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If you were thinking of dressing your kid
like a pirate, handing him a foil sword, and sending him to school
with a bag full of Twix, you’d better pencil in some time for a
talk with the principal. Here are the Halloween guidelines from a
school somewhere in the U.S. (The mom who forwarded them asked me
not to name it, to protect the guilty, obsessive-compulsive
killjoys.) The note begins:

Halloween is an exciting time for children and is always a
special day at [redacted]. To ensure that we are not shortchanging
our academic time, we have found it helpful to modify our day.

God forbid the school shortchange academics one day a year!

COSTUMES

As you plan your child’s Halloween costume,  you must
consider the district’s Zero Tolerance Policy.  Imitation
weapons, no matter how benign, are not allowed — this includes
things like neon-colored guns, plastic swords/lightsabers, and
rubber knives…. This measure reflects the district’s commitment
to the “Zero Tolerance for Guns Act” from the Safe Schools
Initiative.

Actually, it seems to reflect the school’s Zero Tolerance for
Fantasy Act.

FOOD GUIDELINES

It is recommended that food and beverages provided by parents to
be shared with classmates comply with the dietary standards listed
below. Foods of minimal nutritional value cannot be
distributed.

*Snacks and beverages shall contain no more than 8 grams of
total fat, no more than 2 grams saturated fat, and no more than .5
grams of trans fat.

*Beverages limited to 100% juice, milk or water.

*Whole milk in 8 oz container.

SAFETY TIPS FOR HALLOWEEN

We will be having a Halloween safety assembly with a member of
our [] police department.

And there you have it: perhaps the scariest Halloween on record,
because it synthesizes every terrible trend in American kiddie
culture to date. 1). Believing that there is a link between make
believe and violence. (Really, how many Halloween pirates go on to
commit terror on the high seas?) 2). Believing the way to keep kids
healthy is to obsess about every gram of fat they ingest.  3).
Thinking that one day of crazy sugar fun is somehow going to set
kids on the road to ruin, physically, morally, and nutritionally.
 4). Pretending that one day of academic disruption will have
any impact whatsoever on the kids’ education. 5). Calling in the
authorities to teach kids how to enjoy a holiday that kids have
enjoyed for generations without a safety assembly beforehand.

As for the mom who
sent me this note, she says: “I’m all for healthy foods &
snacks, but we’re talking Halloween here! Isn’t the point of
Halloween eating candy with “minimal nutritional value”? And would
anyone keel over if they drank 10 oz of whole milk (God
forbid)?”

They might—if they weren’t already dead from a fatal foil sword
wound.

A
recent Gallup Poll exposed the fact that many teachers have a
Jekyll and Hyde complex when it comes to Common Core: they like the
idea of uniform national standards but vigorously oppose
standardized tests.

According to the poll, 76 percent of teachers reacted positively
to the idea of having “one set of educational standards across the
country for reading, writing, and math.” Good news for Common Core
proponents, right? Unfortunately, the other half of Common Core is
rigorous testing, and 72 percent of teachers reacted negatively to
“standardized computer-based tests to measure all students’
performance and progress.” When the poll suggested “linking teacher
evaluations to their students’ Common Core test scores,” teachers
were horrified: 89 percent didn’t like that idea.

Common Core cannot be stripped of standardized testing and still
survive. Tests were not some incidental byproduct of the national
standards effort; they are an integral part of the package. There
will be no way to tell if the standards are working—or if schools
are implementing them correctly—if the tests are tossed out but the
standards maintained.

Certainly, some teachers merely oppose the tests because they
don’t want to be held responsible for their students’ progress at
all. That’s bad; teacher compensation and evaluation should be
based on something tangible, like student achievement, rather than
something automatic, like tenure or degree attainment.

But I can’t fault teachers who don’t want to be held responsible
for students’ negative test scores when the students
clearly don’t stand a chance of passing. Haphazard
implementation of Common Core means that not all students are
absorbing Core-aligned material at the appropriate grades,
rendering
the tests ill-suited to the task at hand. And how are
kindergartners at struggling, cash-strapped, inner-city schools
going to pass a computerized exam,
no matter how dedicated their teachers are?

One of the main problems of public education is a lack of
accountability. There is no way to excise bad teachers from the
system, and good teachers have little incentive to stay. Better
testing is a perfectly valid solution to deal with that problem.
But this test—a test forced on the states by
large federal and corporate interests—is clearly creating more
problems than it solves.

Incidentally, Common Core tests
are so unpopular that some former supporters of the effort have
been forced to change course in order to avoid alienting teachers.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who is fighting to keep his
governorship, has significantly walked back his pro-Core stances.
His Republican opponent, Rob Astorino, is even more opposed to
Common Core, and will actually appear on the ballot as the nominee
of the “Stop Common Core” party.

• Secretary of Defense
  Chuck Hagel said that “of course” U.S. airstrikes against the
  Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) would benefit the Assad
  regime. About 1,000 foreign fighters are still entering
  Syria to fight with ISIS each month.
• President Obama was in
  Maine to campaign but didn’t touch Ebola.
• The odds of
  Republicans taking control of the Senate stand at 68
  percent.
• Pennsylvania state police say they’ve caught alleged cop
  shooter
  Eric Frein after a nearly seven-week long manhunt. Prosecutors
  want to seek the death penalty.
• Israel has closed the
  Temple Mount after a series of shootings at the site, which
  also includes the al-Aqsa mosque.
• The military has taken over the government in
  Burkina Faso after protesters stormed and set fire to the
  parliament building.
• Zambia’s newest head of state is the first white president in
  
  Africa since F.W. de Klerk.

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Nightcrawler is a steely LA noir that
trains a searchlight on the TV news business, and flushes out some
of its creepiest denizens. Gyllenhaal gives an intense, gripping
performance. His Louis is an icy sociopath, living in solitary
contentment with a laptop and a big-screen TV (both stolen,
presumably), his only companion a sad potted plant. The actor says
he lost nearly 30 pounds for the role, and his cadaverous,
dead-eyed countenance is the movie’s most disturbing element.
Writer-director Dan Gilroy is already a well-regarded screenwriter
(he scripted The Bourne Legacy with his brother,
Tony Gilroy). Here, directing his first movie, he reveals a sleek,
fully formed style, greatly enhanced by meticulous editing (by his
other brother, John Gilroy) and by James Newton Howard’s subtly
ominous score, writes Kurt Loder. 

View this article.

As Veronique de Rugy explained
two days ago, Halloween candy is more expensive than it should be
thanks to really awful, protectionist
sugar policies that gift U.S. companies market share and
profits.

But why do we buy so much candy at Halloween in the first place?
Over at
Bloomberg View, former Reason Editor Virginia Postrel
talks with Samira Kawash, the author of the delectably titled book
Candy: A Century of Panic and Pleasure, to find out.
Kawash is a retired professor of literature at “Dear
Old Rutgers.” Her site, Candy Professor, is worth a
click-thru.

(Side note: This is exactly the sort of fascinating
information that Postrel is brilliant at discovering! She makes
illuminating connections and does the sort of original research all
of us journos aspire to but rarely pull off.)

“For more than a century, we’ve simultaneously gorged on the
stuff and felt guilty about it,” notes Postrel. “It’s an
intensified version of our ambivalent and fickle attitudes toward
abundant, convenient, mass-produced food in general.”

It turns out that the Halloween-candy connection is a post-war
development, likely growing out of the massification of wealth and
industrial production. From the Q&A:

[Postrel]: When and how did candy become
associated with Halloween? Was trick-or-treating just concocted to
sell candy?

[Kawash]: Would you believe the earliest
trick-or-treaters didn’t even expect to get candy? Back in the
1930s, when kids first started chanting “trick or treat” at the
doorbell, the treat could be just about anything: nuts, coins, a
small toy, a cookie or popcorn ball. Sometimes candy too, maybe a
few jelly beans or a licorice stick. But it wasn’t until well into
the 1950s that Americans started buying treats instead of making
them, and the easiest treat to buy was candy. The candy industry
also advertised heavily, and by the 1960s was offering innovative
packaging and sizes like mini-bars to make it even easier to give
out candy at Halloween. But if you look at candy trade discussions
about holiday marketing in the 1920s and 1930s, Halloween doesn’t
even get a mention.

There’s a great discussion of the
tainted-candy scares of the 1970s and much more. I’ll leave you
with this:

[Postrel]: Your book starts with a story
in which another parent compares your child’s jelly beans to crack
cocaine. How does Halloween candy survive in a culture where candy
is seen as dangerous?

[Kawash]: Well, number one is, kids love
it! And I think our society really does have a very ambivalent
relation to candy, which includes both extremely positive and
extremely negative feelings. I do feel like the candy part of
Halloween has gone overboard, though. There are so many fun things
about the holiday, but all too often kids end up obsessed with just
piling up as much candy as they can. When kids are just marching
from house to house and holding out their bag, trick-or-treating
seems kind of joyless, more like work. Hmm, I wonder where they
learned that?

Read the whole thing.

Reason blogger and “Free Range Kids” activist Lenore Skenazy
gives “3 Ways Parents Are Ruining Halloween.” Take a look:

Five police agencies in
southeast Virginia have been collecting
and sharing telephone records, since
2012. Wired reports the agencies have obtained
some of the data from phone companies through subpoenas. And some
of it has been taken from phones taken from people they have
arrested.

Yesterday Maine’s governor, Paul LePage,
said he would “seek legal authority to enforce the
quarantine” of Kaci Hickox, the nurse who returned to the United
States on Friday after treating Ebola patients in Sierra Leone. But
he did not specify which “legal authority” he had in mind.
Meanwhile, LePage dispatched state troopers to Hickox’s home in
Fort Kent to keep an eye on her. Today they tagged along as Hickox
took a
bike ride with her boyfriend, brazenly defying LePage’s
admittedly extralegal demand that she remain confined to her home
until mid-November, even though she is neither sick nor contagious.
LePage said he was willing to allow the occasional bike ride or
jog, as long as Hickox does not come anywhere near other people,
but she rejected that gracious concession. So LePage, having
already announced his intent to force Hickox’s compliance with his
arbitrary, scientifically unfounded dictates, again
vowed to do so, but he was still pretty vague about how that
would work:

The Governor will exercise the full extent of his authority
allowable by law. Maine statutes provide robust authority to the
State to use legal measures to address threats to public
health.

Public health provisions contained at Title 22 of Maine’s
Revised Statutes govern how the State may proceed to control
diseases. There are multiple options provided in law. Specifics of
the process or steps being taken by the State at this time may not
be discussed publicly due to the confidentially requirements in
law.

According to LePage, Title 22 provides “multiple options” for
him to enforce his will, but he is not going to tell us which one
he plans to use. Let’s
have a look and see which provisions might be relevant.

Under
Section 812, the state can obtain an “order for treatment or
such other order as may direct the least restrictive measures
necessary to effectively protect the public health.” A court is
supposed to issue such an order only if it finds, “based upon clear
and convincing evidence,” that “a public health threat exists.” But
since Hickox is asymptomatic and incapable of transmitting Ebola,
she does not currently pose a public health threat, and forcibly
confining her to her home does not seem like “the least restrictive
measure” to address the possibility that she will pose such a
threat in the future, given the alternative of daily temperature
monitoring. As The New England Journal of
Medicine notes,
“fever precedes the contagious stage.”

What else might LePage try? Under
Section 810, the state can obtain a court order giving it
“temporary emergency custody” of someone if it can show by clear
and convincing evidence that such an order is required “to avoid a
clear and immediate public health threat.” But if Hickox does not
pose a public health threat, she cannot pose a “clear and
immediate” public health threat.

Under
Section 820, the state can bypass the need for a court order.
The Department of Health and Human Services can unilaterally “take
a person into custody and order prescribed care,” which
includes “isolation” or “quarantine,” but only if:

(a) The department has reasonable cause to believe that the
person has been exposed to or is at significant medical risk of
transmitting a communicable disease that poses a serious and
imminent risk to public health and safety;

(b) There are no less restrictive alternatives available to
protect the public health and safety; and

(c) The delay involved in securing a court order would pose an
imminent risk to the person or a significant medical risk of
transmission of the disease.

Hickox may have been “exposed to” Ebola in Africa, but she is
not “at significant medical risk” of transmitting it, and the
threat she poses is neither “serious” nor “imminent.” Nor does her
situation meet the other two criteria. Finally, this provision
applies only in the event of “an extreme public health emergency,”

defined as “the occurrence or imminent threat of widespread
exposure to a highly infectious or toxic agent that poses an
imminent threat of substantial harm to the population of the
State.” Although LePage has the
authority to declare such an emergency, doing so would require
a dramatic distortion of reality.

Someone who is forcibly isolated under Section 820 has a right
to judicial review “as soon as reasonably possible but not later
than 48 hours after the person is subject to prescribed care.” To
prevail at the hearing, the state ‘”must prove by clear and
convincing evidence” that conditions (a) and (b) have been met.

In short, LePage does indeed have “robust authority” to deal
with serious and imminent threats to public health. The difficulty
lies in proving that Hickox qualifies as one of those and that home
confinement is the least restrictive way of addressing whatever
risk she may pose in the future.

I’ll be on the Tom Brown Show on WEZS tonight at
9pm ET discussing that whole election thing happening next week. If
you’re in New Hampshire, tune in—everyone else can listen online
here.

Riffing off a
survey conducted earlier this year by the Medical Group
Management Association (MGMA), the conservative American Action
Forum (AAF)
estimates that upwards of 214,000 doctors are declining to
serve patients covered by Obamacare exchange health plans. AAF gets
that number by extrapolating the MGMA’s survey responses across the
full
population of practicing physicians, so take that number as
seriously as you like. But there’s no doubt that physicians have
real concerns about the president’s signature Affordable Care Act
(ACA), and that exchange customers are having trouble finding
doctors willing to take their business.

The MGMA’s finding that 23.5 percent of medical practices are
not participating in exchange plans squares closely with a
survey last month by The Physicians Foundation in which 28.5
percent of respondents answered “no, and I have no plans to”
participate in Obamacare.

Fifty nine percent of MGMA respondents had an unfavorable view
of the ACA, while 74.6 percent of physicians surveyed by the The
Physicians Foundation gave it a C grade or lower (46 percent give
it a D or F).

The survey by the The Physicians Foundation didn’t inquire into
reasons for grades, but the MGMA did ask about resistance
to participating in exchange plans. Forty eight percent pointed to
the
90-day grace period during which enrollees must still be
treated even if they don’t pay premiums (doctors are on the hook
for 60 days of that, with insurance companies responsible for the
other 30). Red tape is a worry for 32 percent of respondents, with
41 percent citing financial headaches including patients not being
able to pick up their share of costs on high-deductible plans.
Thirty eight percent pointed to low reimbursement rates (they can
be half
those for traditional commercial health plans).

In an article published this week, USA Today cited
bargain-basement compensation for physicians as one reason
exchange customers are already having big problems finding
doctors who will see them. “The exchanges have become very much
like Medicaid,” they quoted the president of the Medical Society of
the State of New York saying. “Physicians who are in solo practices
have to be careful to not take too many patients reimbursed at
lower rates or they’re not going to be in business very long.”

The grace period also featured prominently in that article,
since it represents a potentally big expense for doctors (my

wife has run into it in her pediatric practice).

Doctor availability would likely be even lower if some insurance
companies didn’t insist on all or nothing packages, requring
practices to accept their exchange policies along with their
commercial plans.

Even so, for all of the effort to enroll Americans in Obamacare,
there’s no guarantee that the doctor will be in for any of
them.