House, M.D. on the religious

This is a quote from House M.D. season 4, episode 2 titled “The Right Stuff”.

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Feel free to copy.

When an immigrant falls from the balcony

I translated the following article for Devious Diva.  It appeared on her blog as “Injustice“.  I am reproducing the text (after some editing by her) below.

From the newspaper Avgi published on the 11th of November

When an immigrant falls from the balcony

The employer of a hired worker pushed her off the second floor of her house according to the Greek chapter of the World March of Women and the Athens Feminist Center.

The 22 year old Ethiopian was taken half-dead to the Gennimatas hospital where she has been bedridden ever since. According to the report, the police has accepted the employer’s version of the story, namely that the girl fell from the second floor in order to escape her job and the deportation order against her. The girl was guarded by two police officers inside the hospital while she is still confined to bed.

The reporting parties stress that the husband of the employer is an officer of the Lebanon-based Consolidated Contractors International Company and that the company supported the aforementioned story.

The girl was working for 100 dollars per month which was not being given to her, while her travel documents had been illegally withheld from her. The report speaks of crime concealment.

The reporting parties demand that the girl not be removed from the hospital before her health is restored, that her deportation be canceled, that the employers responsible for pushing her off the balcony be punished and that she is financially compensated.

The weekly publication «Εποχή» mentioned the story, enriching it with more information:

The migrant who had been hired from Dubai as a nanny for the children of her employers, is hospitalised in poor condition in Gennimatas hospital and is guarded by police. Her name is Ali Zahira Mohamed. The company which employed the husband of the perpetrator has returned her passport which he had been holding illegally. The police, rather than protect the victim, have sided with the Palestinian perpetrators who, due to negligence, have managed to leave the country. The girl lives today thanks to the care of the Ethiopian community in Athens and Greek women.

Meanwhile a question to the Ministers of Interior and Health was tabled by SYRIZA M.P. Anna Filini. The MP notes the contradictions of the police who claim that she was arrested on the 15th of October (she was already hospitalised). They also allege that she had entered the country illegally (she had a valid visa) and say that she did not object to being deported (she is bedridden).

Anyone interested in communicating can contact Sonia Mitralia (sonia.mitralia@gmail.com) of World March of Women and Sisy Vovou (svovou@otenet.gr) of Feminist Center of Athens.

Happy 6012th anniversary of the creation of the universe!

Today we are celebrating the 6012th anniversary since God Almighty created the Universe.  According to James Ussher, (1581-1656), archbishop of Armagh (and of Ireland), the Universe was created on the 22nd of October of 4004 BC, at 6 o’clock in the evening.

The archbishop did not specify whether this was Jerusalem time or Greenwich time.

(And I guess it would not have made much sense to specify such a thing, because it would have involved such heretic notions as that of a spherical Earth revolving around its axis.)

In any case, there is one way, dictated by milenia of tradition, in which devout Christians can resolve the dispute of the precise timezone of the moment of Creation: they can divide themselves in several sects over the matter and wage war against each other.

As usual, whoever wins, was right.

Amen, Hallelujah!

One of the nicest TEDtalks I’ve seen

Benjamin Zander: Classical music with shining eyes

Visiting Crete any time soon?

You might want to know that the Archaeological Museum of Heraklion, Crete (one of the largest in Greece) is closed for renovation.

You might also want to know that it will remain closed until 2010.

You might even be interested to know that the Greek government is trying to avoid advertising this fact very much, so as not to “discourage” tourists from visiting Crete during the next couple of years.

So, if you are into visiting museums, think twice about going to Crete until 2011.

Oh, and just to be on the safe side, make it until 2012, because, you know how things go in Greece: sometimes we say some work will take 2 years, but it might end up taking 3, and since the Government does not want to talk much about it, you can never know for sure what’s going on, right?

My source of information (in Greek): Το μουσείο του Ηρακλείου και το κράτος-κακοποιός…

WordPress feature request: Hall of Shame

On Thu, Jun 05, 2008, 0:11 Greece time I sent the following message to WordPress support:

Subject: Feature request: Hall of Shame

As I am sure you know very well, one very serious issue with blogging is censorship. As a blogger, I sometimes receive a comment which really needs to go, but I hate to engage in censorship. One solution that I have found to this problem is to create a special page called “Hall of Shame” (actually, there is no such concept in Greek, so I call it with the Greek equivalent of “spittoon”,) and to move offending comments there. When I do this, I replace the text of the original comment with the text “this comment has been moved to the Hall of Shame”, and I provide a link to it there. The problem is, it takes many clicks and copying and pasting to achieve this. Therefore, one very good feature which you could add to WordPress, and which would have a positive overall effect on the phenomenon of censorship in blogging in general, is to provide us with the ability to move a comment to the Hall of Shame with just a single click. Please note that this is a bit more complicated than just providing us with the option of moving a comment to a different post / page, since the original comment needs (optionally) to be replaced with a “this comment has been moved to such and such” message.

Thanks a lot,
Diagoras of Melos.

Minutes later, I received the following confirmation:

[WordPress #NCF-946625]: [comments]

[diagoras.wordpress.com] Feature request: Hall of Shame

Hi,

Thanks for your suggestion. I have added this to our user suggestion list which is reviewed on a regular basis.

Cheers,
Marianne

Let’s keep our fingers crossed…

Homer Simpson answers Pascal’s Wager

Suppose we’ve chosen the wrong god. Every time we go to church we’re just making him madder and madder! –Homer Simpson

.
“And what does that have to do with Pascal?” You may ask. Read on…

The famous French mathematician, physicist and philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) expressed the opinion, which was to be known as “Pascal’s Wager”, that the question of whether god exists cannot be answered logically, so we can only see it as a bet, but in this bet, belief in god is a much better choice than non-belief. Pascal’s statement can be very easily explained by the following table, which shows the available

Expelled

I am going to follow toomanytribbles’ example and do my duty…

expelled
expelled, the movie
ben stein
intelligent design

Book: Sam Harris – Letter to a Christian Nation

Hardcover

Audiobook

Sam Harris awesome as usual. Luckily, this time the publisher of the audiobook chose a narrator whose voice is intelligent and intellectual, yet youthful, and actually sounds like Sam Harris’ own voice, unlike

Book: Sam Harris – The End of Faith

Audio CD

Hardcover

Paperback

Although this is indeed a very good book, I was very disappointed by the fact that the audio version was narrated by some mr. Brian Emerson who made the whole masterpiece sound like a nine hour long commercial for vacuum-cleaners. Seriously, there could be no greater disparity between