Now, before I get hacked again or just lose everything out of pure bad luck, I’m going to back up the whole damn site!

While I’m doing that, why don’t you let me know what your favorite contact management system is… and what you think is the most *secure*.

We all know there are plenty of problems with our education system overall. But when it comes to figuring out how to fix things, most of us just throw our hands up in the air. Truthfully, most of us would probably be hard pressed to identify specific problems other than the most obvious ones. Here’s a look at some of the problems and some interesting ideas to begin reform.

Earlier this year, Michael Vick returned to his career in football after a stint in prison for running a dog fighting ring. We see how negatively dog fighting affects the dogs, many of which die from involvement in fights. Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article for the New Yorker about how the damage to football players can resemble the damage to dogs that have been used in fights. He seems to draw the conclusion that football is as inhumane as dog fighting. I feel that there is a key difference between the two. Dogs don’t have the ability to consent to being beaten senseless in the name of “sport”. Football players, however, do. They have the ability to understand the dangers inherent in the game and to either consent to exposing themselves to those dangers or to quit before they do too much damage. I’m pretty sure dogs wouldn’t consent to these fights if they could somehow understand the dangers and make a choice, because a dog’s first and strongest instinct is to survive. That men consent to being battered by their beloved “sport” indicates to me that they either don’t have a strong survival instinct or they lack the intellect of a dog. But that’s another issue altogether.

We have plenty of reasons not to have children. There are medical conditions that we chance passing on to offspring. There’s the fact that we’re trying to end the cycle of abuse, and we can’t be certain of our ability to do that with children in our home. There’s the desire to give our potential children the best life that we can – stability, hard work, values, diverse interests, etc. There are the standard ideas that we can lessen the environmental impact of the world community by not contributing more Americans to it. There’s the fact that our siblings were born after we both entered double-digit ages, enabling us to experience firsthand the effort involved and the challenges faced in parenthood. There’s the recognition that so many children already exist in this world in abject poverty, parent-less, and disease-ridden. Those children need loving homes and guidance more than we need to continue our genetic makeup. And then there’s the fact that the medication I am on would definitely harm any fetus – and going through the process of pregnancy without my medication would be a harrowing experience at best.

With all these reasons not to have children (in addition to the others that I cannot recall at the moment), we see no need or reason to have children. From our perspective (on the outside, I understand) it seems that people have children for one of a very few reasons. These can be “wanting” them, accidental pregnancy, and meeting social expectations. I’m sure there are more, it’s just so hard to gauge people’s reasoning and even more difficult to ask them how they came to the conclusion that having children was the right choice. I can only imagine that from the parents’ perspective that question would seem as a direct challenge to their decisions.

Without wanting to challenge anyone one about their decisions to become parents, I am constantly seeking a reason to have children. And I don’t mean something like having someone to take care of us in our old-age or finding out what combining our genes would do. I’m seeking something concrete. For example, we just decided NOT to get a Blu-Ray player for a Christmas present this year. We used reason in coming to this decision. We looked at our DVD collection and assessed how often we actually watch the DVD’s that we own. We estimated how often we rent DVD’s vs renting video on demand. It turns out that we probably have absolutely no use for a Blu-Ray player, despite the fact that they are cool and we love new gadgets. That money would be more wisely spent elsewhere – or saved. Now that’s the kind of reasoning I’m looking for in making a decision to have children. Something that follows logic and makes sense. So, please, if you can think of a logical reason to have children, please let us know. Leave a comment, send an email, anything.

In the meantime, please enjoy reading this article explaining some additional reasons for choosing to be child-free.

Here’s the album itself: