COINS ARE EVIL and they must be stopped

I was thinking about change tonight, coinage, and I decided that it's just become a device for tricking people into spending more money than they mean to. Because decades ago, coins were actually viable denominations, rather than a nuisance. You could actually buy things with a nickel or a dime, like a meal or a book or something. Now coinage has just become a mechanism for forcing people to do fractions in their head, which most people don't do very well, and for chiseling fractional amounts of money off of consumers. At least that's my impression of it.

(no subject)

Now that this is over, I'll give my opinion of it.

I think the prosecution's problem was that they just didn't have a case against Michael Jackson. The charges where he was supposed to have abducted Gavin Arvizo and his brother and mother were demonstrably false; they had numerous opportunities to ditch Jackson, if that's what they wanted to do, or to go to the police. Their behavior indicated that this was the furthest thing from their minds.

As for the charges of molestation, neither side could prove or disprove anything. It all came down to he said, she said... the prosecution didn't have any video or photos or anything concrete, and the defense obviously couldn't prove a negative. So it's just a lot of people saying Jackson did it, or Jackson didn't do it. It becomes an article of religious faith.

Which is why I was surprised by the verdict. I was sure he'd be found guilty of molestation, because if everything else was equal, I imagined people would just assume the worst about him. True or not, this child molester thing has been drilled into people's heads for years, and he's a weirdo, so he must be guilty. It's not like the OJ case, either, where the defendant was found not guilty as a rebuke to a police department which was out of control in its persecution of minorities. Jackson's not black anymore, he's from outer space.* So yeah, I figured they'd take him down.

I'll admit that I would like to believe Michael Jackson is innocent, and that this is merely an act of religious faith, as stated above. I don't know whether or not he did what he's accused of. But I do know that this family set him up. They are so dirty. I'd even believe that the mother went into this with the idea that her kids could get molested and that she could profit from it... that's child endangerment.


* For example.