Today seems to be a poor day for headlines. While acknowledging Kim Jong Il's missiles that fizzled, the front page of today's Philadelphia Inquirer mainly highlights the ridiculousness of government -- with the top story being the closure of casinos in New Jersey, which "ceased all gambling operations amid a state budget impasse that idled New Jersey's gambling inspectors." No inspectors, of course, means that there can be nothing to inspect. The power to inspect is of course the power to destroy. People laugh at the fiasco that is New Jersey (and I think few feel sorry for casinos), but what they ought to remember is that this same principle could be used to shut down the necessities of life. New Jersey casinos are not allowed to operate without inspectors, which protects us from something. (Corruption in gambling, perhaps? Heaven forefend!) New Jerseyans should be grateful that the bureaucrats haven't required inspectors in supermarkets, or else they could effectively shut off the food supply. Or how about online safety nannies watching over New Jersey ISPs? Without government money, they'd have to shut down all Internet service in New Jersey.

And closing New Jersey beaches! I like that. I guess the tides will have to stop, and the seas will have to recede, because the King Canute bureaucrats have shut down operations.

New Jersey's Democratic governor Corzine wants a sales tax hike, and the Democratic legislature won't give it to him. Apparently it never occurred to either that they might try doing without the additional funds. Instead, they turn their wrath on the people who come to New Jersey to gamble, and who'd be better off in Las Vegas or Reno.

It's tough to be sympathetic.

Sharing the front page with closed casinos is Philadelphia's recycling crisis. Whether it should be front page news or not, it seems that the city does a piss poor job of recycling, so they're trying different carrot and stick approaches to motivate Philadelphia's benighted humans:

.. they no longer will have to separate recyclables. Everything can go into one bin because it will go into one truck, to be sorted later at the Blue Mountain Recycling facility in Southwest Philadelphia.

Residents can get city containers or use anything from an old laundry basket to a plastic tub.

Officials are hoping the added materials and convenience will jump-start household recycling in the city, which has stubbornly held at 6 percent - meaning 6 percent of everything that could be recycled.

While comparisons can be misleading because programs differ, New York reported a residential recycling rate of 17.8 percent and Los Angeles, 45 percent, according to a Waste News survey.

Currently, Philadelphia's residential recycling rate ranks at the bottom of the bin compared to that of other large U.S. cities-and the figure is actually trending lower. According to statistics for the year ending June 30, Philadelphia households recycle only 5.5 percent of all paper, glass bottles and aluminum cans they take in.

By contrast, San Francisco reports a residential recycling rate of 38 percent, Chicago recycles about 22 percent of its residential waste stream, New York claims an 18 percent recovery rate, and 43 percent of materials set on the curb in Seattle are recycled.

Is the goal really recycling, though? Or is it to change human morality? I couldn't help notice that the recycle activists aren't too happy with the new and simplified "single stream" approach Philadelphia is taking:

Maurice Sampson II, the city's recycling coordinator in the mid-1980s and an advocate of a Philadelphia-based firm, RecycleBank, questioned the wisdom of rolling out a new program in summer when community groups that could help spread the word aren't meeting.

"The best word I would probably use is ill-advised," he said.

That's because recycling is a quasi religion, and activists want to change human behavior.

It's more important than how much a program costs -- or even whether studies and statistics used to justify it are true. One of Philadelphia's throwaway weeklies -- the Philadelphia City Paper -- examines the supremely elitist mindset of the people behind Philadelphia's recent anti-smoking ordinance (and others like it):

Helena [a bogus and debunked secondhand smoke "study"] and a few others are their best and their brightest but are all similarly and deeply flawed. And they are all repeatedly paraded before legislators who rarely have the knowledge, conviction or inclination to question them.

Would you raise the question if you were in their place? Would you do so knowing you'd be accused of being a "Big Tobacco Mouthpiece" and realizing you'd be standing alone in mean-spirited opposition to the phalanx of innocent and pink-lunged children with whom Councilman Michael Nutter packed the balcony? And would you do so aware that you'd be sharing the TV screen with dozens of fresh-faced idealistic little girls wearing signs proclaiming the dread diseases you're condemning them to? What politician in their right mind would have the courage to stand up for truth when confronted with such opposition? Unfortunately, very few.

Last week, Lady Elaine Murphy of the British House of Lords chided me in an e-mail, saying that I had "completely missed the point" about the English smoking ban in talking to her about the science. She wrote that "the aim is to reduce the public acceptability of smoking and the culture which surrounds it." Now, that's quite different than the public posturings about "saving the health of the workers" and the images of oppressed teenaged waitresses being slaughtered by deadly toxins as they work their way through school. And, it's quite different than the cheap shows of pleading children in front of City Council's TV cameras.

The smoking ban is based on lies, even if they are lies that are often truly believed by those supporting it. (Emphasis added.)

But there's more to this than the use of bogus scientific pronouncements to advance activism. Lady Elaine (more on her here) was at least honest enough to acknowledge the existence of primary purpose beyond that of getting legislation passed -- and that is the deliberate induction of shame. Just as citizens should feel ashamed by the presence of aluminum cans in their trash, so should they be ashamed if they smoke.

Why, it's almost as evil as missing the Sunday service once was!

While the anti-smoking shame game is a classic example, Lady Elaine reminded me that statistics are just an activist game and it really shouldn't matter in the least whether they are accurate. They could be made up entirely, as I suspect they are in the "dog overpopulation" meme. Statistics are used as a tool in advancing an agenda of transforming the way we think about a subject, but they do not go to the merits. They only appear to go to the merits. They provide a rationale, and it really doesn't matter whether they are true so much as whether shame is fueled.

The more I thought about this mechanism, the more I came to realize that just as the truthfulness (or even existence) of statistics is largely irrelevant, the practicality (and enforceability) of activist-based legislation is irrelevant. The most important, overreaching issue is to change the way people think. Humans have a vast and innate capacity for guilt and shame, and I think that accounts for how these ideas move so rapidly from insanity to reality.

A law forbidding smoking might be just as unenforceable and impractical as a law forbidding unneutered dogs, but arguing over those things (the way libertarians often do) misses the larger point: these laws make the violators ashamed of themselves. That's the whole idea.

I'm afraid the only way to combat this is with civil disobedience. Smoke!

Or just pretend to smoke!

Counter shame with shame. It's the only language the enemy understands.

What worries me is that some might call this "activism" -- and I loathe activists. I think there's a difference, though, between using government force to tell people what to do and defending your own inherent right to be free from having the government use force upon you.

I have absolutely no problem with people doing what they think is right and advocating for what they believe. If people think it is a good idea to encourage spaying or neutering, or discourage smoking, they are free to do so. But a line is crossed when they use the power of the state. I am not forcing them to conform with my views, and I only ask the same in return. But when they go further, and would imprison me for not doing what they want, that goes too far.

If the goal is to make me feel ashamed, then I must not.

Smokers should be as proud to smoke as I am of owning an intact dog!

Beyond that, I think people should be very suspicious of attempts to change the way we think by the utilization of guilt and shame.

Whether Philadelphians should take pride in their trash is another matter. But is scolding people for their alleged bureaucratic shortcomings really the answer?

I mean, doesn't scolding hurt people's self esteem?

MORE: Ann Althouse has a shame classic -- hitting up a friend for money in order to give to a spare changer the friend just bypassed.

AND MORE: Commenter Mary in LA links to a thing called the Great American Smokeout, which involves smokers giving up smoking.

Hmmm...

Holding a "smoke-in" is the obvious counterpart.

But it occurs to me that there are a lot of people who are giving up eating who aren't really hurting that much. Anyone can quit eating for a day. And these people are the brown-rice-eating, organic types who are used to starving anyway, for reasons of "health." Considering the lack of real suffering that this faux "fasting" entails, why not really do something that really demonstrates suffering?

They talk about "putting their lives on the line," right?

Why not simply take up smoking in protest? It's slow, there's plenty of time to proclaim martyrdom, and even the newbies who don't want to go all the way could participate in the occasional "smoke-in."

If they hate smoking, why, that makes their suffering all the more real!