Nice one, Nikita – typical imbarazz in Joseph's skip
Chief Labour Elve Nikita at the August Moon Ball, taking a break from plagiarising Gillian Tett of The Financial Times
Blogger and Luxembourg lawyer Jacques Rene Zammit has caught Chief Labour Elve and Forum Zaghzagh Laburisti Mata Hari (except that Cyrus in gay, so I don’t know how that pans out) Nikita Zammit Alamango plagiarising, for her blog on timesofmalta.com, an entire article by Gillian Tett of The Financial Times.
As Lou Bondi put it on his own blog, when Nikita steals, she steals from the best.
X’inhuma ir-rioters ta’ Manchester?
When Jacques Rene uploaded his post about it, The Times immediately wiped her off their list of blogger-contributors and ‘disappeared’ her without an explanation.
Damn shame nobody bothered – me included – to read Nikita’s blog on The Times more often, because I’m sure we’d have caught her at it long before now.
Let’s put it this way, when you decide to take up robbery, you don’t start with a grand heist on the Central Bank. If Nikita the Chief Labour Elve had reached the point where she was so relaxed about ripping off Gillian Tett and The Financial Times, no less, then she must have been at it for quite a while.
Maybe The Times now sees what I mean when I wrote here some days ago that if it wanted a young leftie woman who votes Labour, to spice up its blogging mix, they could have done a lot better than Miss Zammit Alamango. What was it I wrote about women like Nikita doing a disservice to women in public life in general?
Dreadful.
When you’ve reached the point where you have to plagiarise, it means you can’t come up with your own ideas, form your own opinions, or put them into literate sentences.
It means you’re completely out of your depth.
The problems with Nikita Zammit Alamango, Chief Labour Elve and August Moon Ball Queen of Joseph Muscat’s Skip, go way, way deeper than mere stealing of other people’s work.
The real problems are the reasons why she stole other people’s work in the first place: that she is incapable of producing her own, because she can’t think and can’t write.
The inability to think and to formulate those thoughts for consumption by others render a person totally unfit for political life. The fact that the Maltese political scene is riddled with people just like this does not change the fact.
The political parties should be shedding the old racanc and not bringing in new racanc in their 20s to prolong the problem.
It shouldn’t have been difficult for somebody who reads Nikita’s blog regularly – and that includes the editor of the newspaper for which she produces it – to work out that something is greatly amiss when her usual writing style is the sort of sentence I quoted here a couple of days ago:
Last Saturday, crowds flocked Verdala in a very honorable aid of charity were all the proceedings go to the Community Chest Fund.
And then a couple of days later she’s suddenly writing like this:
On Monday, the ECB announced its intentions to purchase euro zone bonds in both Italy and Spain after both these countries declared new reforms and austerity measures with hope of boosting their economies respectively to demonstrate how serious they are to get on top of things.
Other than that – what’s next ?
After a temporary recovery illusion, we have to wait and see how this second phase of a double dip recession will develop. Will it truly follow 2008 into a full-scale financial meltdown? Will the state of the US economy improve soon to do dispel people’s fear that the US might go back into recession? And can the single currency, which is in dire straights, actually survive? (Obviously, the fragmentation of the Euro zone would make it much worse). Will major stock markets around the world (S&P500 and NASDAQ) continue to experience a downward trend while the Dollar (due to the news from Bank of Japan to “print” an extra 10 Trillion Yen) and gold continue to appreciate?
In all seriousness, I hope that a sultry summer will not result in an agitated autumn.
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I did post the FT link here for all to compare a full day before Jacques Rene Zammit wrote his article to out her.
And to think that I wrote to the FT to tell them that their correspondent Gillian Tett had plagiarised Nikita’s work. You got me in great trouble now.
Deny everything, Ciccio. If pressed, don a fake Zorro moustache and pretend to be Toni Abela from Standart and Poo.
Thanks, Baxxter. And if it comes to the worst, I will drink a toxic cocktail and that wil be the end of me.
The August Moon Ball is now more like a party for political wannabees (double e sounds just right).
Dik gralha bhal Joseph, tfixklet waqt il-ballu?
August Moon my Mediterranean arse! Bunch of provincial overdressed dagos hamming it up in front of each other. Wiener Opernball it ain’t.
OMG, not another centre-fold.
I fully agree with you in your outright condemnation of plagiarism. People who plagiarise are stealing other people’s work and show themselves to be incompetent.
There were allegations in the past of other people who plagiarised, including people from the PN. If I remember correctly, before the 2008 elections, a PN candidate from the Sliema district had plagiarised an article on sports for the Times. There were also allegations that a Nationalist MP plagiarised his university dissertation.
Those who are considering plagiarizing other people’s work should think twice before doing so, because nowadays it is easy for them to be discovered and exposed.
[Daphne – Let’s not forget the Super One reporter who cheated in his law exams.]
I give you this one. There is no excuse for plagiarism. It is bad, it can be avoided by a simple quote and even if they don’t catch you, it tells nothing good about the way you respect other people’s work.
But don’t get too excited. She has not killed anyone, there is no reason to believe she will rob the BoV or your tax money when Labour is in government.
Let’s not be naive. Your anger and fury is quite artificial and exagerated. Any journalist with some experience has inspired him or herself from other people’s work, has written similar things to others or has many times reproduced the same ideas over and over again (by the way, that’s a common definition for summer in many newsrooms-joking). There is nothing bad in that as long as you give due reference. So we’re not talking about being unable to produce intelectual work, but about recognition. She was just not smart enough to either quote or rephrase and summarise the main points that, by the way, are not a great discovery made by the FT but just another analysis of the sovereign debt crisis like many others you can read these days.
Now you can repeat and repeat and repeat nicknames for her or say that she is capable of killing grand-mothers in cold blood, specially if they vote PN. Or that she’s a disgrace for women. Or even for being blonde! But remember that there are categories (yes, they exist) and this stupid mistake is as common in your profession as innocuous. Specially, if it is written in a personal blog (she hasn’t been caught copying in exams or a doctoral thesis).
I hope you’re getting many cold drinks during summer, but remember that this year it’s not as hot as previous ones. Just don’t pretend that it is because everyone has a thermometer, even for mistakes ;)
[Daphne – Michael/Cyrus/Chris/Nikita, give yourself a break. Really.]
Powerful argument, no doubt. Is that it? ;) Keek guessing, dear.
Suzanne Muscat.
Michael, if you’re getting lots of cold drinks this summer, just make sure that they’re non-alcoholic. I hear that the effect they have on you makes you do funny things with the upper part of your clothing, much to the embarassment of those around you. Go easy.
“And can the single currency, which is in dire straights, actually survive?” Are “dire straights” distressed heterosexuals?
The culture of ‘want and get by any means’ is permeating everywhere. If the PL allow their disgraced starlet to go on as if nothing has happened then it will only get worse.
She would not know the difference between bonds and bondage, a hummus dip and a double dip or a chocolate crunch and a credit crunch.
Her only option was plagiarising. It was her forte.
I always thought that she was pretty good at it.
She certainly knows her food groups
In Maltese we say “waqghet ghal-so*mha.” Sorry for my French “R” there.
So in whose skip did Pippo Psaila end up?
[Daphne – Who cares? He’s not aiming to be personal assistant to the prime minister.]
I can’t wait to see Labour’s 2013 electoral manifesto. The first thing I intend to do is to check it word by word on the internet to see where it has been copied from. I will start from Castro’s most recent writings, and then, if I wouldn’t have matched down to the last word, I will try Mugabe’s.
No. New New Labour would copy it from Cameron’s manifesto. Or Obama’s (because English is the only language they – barely – understand).
Ciccio why don’t you start your own blog? I find your comments as amusing as Daphne’s.
Thank you, Ella, I am shy. I normally need someone to start up the conversation.
Actually Ciccio and H. P. Baxxter should join up and start their own blog. It would be a hit for sure.
Thank you, Miriam. But Daphne is doing a great job and I do not plan to compete with her.
Oh I tried to fill a niche in the market all right, but the market segment was too small.
If I had a blog on general stuff like Daphne’s, it’d just be redundant, since I share her views on practically everything.
Gillian Tett or Nikita Zammit Alamango:
“In all seriousness, I hope that a sultry summer will not result in an agitated autumn.”
You know what? I think it’s going to be an early winter – for Nikita.
For anybody interested – you can only get the cached site
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:xDXe2qBcGgcJ:www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20110810/blogs/global-markets-a-toxic-cocktail.379648+%22On+Monday,+the+ECB+announced+its+intentions+to+purchase+euro+zone+bonds%22+times&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&source=www.google.com
I can’t understand how a student living on a tight budget can afford to attend functions such as the August Moon Ball. She continuously boasts on FB about all the super-posh functions she attends. So hard to live under a PN goverment!
Nice one Ella! Daphne will tell you all about what youth could look forward to in the 70s/80s . . . Uni destroyed and ‘Korpi’ (note: I’m not talking Mars bars here, elves).
Tee hee
Dire STRAIGHTS? Why, are the others dire GAYS?