On first reading, this is all about the disillusionment of the idealist at the intransigent, corrupt, ineffectual nature of party politics, Irish style. The brilliant broadcaster, with his MSc from the London School of Economics, was not willing to put up with the incompetence of his party leader and the bovine attitudes of his party colleagues, so he threw in the towel. Life's short, after all.

But there's another reading of this story. According to Rainy Day's impeccable sources on the ground in the Dublin South constituency, George Lee has seen enough of parliamentary politics in his brief eight months to realize that the current revulsion at the Irish political system is about to present him with a golden opportunity. The time for a new dawn in the shape of an Irish Liberal Democratic party is at hand and George is the man to form it and lead it. The major parties will get a hammering at the next election and George's new group, powered by middle class hope and fear, will then be able to call the coalition shots. Instead of being fobbed off with a ministry in a future Fine Gael-led government, George Lee will be Tánaiste (deputy prime minister) instead. Just like that. The power behind the throne.

He's a sharp one, George Lee. Just wait and see.

"In March 1500 the Marconi, good and worthy citizens, failed, and the creditors of the Garzoni were called publicly to assemble at the church of S. Zuan di Rialto to elect a committee of inspection; in April the creditors of the Lippomani met in the same sacred edifice and agreed to accept a promise to pay in instalments. Merchants' promises are easier made than kept, and the defaulting Lippomani were subsequently laid in jail. They were influential citizens, and their imprisonment was made less irksome by many favours, it being rumoured that the Avogadori told the Captain of the Watch that even if their wives and children came twenty times a day they must be allowed to enter. It soon became customary to open the door when their dinners were sent, and on September 8, 1501, three stout fellows came with the meal, which included hot tart, and the door being opened to him who carried the tart, Hieronimo Lippomani rushed forth, flung a coat over the warder's head, and, putting a knife to his throat, secured the keys. Setting free his brothers, Sier Bartolo and Sier Vettor, all three escaped in their jackets and bareheaded into three armed boats, and took refuge at the monastery of Sta. Elena. Thence they mocked at their creditors, who, after much negotiation, to the number of 600, held a stormy meeting at S. Zuan di Rialto on March 21, 1502, to consider a further offer to pay in two years. Angry declamation ensued, and moving recitals were made of the misery consequent on the bankruptcy of the house: many creditors had died of malinconia; maidens whose dowries had been lost, being unable to marry, had fallen to the streets; hospitals languished for their invested funds; houses had been sold up to meet the demands of the tax gatherers."

But how many creditors will die of malinconia, how many maidens, their dowries lost, will fall to the streets, how many houses will be sold up to meet the demands of the tax gatherers before the cent, as it were, drops — right through the floor?

Jeff Jarvis. "The theme of this year's World Economic Forum meeting at Davos was 'rethink, redesign, rebuild.' When a friend recited that list for me, I responded that given the institutions there, the more appropriate slogan is 'replace.'" Swiss Smugfest.

Warren Beatty. "He was insatiable," Collins has said. "Three, four, five times a day, every day, was not unusual for him. I felt like an oyster in a slot machine." Aphrodisiacs.

Gideon Rachman. "What if a country's infrastructure could be destroyed as effectively by a cyber-attack, as by an invasion of tanks? How do you defend against that? How do you identify the culprits?" Cyber-security.

Dr R.K Pachauri. "The Indian government has established its own body to monitor the effects of global warming because it 'cannot rely' on the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the group headed by its own leading scientist Dr R.K Pachauri." Glaciology.

Joan Collins. Sleep is now, officially, a feminist issue.

John Terry. "I thought that fornicating with underwear models was precisely what professional footballers at that level do as a matter of routine — indeed, almost as a contractual obligation." Premier league.

Supported by Paul Auster, Ian Buruma, Don DeLillo, Siri Hustvedt, Jonathan Lethem, Philip Roth and Salman Rushdie, the president of PEN American Center, Kwame Anthony Appiah, has nominated Liu Xiaobo for the Nobel Peace Prize stating that:

"Liu's writings express the aspirations of a growing number of China's citizens; the ideas he has articulated in his allegedly subversive writings, ideas that are commonplace in free societies around the world, are shared by a significant cross section of Chinese society. Charter 08, for example, is a testament to an expanding movement for peaceful political reform in China. This document, which Liu co-authored, is a remarkable attempt both to engage China's leadership and to speak to the Chinese public about where China is and needs to go. It is novel in its breadth and in its list of signers — not only dissidents and human rights lawyers, but also prominent political scientists, economists, writers, artists, grassroots activists, farmers, and even government officials."

Meanwhile, Reuters reports that the belligerent Chinese leadership has warned the Nobel Committee not to award Liu the prize. In the New York Review of Books blog, Perry Link, who has been providing outstanding coverage of the case, says that while Liu Xiaobo has appealed his sentence, the chances of the verdict being overturned are non-existent.

Addendum: The disappearance of the human rights lawyer, Gao Zhisheng adds to the frightening news out of China. Please support the campaign to save him before it's too late.

We've been here before, of course. In his 24-page "Letter to the citizens of Dublin", Henry Grattan wrote that to "save the country" it was "absolutely necessary to reform the state." The "continuation of the old system" would lead to Ireland's ruin because the people had lost confidence in the Irish parliament he said. That was... 1797!

And guess what happened? The following year, a bloody revolution took place and its outcome was the 1801 Act of Union. Ireland lost its legislative independence and would have to wait another 120 years before it had a parliament it could call its own again. All at the cost of savage bloodletting, naturally. And now? It's time to re-read Grattan:

"Make your people honest, says the court; make your court honest, say the people. It is the higher classes that introduce corruption; thieving may be learned from poverty, but corruption is learned from riches. It is a venal court that makes a venal country; that vice descends from above; the peasant does not go to the castle for the bribe, but the castle candidate goes to the peasant; and the castle candidate offers the bribe to the peasant, because he expects in a much greater bribe to be repaid by the minister. Thus things go on; it is impossible they can last..."

Dublin Castle is still standing and it'll make a fine HQ for the shock troops of the ECB as they begin their 120-year rule. There will be no shortage of castle candidates, either, and they'll be well versed in bribery, too. But maybe Leviathan can save Ireland from such a terrible fate.

In 1995, Werner Herzog dedicated a documentary to Carlo Gesualdo. "Death for Five Voices" is as puzzling as its subject. The Herzogian narration is priceless.

Yesterday, things took an even unfunnier turn for the Iberian disciple of Marx & Co. when it was revealed that Spain's unemployment rate hit 18 percent. If the truth be told, it's actually 20 percent, and the budget deficit is 11.4 percent of gross domestic product, to boot. So much for the wonders of central planning! Spain's growth model — residential construction driven by a house price boom — is now as defunct as Cuba's.

But there was even worse news yesterday for the comrades. The White House said that US President Barack Obama would not be attending the EU-US summit planned for Madrid in May. Convinced, somehow, that Obama is a fellow socialist, Zapatero had been hoping for some kind of fraternal display in May, which would help shore up his discredited government. And, after having been shut out in the cold by George W. Bush after Spain pulled its troops out of Iraq in April 2004 and stabbed the US in the back, Zapatero was anticipating a public hug that would somehow vindicate his betrayal.

But it gets better, or worse. The loyal El País noted that the Madrid summit scrapping would "cast a shadow" over Zapatero's visit to Washington tomorrow, when he is due to attend the National Prayer Breakfast, a meeting traditionally attended by the sitting American president. Given that Zapatero is a doggedly secular politician constantly battling the Catholic Church, trusty old El País calls it "shocking" for him to turn up at an evangelical Christian event, apparently in the hopes of securing a "chat" on the side with Obama (he is not even being granted a formal meeting). ¡Ay, caramba!

What's the betting Mr Bean won't turn up instead?

2. On 1 February, the Irish Independent says that RTE reporter Charlie Bird is to return to Ireland less than two years into an expected four-year stint as Washington correspondent in the US.

Factoid: Richard Nixon was US president in 1971.

Note: Writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education at the time of the beginning of the Iraq War, Robert J. Lieber noted a daft leftist theory that painted the neoconservative movement as a conspiracy and "a product of the influential Jewish-American faction of the Trotskyist movement of the '30s and '40s." Lieber also mentioned Nixon in his article.

Wonder if Charlie Bird ever got around to digging in the Nixonian dirt of the early 1970s when he was in Washington? Fertile ground, one would imagine. He would have been far less lonely, too, if he had sought out the company of the DC resident George Galloway once dubbed "a drink-sodden ex-Trotskyist popinjay and a useful idiot". Yes, Christopher Hitchens!

Anyway, now that Charlie if flying home, Irish intellectuals in need of a regular dose of moral indignation will have to get by on what Eoghan Harris calls "the sour anti-Americanism" of Lara Marlowe.

"The moment I set foot on American soil, a sombre customs agent singles me out from the line, tells me to drag my suitcase to a table in the corner, and orders, 'Open up!' The first item under scrutiny is a canvas pouch the size of a shoe-box. The inspector pulls out decks of playing cards — some blank, some made up of fifty-two tens of clubs — fake fingers, double-headed coins, make-believe burning cigarettes with glowing ashes at the tip. Exhausted by a sleepless flight, not in the mood to play the magician, I wait for the old man's question.

No question.

Instead, the officer grabs an ordinary deck and spreads it into an impeccable fan, which he thrusts at my chest, barking, 'Take a card, any card!' An amateur illusionist welcomes a fellow-criminal to the shores of his future crime. Joyful omen! A line of passengers has formed behind me, waiting to be searched. Absorbed by his routine, the prestidigitator merely shrugs and, hardly looking up from the silver dollar he is about to vanish, shouts, 'Hey, Jack, take these people will ya? Don't you see I'm busy here!'"

Philippe Petit, To Reach the Clouds.

"He had elegant manners and suits to match, and he wrote in longhand in the living room of an antiques-filled apartment on Park Avenue." The last of the gentlemen novelists, the chronicler of the Wasps, is gone: Louis Auchincloss, RIP.

It was the week of the iPad and they only person who really seemed to understand the implications wrote that it is "Apple's way of asserting that they're taking over the penthouse suite as the strongest and best company in the whole ones-and-zeroes racket." John Gruber on The iPad Big Picture.

As we know, much of what the Main Stream Media present as "journalism" is, in fact, lies. Andrew Breitbart is doing a great job exposing the culprits with his Big Journalism blog and this was a classic week for Retracto.

Don't know if Al Gore will appreciate this, but Osama bin Laden has now got Gaia.

Talking of ideology and terror, the crazed Obama plan to try 9/11 organizer Khalid Sheik Mohammed in lower Manhattan was scrapped. So much for promises.

Ferran Adria takes a two-year break. Or maybe longer.

"I bid farewell to the state of old New York
My home away from home
In the state of New York I came of age
When first I started roaming
And the trees grow high in New York State
And they shine like gold in the autumn
Never had the blues from whence I came
But in New York State I got 'em"

Kate McGarrigle (1946—2010)

Nice of the BBC to throw in "martyr" and "Zionist" as well. The Hamas PR department will be pleased.

Except, of course, we've done it before. By one of those odd quirks of history, Prime Minister Gordon Brown, the host of this week's Afghanistan Conference in London, found himself in Belfast a few days ago attempting to soothe the pride of the province's (nominally) Catholic and Protestant tribes, who were threatening to scupper the deal that's kept them out of the killing business for more than a decade now. The agreement that led to "peace" in Northern Ireland involved massive transfers of money to the rival chieftains, who have been busy passing it along to their supporters. Bribery, in other words. The savagery that marked the Ulster conflict was very much like that which is now going on in the Hindu Kush, so maybe a similar cash-for-quiet deal might work over there.

The thinker, Edward de Bono, once suggested that the solution to the Middle East crisis could be found if the West (again) gave a huge amount of money to the rival parties, but we should "Deduct $50 million from the aid given to the Palestinians for each rocket fired into Israel. The same concept would be applied to Israel. Now you are no longer a hero to your people by firing a rocket, which in any case is symbolic, since you've just cost them a hospital or a school. You have to give them something to lose."

But what if Hamas decided to buy just one BIG rocket from, say, Iran with its share of our money? They wouldn't have to worry about deductions anymore if it did the business. And that's the trouble with bribing the Taliban. They don't think in terms of hospitals and schools, do they?
Photo: DFID — UK Department for International Development.