Behold the problem of others: as population increases arithmetically, the ratio of self to others worsens geometrically. The ideal ratio is 1 to 3: one other, plus a second person to help you overrule the first. The problem of others is not that, in the 21st century, the ratio has gotten as bad as 1 to 7 billion. It’s that none of the other seven billion people benefits from it, either, since each perceives the ratio of others to self as 7 billion to one. The problem of others is everywhere. For example, it’s at Disneyland with the measles. Today is Friday, and 350,000 new people will be born by the time you get out of work. Won’t you confront the problem with me?

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The Mayor’s Downtown Advisory Committee has a new plan for addressing the unusually large homeless population in Missoula, and it’s for businesses to voluntarily stop selling cheap liquor downtown. Obviously, they don’t mean Al’s & Vic’s. They mean stores like Worden’s that sell tall boy cans of malt liquor and plastic vodka pints. That’s the kind of drinking you want to discourage, while still preserving a downtown where approximately one third of the successful businesses are bars. Over at the Independent, I worry that the city might inadvertently crack down on the good kind of drinking in its effort to sober up and/or drive away the bums. As usual, I get a little confused about the line between good and bad. Check it out, won’t you? We’ll be back tomorrow with Friday links.

Diligent readers of Combat! blog such as my mother will notice that there have been no Friday links today, and it’s darn near 3pm Mountain. That’s because I’ve spent the day volunteering at Project Homeless Connect, an annual event that helps homeless Montanans get access to various social services. It also forces them to experience my own eerie approach to personal interaction, but fortunately they are used to hardship already. There is no Combat! blog today, because I actually helped somebody for once instead of just talking about how other people should do that. Don’t worry—we’ll be back to sanctimonious inaction Monday. In the meantime, how about you listen to Gary Numan? That’ll give you something to explore for the weekend.

Between the political practices indictment and filing for the wrong district so he could switch and run unopposed, I’m starting to think Art Wittich is devious. Last week, the Republican from Belgrade chaired a meeting of the House Human Services Committee that heard testimony form three state aid workers. In this context, “testimony” means stories about welfare moms driving Hummers. After the committee had heard a series of what seemed to be office anecdotes, Ellie Hill (D-Missoula) asked if the witnesses reported any of these obvious abuses to fraud control. They had not. Could they connected these stories to any names or case numbers? They could not.

Here Wittich took proceedings in hand again, asking the witnesses not to offer names or numbers “in case there’s a prosecution.” Thus were facts formally banished from the meeting and rumors designated their proxy. This week in the Independent, I suggest that Wittich might lead us away from our base ignorance rather than toward it. There is plenty of actual data about welfare available, much of it indicating that underpayments are more common than overpayments. Maybe that’s because a woman whose job is to hand out benefits thinks what her coworker said about somebody’s husband is admissible evidence. Maybe it’s because the man appointed to chair the House Human Services Committee opposes all services and most humans. Maybe most poor people are, in fact, poor.