Interesting Posts and Articles #155

1. At Daas Torah, two gedolim, one unnamed and one who is Rav Elyashiv, on an abused child vs. a suicidal parent. (Read it, and the comments, first.) I don't like the situation, and I don't like some of how it is being handled. But then I am not privy to all the details. On the one hand, not giving a hot meal every day, particularly if she is poor, is not neglect. But threatening suicide marks the parent as more unstable and thus more likely that she is really abusing. And if the child is abusing herself (with bitings), then she might still need to be removed from the parent for the sake of psychological intervention. If the threat of the mother's suicide is deemed real, they could temporarily commit her and keep her in a padded cell until she is deemed healthy enough. But I agree with Nachum Klafter's comment. And there is indeed something here that reeks of lo taamod al dam reiecha.
   
   
2. At Israel National News, the IDF developing a mouse, keyboard, and touch-screen which operate via grama.
   
   
3. Emes veEmunah on a news story (and video) on an old issue, mehadrin buses. But an American seminary girl there for a year imposing her values on another culture, even though her cultural values here are right? In the comment section, Miriam Shear reports on her recent experiences on the #2 bus. An excerpt:
   

   I picked up the #2 at Har Tzion. The bus was completely full except for 1 seat in the very back row. Boys - whom I later verified through one of them were all in Kita Vav (making them approximately 11 - 12 yrs old), were seated in the back row with the empty seat in the middle. I sat down. The boys - on each side of me - began screaming at me at the top of their lungs, waving their arms, putting fingers in my face that I could not sit there; that this was not tzniut; that I should "get out of here". And here's the terrifying part: They were kippa sruga from a yeshiva I actually had interviewed for my own son.

   but there is more.
   
   
4. Perhaps related, Lion of Zion discusses choosing a yeshiva which fosters good midot.
   
   
5. Life in Israel has an anonymous (though not to him) guest post on Chareidim, and molestation, in courts.
   
   
6. On the rationalist front, I have a post discussing rejecting evolution because of Darwinian attitudes, and whether those saying this have enough background in the subject to accurately describe those Darwinian attitudes. And at Rationalist Judaism, Rabbi Slifkin has part iii of the Sun's path at night, and whether when people use the term masorah they mean what they think they mean. And Hirhurim about a rationalist trend in Rashi, where Rashi says "I don't know" rather than the famous non-rational yet literal peshat.
   
   
7. The Jerusalem Post on leprosy as opposed to tzaraas.
   
   
8. Shirat Devorah beats me to the issue of limited rabbinic approbations for facilitated communication contrasted with what the autistics are presently doing, which is way over the line. A worthwhile read. Perhaps I'll post more on this topic in the next day or so.
   
   
9. Moshiach is Coming has a post noting an article on hand-washing to prevent swine flu and other disease, and how many teachers in Israel are somehow unaware of this. She takes this as a reason to promote netilas yadayim. However, the government guidelines are different from those of netilas yadayim, and include using soap. A while back, there was a shigella outbreak in Boro Park and Williamsburg in large part because people merely washed ritually rather than hygenically.
   
   
10. See my own blogging on facilitated communication, namely the first and second problem with FC, via the website of Galia, an autistic.