95% will weigh more four years later than when they began the diet.

Researchers are increasingly agreed that body fat is actually an organ that helps the individual deal with stress. If you are overstressed, the organ enlarges, just as the heart or liver enlarges when they are overworked. There’s no adjustment in the diet that will reduce the size of an enlarged heart or liver, either, so it’s not surprising that there’s no way to reduce the size of the fat organ.

About 2% of the population will have permanent weight loss of more than 40 pounds in any given year. That 2% occurs whether you’re trying to diet or not trying to diet, and whether one finds the weight loss desirable or not.

Diabetes is a symptom – high blood sugar – rather than a single disease; we know, for instance, that there are at least 4 diseases that all get called MODY. Lots of things cause high blood sugar. If it’s not caused by something else we have a name for, we call it diabetes.

The largest single cause of diabetes appears to be genetic, not in the 46 chromosomes that are determined sexually, but in the mitochondrial DNA we inherit only from our mothers.

The percentage of the population with diabetes has been masked by malnutrition, just as vitamin B12 can mask the symptoms of pernicious anemia. The answer is not to malnourish our children to hide the symptom of high blood sugar, but to find a cure for the underlying disease, which causes damage even if blood sugar levels are maintained at a low level.

Editor’s comment: The above makes a valuable contribution to a discussion of obesity in adults. However, it remains important for children to be taught to eat a nutritious diet and to adopt healthy life styles, including exercise, to prevent becoming overweight. Ours are not the only generations having to deal with stress.

Editorial “The Erosion of property rights” opines “We need to limit the use of eminent domain to keep local governments from seizing property without due consideration of the property owner.”

WATCHDOG: The law already requires proper financial compensation for property owners. The issue is under what conditions should government be allowed to displace rundown neighborhoods with new development and, under such cases, what arrangements should be made to provide comparable or better housing for those actually living there, be they owners or renters?

Often concentrated public housing has destroyed a sense of community and led to vandalism, crime, and even worse living conditions. More prosperous neighborhoods resist any attempt at ‘scattered’ subsidized housing. So where are those displaced to go?

This allows for no simplistic answer. In fact, Lancaster City wrestled with the problem throughout much of the twentieth century.

“Diabetics in U.S. May Double in 25 Years, Tripling Health Costs” discusses a study published today in the journal Diabetes Care.

The article continues “Without new programs to assure that people get health care to manage their condition, 44.1 million people in the U.S. will have diabetes by 2034, from 23.7 million today, the report said. The number of diabetics on Medicare, the government plan for the elderly, will reach 14.1 million from 6.5 million today.”

WATCHDOG: When will most Lancaster parents help prevent child and adult obesity by providing nutritious diets and restricting the food consumption of their children?

Is Lancaster General doing enough to promote public health, or does it welcome the business? Is the Lancaster Newspapers, Inc. and television stations doing enough to educate the public? Will the County Commissioners take the lead?

“U.S. Will Push Mortgage Firms to Reduce More Loan Payments” states “But the mortgage companies that collect payments from homeowners — servicers, as they are known — generally do not own the loans. Rather, they collect fees from investors that actually own mortgages, and their fees often increase the longer a borrower remains in delinquency.”

WATCHDOG: Even the New York Times in this extended article misses the main point, one that was made repeatedly last year by witnesses before the Senate Finance Committee (as broadcast over C-SPAN.”   Most mortgages have been ‘sliced and diced’ with portion sold in secondary security markets to various investors and are managed by mortgage service companies.

The servicers have no authority to adjust the terms of the mortgage!  That is why witnesses urge Congress to empower the service companies to adjust terms and rates.

The following is excerpted from “American Lion, Andrew Jackson in the White House”  by Jon Meacham and describes what took place upon inauguration day, 1829:

“It is possible that Jackson’s failure to communicate directly with Adams helped lead to the disaster that followed, a legendary scene in American history that has forever linked Jackson with the image of a crowd trashing the White House.  ‘No arrangements had been made’, Mrs. Smith noted, and ‘no police officers placed on duty and the whole house [was] inundated by the rabble mob.’”

“The reception Jackson had planned turned chaotic, with his enthusiastic followers filling the house past capacity.  ‘The Majesty of the People had disappeared, and a rabble, a mob, of boys, negroes, women, children, scrambling, fighting, romping replaced it’, said Mrs. Smith….Standing in the mansion, Jackson was nearly crushed by the visitors.  His aides formed a protective ring around the president and spirited him back to Gadsby’s.”

“All Bets off” goes on to say “We support moves by the state auditor general and Rep. Denlinger to ban ’swaps’ and keep local governments from losing our shirts in a bond-issue shell game.”

WATCHDOG: A wag of the tail! We remind the Sunday News that ’swaps’ were used to fund the Convention Center Project over the protest of knowledgeable objectors. Of course we all know what the Lancaster Newspapers, Inc.’s editorial and news slant was at that time. To its credit, it has returned to legitimate journalism, even if hesitant to offend powerful interests by investigating and commenting upon local failings.

The lead story is “Can’t miss work, child sick…Flu pandemic, harsh economy combine to give parents a major headache. ” It describes at length and in detail the dilemma facing parents who need the full pay check and employers who cannot afford paid time off or fear employee abuse of the privilege.

WATCHDOG: This is excellent journalism. It points out a significant problem at an especially pertinent moment. It is a fair presentation from all points of view. And it is a subtle call for employers to think or rethink their approach to compensated time off for caring for sick youngsters. (One promising approach is allowing the use of paid vacation days.) Three wags of the tail!

The Nov. 5, 2009 edition of The New York Review of Books contained a review by Bill McKibben of “A Paradise Built in Hell:  The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster” by Rebecca Solnit.

NewsLanc has continuously inveighed against the internecine character of the leadership class of Lancaster County, citing examples  (The Convention Center Project and the questionable new location of the Norfolk Southern rail yard) of a few predators taking advantage of the unwillingness of their peers to publicly object.  We half jokingly raise the battle cry of “Stamp out niceness!”

Solnit’s well-documented contention is that when real disaster occurs, the society quickly and informally reorganizes and competent and altruistic leaders come to the forefront.

McKibben writes “In too many cases, disasters are made worse by the response of authorities, who often turn out to be far more prone to panic and blunder than the citizens actually affected by these upheavals…

“In Solnit’s telling, it turns out that the fumbling of various government entities in the wake of Katrina was more rule than exception….Instead of the ‘law of the jungle chaos’ that Hollywood movies (and Thomas Hobbes) would lead us to expect, what in fact takes place is another kind of anarchy, where the citizenry by and large organize and care for themselves. In the immediate aftermath of disaster, government fails as if it had been overthrown and civil society succeeds as though it has revolted.”

“But Solnit’s argument, at bottom, is that human nature is not necessarily what we imagine it to be, and that even in very extreme cases, people are cooperative – that ‘tend and befriend’ is more likely than ‘fight or flight.’

“Solnit implies that we might want to reconsider anthropology in this light—she posits that for a very long time before modern development made life more secure, we basically lived in a condition of ‘continuous disaster’, always on the edge of running out of food.  ‘Hunter gatherers and others who live close to the bone daily experience risk and daily remake the circumstances of their survival.  They are bound together by an urgent necessity that is also a satisfaction’.”

Solnit’s wisdom is especially apparent to this writer. He, with others, experienced a disaster during the aftermath of Hurricane Agnes in 1972 which flooded over the second floor and up to the roof tops in much of Wilkes-Barre, Kingston and other Luzerne County river towns.

What emerged was a momentary new leadership of altruism, courage and competence, replacing the usual fawners and posturers. Volunteers emerged from nearby and out of town who selflessly played important leadership roles, afterwards to disappear in the routine of their inconspicuous lives.

May Lancaster never experience a disaster. But metaphorically, a flood that would wash away much of the current docile (read “getting along is everything” ) and predatory (read exploiting the former) establishment and bring more altruistic, independent and competent individuals to the fore would be a service to the community. May NewsLanc’s contributors be part of that ‘flood!’

“The Needle Nexus” reports:

“We know that abstinence, sexual fidelity and consistent condom use all prevent the spread of H.I.V.  But we do not yet know how to persuade people to act accordingly. Then there is another way that H.I.V.  infects: by injection with a hypodermic needle previously used by an infected person.

Outside Africa, a huge part of the AIDS epidemic involves people who were infected this way.  In Russia, 83 percent of infections in which the origin is known come from needle sharing… In the United States, needle-sharing directly accounts for more than 25 percent of AIDS cases.”

WATCHDOG: Now that syringe deregulation has removed any likelihood of public objection, hopefully Lancaster General Hospital and others will fund and the Urban League will operate the syringe exchange funded until the end of this year by a benefactor and operated out of Bethel AME Church during the past ten years.