I have to agree with Conrad: “Hong Kong will take your breath away” is indeed the worst-timed ad campaign ever. Haven’t these guys heard of SARS?

Update: Conrad’s sympathy scale of deaths in Iraq is pretty funny too. I’ll have to add him to my blogroll… after Terry, of course.

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How on earth did Ricky Smith get voted off American Idol last night? Carmen was truly “ghastly” — and she wasn’t even in the bottom three! Did every single Mormon vote for her? Sheesh. I’m disgusted. (I didn’t find out about the results until today, as the show ran over the half hour recorded by TiVo. I bet the judges were surprised.)

Okay, back to more important matters, like, um, the war.

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I never read the original Dickens, but I really liked this Tale of Two Cities. It has cool picures and stuff too.

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Plagiarizing in school papers is stupid. Plagiarizing in newspaper articles is really stupid. Plagiarizing in blog entries is sheer idiocy. But that’s just what Sean-Paul Kelley of The Agonist did with material from the for-fee intelligence service Stratfor. The details are in this Wired News article.

I’m honestly shocked by the number of people defending him on the message board. I don’t think that Kelley’s sin is unpardonable, but passing off the work of others as your own is a serious breach of integrity for any writer. And unfortunately, Kelley doesn’t seem to be taking the issue very seriously himself.

In recent days, I had been checking The Agonist more frequently for war updates, but I think I’ll stick to The Command Post from now on.

Blech.

Update 1: I e-mailed Sean-Paul a note about the above post. In response, he pointed me to this post written a week before (in his words) “the press decided to have a field day with me.” However, lack of time and equipment is hardly a justification for plagiarism. In any case, would “Via Stratfor” (even without a link) really have been so difficult to type in before copying and pasting?

Blech again.

Update 2: I just send this note to Glenn Reynolds, which I thought worth reposting here, even though it repeats some of the above:

Is it just me, or does Sean-Paul Kelley seem to be digging himself into hole? He seems to think that a long-buried blog post saying that he does sometimes copy-and-paste (without notice or attribution) was warning enough to his readers. He argues that his time constraints and the difficulty of posting from a PDA justifies plagiarism. (Hmmm… let me try that line with my philosophy professors sometime… not!) Worst of all perhaps, in response to my post on the subject, he claimed in an e-mail that that the “press decided to have a field day” with him, as if he did nothing wrong in liberally reposting from a for-fee news service without citation.

I think that unless Kelley mea culpas, this story is going to turn into a big hairy beast for him. But a mea culpa seems unlikely, as he just doesn’t seem to understand that passing off the writing of others as your own is wrong, wrong, wrong. And that’s a real shame.

Update 3: Sean-Paul has finally really apologized. I’m very glad.

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According to this Fox News report, Saddam’s regime uses “a combination of fixed sites and mobile vans in attempts to keep television signals intact.” That explains why we haven’t been able to keep the propaganda off the air for any significant stretch of time.

So Saddam seems to have spent far more time ensuring the continual flow of propaganda than preparing his military for battle. On the surface, such a strategy seems completely idiotic. We are, after all, in a battle of bullets — not of imagery. Then again, the Iraqi military never had a chance against our superior firepower. Keeping people in fear of Saddam’s continued rule, however, has proven to be an obstacle in the war, albeit a temporary and minor one. And of course, such fear is only sustained with a steady diet of propaganda from Iraqi television.

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