How to demoralise the police: This type of story justifies bringing back the death penalty where there is absolutely no doubt whatsoever of the guilt of the perpetrator. However, it wasn’t even classed as murder at the conviction and some suggest that Social Workers are to blame.

Hat tip- story originally seen on inspector Gadget, links from commentariat.

Image from the Mail (click petrol pump for story) and how much the tax has changed from Petrolprices.com.

Will there be civil disobedience again, or will it be rapidly suppressed?

(Hat tip- Burning our money.)

There I was in W H Smith, browsing through the computer books. There are a surprising number of books on a very broad range of IT topics. Perusing a number of familiar styed yellow spines, I did a double-take when I saw NLP for dummies. NLP? I hadn’t heard of any programming or scripting tool known as NLP, although there are hundreds of TLAs in the sector and there is a new one every month.

Pulling out the book revealed all- it was about Neuro-linguistic programming, a powerful (and controversial) set of techniques for getting people to agree with you (amongst other uses). Obviously, it was misfiled, someone seeing the word “programming” & thinking “geek”. (Have you noticed there is a dummies book for even the most obscure thing these days? Although the De-Nationalise down to nine Regions for Dummies doesn’t appear to be on general release yet).

NLP gets called many things, some of the more negative ones being manipulation towards pre-ordained consensus and even brainwashing in the case of cults. It is rather manipulative at the best of times and when used in the Sales sphere it is bordering on the fraudulent by somewhat transparent deception and totally fabricated false empathy. See the reviewers comments on this book and read between the lines to see what I mean. When they refer to the “unfair advantage”, who is losing out, the competition or the victim?

I imagine the half a glass of water illustration on the cover of the dummies book is a subtle reference to the technique of reframing.

(Both images from Amazon, who also seem to have the cheapest prices for the two tomes.)

I wondered yesterday what would happen if I tried to photocopy a £20 note.

The following happened:

• The machine scanned the front of the note
• It started to beep
• It displayed “Unable to copy this image”
• It spat out a sheet of paper with a dark blue rectangle the size of the print area
• It emailed EuroPol via the network connection, CC: Mervyn King
• Our firewall blocked the email due to Corporate policy
• We lost building power.

When the lights came back on again, I was able to photocopy the back of the note without any problem.

(OK, I made the last three bullet points up…)

So, what compulsion/coersion did Governments apply to ensure that photocopier manufacturers included EUrion banknote rejection software? Probably a very simple one- if you don’t do it you don’t get Public Sector Contracts. (& the public sector do an awful lot of photocopying).

The rules are here and an explanation of Eurion here. (It seems it is more complex than just the EUrion with Photoshop).

Conspiracy theorists would have you believe that the logo of this possibly shady training organisation appears on the new English £20 note, the one with Adam Smith on the back. Get one out and have a look to see if you can find it. (If you don’t have one, take your pick HERE).

Convinced? I’m not, the connections are way too tenuous and I can’t see any pyramids and all seeing eyes either. Banknotes certainly have concealed motifs but they are more to do with fraud prevention. For example, look for those circles on the left arranged in the pattern shown, this pattern will cause software to reject scanning in some cases. This pattern is very obvious on older £20 notes, they were arranged as musical notes, fitting in with the Elgar theme. I keep meaning to try photocopying a £20 note to see if the EURion Constellation feature will be detected and rebelled against by the machine. (An explanation of EURion can be found over at Wikipedia).

These tangential circle motifs are all too common and I’m sure my cousins had a Spirograph set as a kid that could produce something similar, especially if the pens were starting to run out. Spirographs- the last resort of wet Sunday afternoons or being Grounded! Not something you could do on an Etch-A-Sketch though, although you could scrape all of the powder off the window and see the innards if you were very, very bored…

What I did notice today, however, was reporting of the Queen’s Speech and a flurry of outspoken opinions in the blogosphere, none of which I have seen (so far) are complimentary about the Education and Skills Bill (apart from Mike Ion, of course). For non-Brits, this is compulsury education up until age 18, rather than 16 as of at present. As a ROSLA kid, I saw the detrimental effect it had on our school 5th year by the idiots, who, compelled to stay against their (& the school’s) better judgement just made it a misery for everyone else. No doubt a couple of them went back into further education afterwards but they probably wanted to by then.

Is there an EU connection in all this? I’m not certain. However, I don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist do recognise the signs of this,to confirm if you’re thinking what I’m thinking, look here .