Gold closed at 554.20 dollars an ounce on Friday, down 3.2% from $571.90 the week before. The dollar closed at 0.8401 euros, up 1.0% from 0.8317 at the end of the previous week. The euro, then, closed at 1.1904 dollars compared to 1.2024 the Friday before. Gold in euros would be 465.56 euros an ounce down 2.2% from 475.63 the week before. Oil closed at 61.84 dollars a barrel, down 5.7% from $65.37 at the close of the previous Friday. Oil in euros would be 51.95 euros a barrel, down 4.7% from 54.37 for the week. The gold/oil ratio closed at 8.96, up 2.4% from 8.75 at the end of the previous week. In the U.S. stock market, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 10,919.05, up 1.2% from 10,793.62 the week before. The NASDAQ closed at 2,261.88, virtually unchanged from 2,262.58 at the end of the previous week. The yield on the ten-year U.S. Treasury note closed at 4.58%, up five basis points from 4.53 the week before.

With gold down substantially, oil down even more and the dollar up a bit against the euro, it looks like a good week for the imperial economy.

Iran dismissed as "tough words" the United States' refusal to rule out using military force against the Islamic republic over its controversial nuclear programme.

"We are not afraid of attacks by the United States or by other countries on Iran's nuclear installations because we have nothing to hide, we have no installations to produce nuclear weapons," Iranian Vice President Esfandyar Rahim Mashaee said here after meeting with his Indonesian counterpart.

US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said this week Washington would not rule out using military force against Iran to prevent it from obtaining nuclear weapons.

Iran is not Iraq, and the year 2006 is not the same as year 2003 for George Bush; but one cannot stop wondering about the uncanny similarities between Iraq at the verge of war, and the present state of affairs in Iran.

But Then It Was Too Late

"What no one seemed to notice," said a colleague of mine, a philologist, "was the ever widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with, here in Germany. And it became always wider. You know, it doesn't make people close to their government to be told that this is a people's government, a true democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defense, or even to vote. All this has little, really nothing, to do with knowing one is governing.

"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

In the past, the lies that have come out of the White House have at least been potentially almost kind of a little bit true. Now we've reached a new low.

Today our President told the country that his illegal wiretapping allowed the US government to foil a terrorist plot four years ago to hijack an airplane using shoe-bombs and fly it into the US Bank Tower in Los Angeles.

Bullshit.

Does this man have any credibility? Only with those who think that Osama and Saddam are one and the same and, of course, the people who still believe that Iraq attacked us on September 11, 2001. Yes, that's the answer. Oh, and the scared.

Actually, I don't buy this foiled plot Bush announced today--that al Qaeda planned to fly a plane into the Library Tower. And one of the many reasons is because he had to read it to us. If there were any truth to his success at preventing a disaster, he would have been capable of telling it.

When I speak against this war and the lies of the Bush Administration that took us to Iraq where my nephew died, I don't have to look down at a piece of paper, look up, stumble, and, then, look down again. This boob didn't even give us the correct name of the tower. He called it the "Liberty Tower." If the plot were true, he'd sure as hell know what tower because it would have been discussed in the inner sanctum of the White House over and over. But George knows he's in trouble. His polls are down and he's using the same tired trick, this time with a little twist of creativity. One of his handlers should've told him to memorize it though. I guess Karl wasn't there to help plan this tactic and then stamp it with his seal of approval

Please, America, wake up. Bush is the boogeyman.

Magus, a friend of Signs of the Times and former 60s activist in the United States, looks back finds some answers to questions that have been haunting him for three decades.

Greetings from the Swamps of Eugnosia, Forum Friends and Passengers,The old Magus, being of a more formal time than this era we now traverse, simply cannot countenance warping the standards of his tastes so as to pronounce upon the Good Lady's journal such an unkind name as is "blog" (which resonates upon the tongue as though 'twere describing some misbegotten amphibious creature born in a bog on a log); to describe the Signs writ large and the one who writes them there, when both be filled with Graces and Fair indeed for the readers' eyes to behold, indulge me as I quote her sage advice. Taken from Maestra Laura's Missive, "How To Spot COINTELPRO Agents":

"How To Spot a Spy"

One way to neutralize a potential activist is to get them to be in a group that does all the wrong things. Why?

1) The message doesn't get out.

2) A lot of time is wasted

3) The activist is frustrated and discouraged

4) Nothing good is accomplished. FBI and Police Informers and Infiltrators will infest any group and they have phony activist organizations established.

BEIJING - Yahoo Inc. provided evidence to Chinese authorities that led to the imprisonment of an Internet writer, lawyers and activists said on Thursday, the second such case involving the U.S. Internet giant.

The latest storm over Western Internet companies in China comes just weeks after Web search giant Google Inc. came under fire for saying it would block politically sensitive terms on its new China site, bowing to conditions set by Beijing.

It's a crazy, polarized world. On the one hand, we have former GCN radio show host Daryl Bradford Smith declaring fellow radio talk show host and website proprietor Jeff Rense a Zionist stooge, and on the other hand we have a reactionary Horowitzite and Israeli settler Steve Plaut, calling him a "Holocaust Denier, a Neo-Nazi, and a UFO nut."It seems to be open season on poor Jeff Rense, as the creation of a "watch" blog slapped up in the templated blogger zone by a hereto unknown Nova Scotian indicates (it is originally called The Rense Watch). Rense is not a neo-Nazi, a Holocaust Denier—in the current Straussian dominated political climate, just about anybody who takes Israel to task is considered a Holocaust Denier—or is he a Zionist stooge, as Smith would have it. Neither Plaut nor Smith can satisfactorily demonstrate their claims.

Since Steve Plaut's career consists primarily of character assassination and slander—a fallback position for Straussian neocon “conservative” (not) and Jabotinsky Likudite apologists who are allergic to making reasoned arguments, because they really don't have any—his take on Rense is ho-hum predictable (he does not bother to explain exactly why Rense is a neo-Nazi, but then Straussian neocon wannabes and Jabotinsky fanatics never explain themselves), while Smith's take is seriously paranoid (as of late Smith has expended a lot of energy casting numerous folks in the deflated “patriot movement” as "crypto-Jews," whatever that means—as a matter of a fact, and Plaut would likely have a laugh at this one, Smith considers your humble blogger a "crypto-Jew" because on occasion Rense posts my blog entries on his “Holocaust Denier” website).

BEIJING, Feb. 7 (Xinhuanet) -- China has expressed firm opposition to a U.S. defence review to play up the "China military threat."

Foreign Ministry spokesman Kong Quan told a press conference on Tuesday that China has lodged serious representation with the U.S. side on the China-related content in the Quadrennial Defence Review (QDR).

The QDR, issued by the U.S. Department of Defence on Feb. 3, irrationally criticized China's normal defence construction. The move "interfered in China's internal affairs" and could "mislead public opinion," Kong said.