The main points that Ray Villard makes are:

1. Throughout our history of UFO’s, there has not been a single credible source that has provided confirmation of the origin of would be aliens.
2. From popular belief, the only possibility that has come forth so far is Zeta Reticuli, located some 39 light years from Earth.
3. The twin star system is roughly 3 billion years older than our own sun, and therefore any life that has developed on Zeta Reticuli would be far superior than we are, presumably far superior to fall victim to simple earth tools and weapons and would be easily able to evade or overpower such efforts.
4. Inter-galactic trade is not possible given the demands on resources to go from one star system to another.

First lets consider what we know about space–it’s big! While 39 light years seems like a large amount of time, even at the speed of light which we all know to be c or 299,792,458 meters per second, this trip in our current conventional wisdom would be impossible. First conventional wisdom tells us that the energy that is required to push an object with mass to the speed of light would be so great, that the object would have to be very small in order for all the energy that we could produce to push and continue to propel that object to Zeta Reticuli over the course of 39 years. Certainly not large enough for a human, and the necessary resources to keep that human alive for 39 years.

With that being said, let’s consider for a moment outside of our comfort zone–after all, these are all just theories, and theories are only good until someone disproves them through falsifiability. Consider for a moment the Geocentric model, where the Earth is at the center of the universe and the stars and universe revolves around us. Now this isn’t just something that came up and died down in rapid course as a scientific fad. This was a concept that was accepted by many/most in the scientific community for over 1500 years and wasn’t until the last several hundred years have we come up with more plausible explanations.  But until that time, we were firmly of the belief that we were the center of it all (how wonderful of us!). But then through research, observation, reasoning, and science, we have come to a new understanding of the universe (several actually).

Consider how up through the 14th century, scholars believed that the Earth was flat. This was until we achieved a higher understanding of our planet and began to understand this spherical concept. Up until that point, it would be impossible to convince anyone that the Earth was round.

Consider these major milestones in our history that we thought were impossible until we developed the technology or understanding necessary to achieve them:

• Flying in general
• Flying over an ocean
• Flying faster than the speed of sound
• Flying several times faster than the speed of sound
• Leaving Earth’s gravity
• Going to the Moon
• Cars from horses
• Metal ships (won’t they sink?!)
• Guns from arrows
• The internet

The list goes on and on and on. There isn’t a history of something until it actually happens. There were points in our history where the idea of going faster than the speed of a horse was outrageous and couldn’t be done. Now most people in America have at least 1 car and many have several cars. There was a point in time where talking about man flying would have gotten you into serious trouble, but now not only do we fly, we fly at speeds that are just absolutely absurd to think about. And we are still innovating there so we can travel faster than the speeds we have already achieved. We thought we’d never leave Earth’s gravity and now we have people living in space on the International Space Station, we have satellites in orbit and traveling to other planets. Nothing is possible until we actually do it, and before that point, we call it impossible and discourage innovation because of that supposed certainty.

While all signs currently point to the speed of light being the fastest thing in our Universe, I would argue that there has to be a force in the universe that goes faster than the speed of light. And I’d go as far as to say that not only should there be one, but many. What’s my reasoning for this? First off, the forces at work to arrange our universe would suggest to me that gravity or the forces involved with gravity (since we have yet to find that elusive graviton), can interact with each other over great distances (even the article states that the distance between these twin stars is some 800 million miles), well if the universe had to send a single to one star to be affected by the others forces and have to wait 800 million miles for a response back to that request, this whole universe concept is a gigantic failure. Imagine those days of turn based games and how long they took verses real time games. The universe has to be able to talk to itself and the things within it instantly. This by itself would almost guarantee that light speed is too slow, as we’ve proven at great length that the time it takes for light to get from one side of the known universe to the other would take just too much time.

Let’s look at this idea that if an alien from an advanced civilization came to earth, that they would provide us with details on where they came from. What do we know? We know that the universe as we know is is very very old. We know this because our current method of observation requires us to look at light that has traveled through space and is in itself quite outdated. If an alien who presumably would need to know how to get here and back home tried to convey where he was from, most likely they would not look up to the stars and point out his home–why, because it’s probably not there in our view of the universe! I give this example that most people will understand (although might not agree with). In biblical times, it was written that God communicated with man through a burning bush, and passed on two tablets that contained the ten commandments by which we should live our lives by. Now, if that same event happened today, I think that we would perceive that differently? Why? Because we have grown as humans, as living, breathing, thinking humans, and through our continual facination with science and proving the why’s and how’s, we would look to validate the burning bush by ruling out all earthly reasons that this could happen before resorting to the divine as the cause. Simply stated, man of Biblical times did not have the comprehension to understand the events that they were observing. Likewise, if an alien came to earth and tried to explain to a current earthling how they were able to come to earth and where they were from, we just wouldn’t have the comprehension to understand what they were saying. We are just so use to looking up at the sky and seeing something static, that we couldn’t understand it if someone told us that what we saw was not really the case. Or to say that they came from a far off land, something that only could be viewed through alien technology, the only thing that we could have is the approximate area in the sky that they were referencing. Beyond that the markers would just be an interpretation of a point in space, verses the exact origin.

Additionally think about spacial references, our current method of referencing is very 2 dimensional, as we see space as a large canvas with points scattered about representing what we can see. And we can approximate distance to the earth by light that we are seeing. However, if an alien civilization has achieve true inter-galactic space travel, presumably their methods for mapping out the stars and various other space debris would be far different than our view of the visible universe. I go back to the flat earth argument, if all you see if a straight horizon, how would you know to think of it as a sphere? I dare you to go outside on the streets of Chicago and point to the location of Tokyo, Japan. This is the problem that we’d have if we went back in time to try and explain to humans in the 12th century locations on the other side of the world with their current level of understanding.

To think that aliens from far off galaxies would not trade is just preposterous. When we look at how human civilization operates, resources and the control of those resources is the primary driver for our economy. But at some point in time our resources will be used up. Take an element such as Helium. When we think of helium we think of Mylar balloons and birthday parties. But what we don’t think of is how scarce this element is. Because of the rate of consumption and the slower rate of renewal, we will get to a point where we are helium deprived. But we don’t think about what will happen at that point in time. Now think 3 billion years into the future and if we don’t have elements like helium and such, wouldn’t we find ways to resource those elements from neighboring planets or celestial objects? Sure we would. And why wouldn’t aliens? Stephen Hawkings was right to be paranoid and caution against the pursuit of actively looking for these aliens. But that’s not to say that aliens would be hostile. Certainly there are better sources of natural resources than on a planet that is feverishly consuming those resources as fast as we can get our grubby hands on them. Nonetheless trade would be necessary to ensure that resources that are rich in one area of the galaxy can be consumed in other area’s. The only obstacle that you have to get over is the lack of ability for us to travel between solar systems. Once you get past that and if you assume that such a feat is possible, trade becomes a no brainer and necessary to ensure the survival of a civilization.

The big question that comes to mind at this point in time is why haven’t aliens introduced themselves to the greater masses and only to the people who are least likely to be believed if they did announce to the world that they had made contact with life not of this world. I think the answer is pretty simple–humans are not ready to meet other life forms. This was one of the major themes in the movie Contact, as we can see the reaction of the people after the Jodi Foster character failed to come back with the necessary proof of her journey to the Vegans. The same applies here. If an alien species came and observed humans, they would quickly realize that we are still a savage race, hell bent on our own destruction and without enough self-restraint to deal with such a large issue. We are a world consumed by religion, something that would be put into question at all levels–those of faith and those without. We look around today and we see people who are willing to kill for religion, what happens with 6 billion people realize that the faith that they have is on such a micro scale that they feel that they have lost their faith? What would happen if the world realized that they were no longer on the leading edge of technology and in fact were on the more primitive side of things? What would we do as a species to gain new technology that had military applications? Would we use them against each other, or worse against those we fear and would try and stay at arms length with? There are so many questions that rely on the unreliability of the human condition that if I was an alien species I would think to myself how much humans would benefit from medical and technological improvements, but then think twice and stay to myself that they are just not ready–just not yet. Through time and growth as we overcome our own problems and grow will we become more appealing to the greater universe of life, but at the moment, we are the savage beasts who need to expend all our energies not to pull ourselves apart. Other aliens may just be waiting for the day that we annihilate ourselves and think why go through all the hassle when given time they will do the heavy lifting for them and leave a barren planet ready to be consumed?

Too often do we see portrayals of aliens as the slow moving, awkward, and socially inept creatures that we’ve come to fear and love in movies. I compare this to our portrayal of zombies as slow, dumb, and otherwise brainless creatures easily overcome by doors and guns and sheer force. Where are the representations of zombies that take into account that they have taken over human bodies so technically anything a human can do, so can a zombie–only difference is that a zombie is not worried about preservation of life, so the threat goes up. Likewise, aliens who have conquered space travel cannot be assumed to be like the traditional grey aliens like the Asgard that we see on StarGate and other shows. We have to assume them to be just as intelligent if not more than we are. And based on how we would react if we were the explorers finding creatures that we thought to ourselves to be lesser than us, we have to assume that they would do the same.

Perhaps in future generations we will learn to overcome our current understanding of the universe and allow us to join fellow travelers through the stars, but for now it’s just science fiction.

I think you know that your a World of Warcraft addict when you are trolling the internet and find something like this. Garfield + WoW = awesomeness ftw. Although John Arbuckle probably would be wielding the Sword of a Thousand Truths worse than most.

I do have to admit, having missed the releases of Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King, actually experiencing an expansion such as Cataclysm will be a whole new experience. Everything is going to change–everything. And I can’t wait.

What has become of the National Space and Aeronautics Agency? Huge budgets to plan for trips to the stars have plagued their ability to get and secure funding to plan for the on-going journey into the stars. Is the direction of the Administration to privatize this function to outside vendors in favor of carrying this out within internal government agencies? Would we see similar types of mis-spending and questionable practices as we saw out of Blackwater and Halliburton in Iraq and Afghan?

There is one point to this article that I can’t argue with–in the 40+ years since we have put a man on the moon, the agency has failed to progress the innovation and technology necessary to put a humans further into space. While rocket development has come a long way, the sheer scale and depth of a project necessary to go to Mars is currently so astronomical (no pun intended) that it just doesn’t seem feasible with today’s technology.

While the need still exists to provide funding for research and development into area’s of off-planet exploration, guidelines and expectations still need to be set in order to ensure that those monies are going to worthwhile causes and not into some skunkworks project that will only marginally improve the current rocketry and propulsion understanding. I’m not advocating

that our goal should be warp drives and sub-light engines, but clearly we need to have a new approach to how we:

1. Get humans into space, so overcoming the forces of gravity that will allow us to carry heavy payloads into orbit,
2. Cover off the massive distance between Earth and Mars (at it’s closest distance Mars is about 36 million miles and at it’s furthest is over 250 million miles)

By decreasing the total time in space to cover the distance between Earth and Mars we will have to carry considerably less fuel, supplies, and equipment than if we had to cover that distance off using conventional rocketry. Subsequently if we had a way to send all the necessary supplies and fuel into space and construct the ship while in order, the shape and construction of the vehicle would be considerably different as there would not be a need to withstand the tremendous forces (near to 9 thousand degrees on re-entry) that current space vehicles are required to be constructed to meet. If you look at the lunar module, because it was only designed to operate in space or low atmosphere conditions, the construction of the lunar module to the command module on the Saturn V rockets were considerably different.

What we need in NASA is some visions of the future, what is it that we want to accomplish and how do we need to improve our current understandings in order to get there? Or is the end goal so impossible that we should alter our course now and save ourselves the headaches and hassle of even trying to put that square peg (travel to another planet) into the round hole (the financial burdens required to invest in such a trip). Also even if we were to expend a vast amount of financial resources towards this type or project, would we be able to rinse and repeat that activity in a way that makes going to Mars worthwhile or is this a one shot trip? We do it once to say that we can or did, but the feasibility of going back makes this not practical?

In these ever lasting words that Patrick Stewart says during the theme to Star Trek: The Next Generation, we find ourselves in similar shoes as we continue to embark on our joy into space and beyond.

Recently I started to watch the series When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions and I have to admit, the progress that we’ve made and the steps that we have taken have been nothing short of a miracle. How we started a little less than half a century ago with a dream to go into space and the Moon, to today where we are sending probes into deep space, cataloging distant worlds and testing the limits of our engineering and imagination with new methods of survival and exploration to planets such as Mars within our own solar system.

When we look at today’s generation and our perspective on space, I don’t think that we see the same type of hands on drive that we saw in previous generations. Previous generations were more inclined to try something in the real world and observe and adjust; whereas in today’s generation the safer route is to computer model the simulation and extrapolate possible outcomes or the likely outcome. There’s something lost there that I think has degraded our overall experience when it comes to space travel and exploration.

The reasons why we leave earth I don’t think have changed. Humans by their very nature are curious beings, and while we certainly don’t pretend to know everything about our physical world, the magical pull that is inside each and every one of us to look up at the stars and wonder, Are we alone in this universe?, and if not, who and where are others that are like us?

If the Drake equation is even remotely accurate, the likelihood of life in the universe is not just probable but a certainty. Stephen Hawking’s recently commented that he has concerns on how encounters with extraterrestrial life would go and that almost certainly the Earth would become a victim–similar to how we have fantasized it happening in such movies as War of the Worlds. While our initial attempts at communicating with extraterrestrials have promoted peace and openness, it begs the question whether or not we are being naive in assuming that creatures from beyond the stars are peaceful and curious and eager to learn as we are. And in fact if we take our own human behavior into account, we are savage creatures who wage war on each other, plan the destruction of the human race through weapons of mass destruction, and are otherwise suspicious of each others actions and motives. Why should we assume that while the best parts of humanity should be what we present as our good foot forward, that other species of life out there in the universe will be any more noble and without the deeper seeded maliciousness that exists in each and every one of us today?

The big news today was the Hayabusa’s return to earth after its mission to collect samples from the asteroid: Itokawa and provide us with a clearer picture of the primordial stuff that makes up our universe and what elements and compositions of materials exist elsewhere in our universe. Clearly humans are still moving forward with our desire to go beyond the stars, but I question whether or not we are making enough dramatic steps forward as our forefathers had done to pave the path into space many decades ago.

It is up to the future generations to continue the progress and the determination to go beyond our atmosphere and to be curious about the universe as a whole. Even intellectually we have become so mathematical and theoretical that we are borderline on the philosophical instead of anything that remotely appears to be applied physics. The hows and whys of the natural world are becoming more and more unclear and in many ways seem to be hindering our ability to develop the new technology and methods that are needed to aid in our journey to the stars. Our limits in terms of our understanding of the universe prevent us from conceiving of speed in terms faster than light. We use the term impossible with such certainty, and yet even if we look at our past and the things we would assert similar certainty on, it would seem that certainty is no longer certain but rather just a temporary hold on our understanding waiting to be unlocked by that breakthrough that changes or transforms our understanding. Centuries ago everyone was certain that the world was flat (baring the current argument amongst the current Flat Earth Society folks) and yet our understanding changed and we now (for the most part) can agree that the earth is spherical. Centuries ago, the idea of a person flying seemed so completely far from the realm of possibilities that such talk would make others look on you with confusion and contempt. How dare you think that humans can fly! And yet today flight is as common place and walking and all it took was a principle on lift and technology to take advantage of it. Today the idea of space travel where the distance between two points is covered in a very short period of time seems to be an impossible feat. Theories such as the Theory of Relativity that deals with the amount of energy it would take to go the speed of light and other Constants further plague our abilities to take the next leap forward from the speed of a rocket to the speed of a photon. We’ve assumed that there is nothing faster in this universe than light, and perhaps with today’s level of understanding and technology that is true, but just as it was thought to be impossible to go faster than the speed of sound, human courage and our desire to go beyond slowly pushed through that barrier and now we see that as a non-issue. Will faster than light travel be done in the same way?

As I’m sure is the case with the majority of folks out there, I hope that within my lifetime I can see the day when humanity embarks on a truly remarkable journey into the stars and we can experience the universe in a way that we could only have dreamed about. What new things lie out there for us to find and discover? What new challenges and species will we meet? How will our experiences forever change the world that we live in today–the one we call Earth and Home? While there are many questions that leave more questions than answers, there is one thing that remains a certainty–we will never stop looking up at the stars and wondering what is up there.

I remember back when I was in high school, how we used search engines like DogPile, as these types of search engines would aggregate multiple different search engines results together. The rational for doing that was back then, it was a much different landscape in terms of searching the web and no one provider seemed to do it well. You would have Webcrawler and Yahoo! and others, but their results seemed to vary and one search would yield a variable cornucopia of “stuff”, maybe stuff we intended to find, and maybe stuff that seems so far off the beaten path you wonder to yourself, “How in the world is that relevant?”. Then along came Google and the game changed.

I remember many years ago a good friend of mine saying, “Hey have you tried Google?”. My first thought was, “No, it’s just another search engine”. But low and behold that turned out to be the understatement of the century, as Google as grown to be the household name when it comes to searching. Additionally it has become one of the de facto information providers for companies to do research–especially when it comes to programming errors, server errors, errors that appear in logs, etc. Most techies are accustom now to doing a Google search on the issue to see if the community has experienced the problem. So ingrained has Google become in the world of troubleshooting a problem, LifeHacker’s recent survey on Best Computer Diagnostics, has Google listed as the number one tool, beating out several top rated contenders. Clearly Google has changed the way that we look at the web.

Today Google announced that they are evolving once again. This is on the heals of Apple announcing that the iPhone4 and iOS4 have “This changes everything. Again“. Google announces that they have added Caffeine to their indexing services takes them closer and closer to real-time indexing 0f web content. How does this change things?

I remember the days managing tech support for a top Web Hosting company, and almost daily you’d see the question asked by a customer “I have submitted my site to Google to be indexed, but why is it not appearing on the search?”. Many today would say, “Well maybe you should pay for it through AdSense like everyone else”, but fundamentally this shouldn’t be true. Web searches should allow a user to search the web and find not just the glitzy gimmicky results that companies and merchants want you to see, but also stuff that is related to your topic but provided by lesser known sources. That’s the beauty of the web, no longer is content pushed out to the users by the people who have the most resources, best logistics, or publishing power, but that anyone can publish something to the web and that information can be consumed by an indexing service and served out at a later time when someone enters a string that has relevance. So back to the question that was posed above, what happened?

Back then, Google reindexing services did take several days if not weeks to index your site. Additionally users would have to make sure that their sites were Search Engine Optimized (SEO) to ensure that they had the best chance of the indexer picking up the right content and matching it to relevant search strings. But even if a site was SEO optimized, the indexing process was still slow. I recall many instances where we would have to look through access logs and such to verify to a customer that “Yes your site was indexed, look the Google crawler was accessing your content”. This was a very frustrating thing for site owners who did not have the capital to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on professional SEO services and/or AdWords/AdSense to improve their rankings.

How does Caffine change all of this? Well this is best explained on the Google Blog for the technical minded folks, but for everyone else, what Google has done is to take the chore of indexing the web from indexing large chunks of information that was tedious and time consuming, to much smaller and more frequent chunks of information to enable them to refresh content that would otherwise take much longer to be indexed. Just how much information are we talking about? Generally speaking each webpage (omitting all the funky addons such as Flash, movies, publication grade images), the webpages themselves are only several KB each. From what Google is saying, Caffeine has the ability to index hundreds of thousands of gigabytes of data a day! Assuming that each webpage is about 5KB in size, this is about 20,971,520,000 individual webpages a day! Pfew! Needless to say that’s a lot.

Given the size of their databases needed to store all this information and the size of their server farms, it does beg the question, where’s the upper limit here? How much of the web can Google store because at some point in time, the web will live in the Google cloud. How are other search providers going to compete with this level of near real-time indexing? And when looking between the lines, is this a way for Google to improve their ability to news aggregate and read in other news sources to provide more timely real-time propagation of breaking news as it’s happening?

When we thought the glass ceiling was hit, Google took the ten-ton hammer and smashed it to bits. Now by raising the bar, I wonder who has the ability to beat Google or is this just the beginning of an empire destine to rule the web for the next several decades?

When were the days when we were just satisfied to have a win in our favor and reasonable damages awarded for the harm inflicted?

I look at one case in particular, as Judge Kimba Wood has recently ruled that peer-to-peer file sharing service LimeWire infringes copyright. Now this in itself is certainly reprehensible; however, what makes this situation move from the legal to unethical is what Attorney Kelly Klaus is seeking in terms of damages–1.5 Trillion dollars. Yes folks, that’s 1,500,000,000,000.00 dollars in damages at a cost of $750 per download.

Let’s just take a look at the math. Last I checked, you could download a song for about .99 cents, or an album for between $14.99-$24.99. Movies generally range from $9.99 to $39.99 for your high end Blu-Ray disks. Movie or Television series run anywhere from $49.99 to several hundred dollars. But certainly each download could not have been several hundred dollars, let alone $750! If someone downloads 1 song, shouldn’t that one download only be worth .99 cents plus a certain percentage for additional costs and an additional penalty fee for the infringement? That one song, I can’t see being worth more than a few dollars when everything is said and done–at the most.

And yet the RIAA continues to seek ridiculous settlements and damages to compensate for a soft economy. Is it the fact that people are downloading more that causes their bottom lines to become leaner and leaner? Or is it because the music, films, and TV being produced has become less and less quality and people just don’t see spending $14.99 for the CD and would rather just either download the 1 song or purchase it for .99 cents from iTunes or Amazon MP3 services? With advents of Video-OnDemand through Amazon and more notably Netflix Instant Play, people are renting less, buying even less, and choosing to watch what’s available or just renting it through Netflix through one low cost monthly subscription fee. The convergence of all of these events has lead to the recession within the entertainment industry–not because people are downloading more.

Furthermore, I submit that if the RIAA and the entertainment world believes that their content or IP is worth 1.5 trillion dollars, do they realize that the total cost of both the Iraq and Afghan wars is just over 1 trillion dollars? The economies of scale just don’t seem to add up here.

What we need here is a bit of common sense. What the RIAA should be doing is to support on-demand or more streaming content to support the direction of viewing/listening habits of the people they are serving their content to. People don’t want to spend money for an album that has 15 tracks of nonsense and 1-2 tracks that are really worth while to them. People are more likely to pay one yearly subscription cost to a service like Pandora and get unlimited music play than to pay to own hundreds or thousands of CD’s, or even hold that many MP3′s on a drive somewhere–guess what storing all that music is getting costly too and why go through that hassle? Services like Lala, Last.fm, Grooveshark, Pandora, and Spotify, many of which are available on popular mobile platforms like your Blackberry, iPhone, and Androids, the evolution of music and content viewing is changing before our very eyes. The old institutions that the RIAA holds on to are starting to or have already begun to wane, and they in addition to the rest of the industry needs to accept the fact that their losses are just that. Changes to the way people use services will have a direct impact to how much revenue they will receive. And year over year, they cannot continue to expect large growth numbers when more and more people are moving away from the “I own that” model for Music and Movies.

Additionally we need to look at improving our legal system to evolve as rapidly as our behaviors. Certainly when these laws were drawn up, these types of damages made sense given the types of cases that they would expect to deal with. Now, perhaps not so much anymore. And let’s not completely absolve the downloader’s from this. Just as the industry needs to change, with the availability of legitimate low-cost content, illegal downloading just doesn’t make sense anymore. If you are completely at a loss if you are unable to see the full series of Lost and what’s on Netflix instant play or Hulu is not enough, pony up the dollars and purchase the DVD set or buy it used from eBay or Craigslist. If you don’t want to spend that amount, clearly the need to watch this series is not as strong as you thought it was. If it is, then you see the value in both the content as well as supporting the providers of that content, and all the power to you.

We all are both victims of these types of lawsuits for profit, but also are all contributors to that same issue. When we try and remove ourselves from the problem we ignore our part in societies acceptance of these types of illegal download practices. We all should help each other promote legitimate sources of content and recognize that illegal downloading is harmful–maybe not to you today, but when someone faces these types of lawsuits (I take case against Jammie Thomas-Rasset and the ruling that $2 million dollars is justified compensation for downloading 24 songs) we all lose–the only ones that win are the plaintiff’s, in this case the RIAA.

]]> http://wp.evolutioncreations.com/2010/03/to-all-you-boomkins/feed/ 0 http://wp.evolutioncreations.com/2010/03/the-truth-about-ragus-old-world-style-pasta-sauce-commercials/ http://wp.evolutioncreations.com/2010/03/the-truth-about-ragus-old-world-style-pasta-sauce-commercials/#comments Tue, 16 Mar 2010 16:52:27 +0000 evo http://wp.evolutioncreations.com/?p=184 Over the past few days, I’ve seen this commercials for Ragu Old World Style pasta sauce and there are a few things here that really bother me. First off the commercial as well as the companies website tries to convey this message:

Ragu gives kids more than a full serving of veggies in every half cup of red sauce. And it’s all natural, without any additives or preservatives.

Additionally there is a disclaimer on their website:

A smooth, flavorful classic sauce. Ragú Old World Style® pasta sauces meet FDA guidelines for healthy.*

And the * provides the following:

* To be considered “healthy” by the FDA, pasta sauce must be low in fat and saturated fat, contain limited amounts of cholesterol and sodium, and contain a minimum amount of certain nutrients.

But looking at their ingredients:

Tomato Puree (Water, Tomato Paste), Soybean Oil, Salt, Sugar, Dehydrated Onions, Extra Virgin Olive Oil, Spices, Romano Cheese (Part-Skim Milk, Cheese Cultures, Salt, Enzymes), Natural Flavor.

I have to ask the question, does anyone buy the claims that this is all natural and without any additives or preservatives?

Let’s look at this from the top down. The first thing we need to consider here is that the FDA is NOT the authority on what’s considered to be healthy. The reason for this is that whenever there is policy to determine what’s healthy organizations such as the ones that produce food will try and meet those requirements so they can claim that what they are saying is FDA endorsed.

Second look for the whole food. When you look at the ingredients, what in it is a whole food? When I think of “a full serving of vegetables in every half cup, I actually am thinking about a vegetable. Tomatoes, onions, garlic, carrots, etc.  Now let’s look at the ingredients, there is:

1. Tomatoe Paste
2. Dehydrated Onions
3. Romano Cheese

There is nothing close to a whole food in that. Also if you look at the cheese, even that is made with part-skim milk–there are good fats and essential nutrients in regular milk. When looking at foods like this, we need to move past all the claims, such as:

All natural, low fat, a good source of lycopene, vitamins A and C

First off, this is not all natural, and we need good fats (why would there be fats in a product made with whole foods?), lycopene comes naturally in tomatoes and other foods, and Vitamins A and C should be a mute issue as it’s in most vegetables and fruits which you should be eating lots of (more vegetables than fruits) on a daily basis.

As consumers we need to really take a look at the ingredients, and not the bells and whistles that are on the labels.

America as a nation is a fairly young nation, at least in comparison to the rest of the world. And yet we sit at the front of the stage in the eyes of the rest of the world as a leader in almost every vertical; industry, science, economics, education (higher education), military, humanitarian relief, the list goes on and one and on. And yet through all of this, the blemishes that exists and the blood that has stained our hands through events of our forefathers past, have yet to heal in the nations wounds and allow us to move forward. We are still in many ways a nation divided, divided in socio-economic silos where while we don’t openly admit segregation and inequality, in many ways we are facing the same very real problems in very different shapes and forms.

And yet the fight to continue the pursuit that icons such as Martin Luther King Jr. and many others have risked their lives and have in many cases died for, but as generations are born and mature, the same type of icons have yet to step forward and continue the unexplored challenges that face us in this brave new world.

Social media, the internet, faster pace in business, faster pace in our lives, mass media, and globalization of our economies and politics have all attributed to a new generation that may have false beliefs that with the dissemination of  information to all people that we in turn will see the same types of social changes that took years of sweat and tears by a tireless few good people. But in fact I would argue that what we see is somewhat like treading water in the middle of the ocean. With information comes a lot of good information but also a lot of bad or misleading information. Information published by everyone comes with it a certain degree of risk in terms of credibility but also we find that because there are so many who want to have a voice there is a sort of information overload that occurs and the messages get lost as a sea of white noise. Very similar to how difficult it would be to spot someone floating in the middle of an ocean, or find a satellite with your naked eye in the big open sky, finding that credible information in the sea of what amounts to meaningless information because the same effort in futility.

As we move forward both today and in years to come, we need to remain focused on the fact that the challenges that our forepeople experienced while different than we see today, are no less real and upon us. While there aren’t separate bathrooms for blacks and whites, we see new realisms caused by events of 9/11 where we are fearful of a group of people based on appearance and beliefs. Still we have political correctness when it comes to how we address people of different color, African-American’s, Black Americans, to the rest of the world we are just all Americans. Or when you go into a business and see two people, one man and one woman doing the same job, and yet the woman does not get equal pay for the same work. Even looking at our military where woman have skirts and men pants, or the standards where society judges women’s ages to the point where the cosmetic industry booms in the billions of dollars as more and more woman seek out the fountain of youth to remain young, attractive, competitive and up to the standards the world sets for them, and yet their male counter parts can become all of the opposite (fat, less attractive, hair in all different sorts of places). The issues of segregation and inequality and still very much alive and very much a fact of life.

We need to as a people come to terms with the fact that in our past there are things there that do not reflect on the virtues that built this proud nation, and yet those events did happen and we need to forgive ourselves and each other for these acts. No measure of compensation or apologies can change the fact that these events did happen, so it’s in all of our best interests to learn how we can put this in the past and move forward. I ask those who make statements such as, “If we put this behind us, we forget and we let the pain of our fathers go on with no meaning and no purpose”. To those people, I argue that if this was so important to you, why have you not taking up the fight to pursuit further civil rights and equalities not just to pursuit the inequality that exists between whites and blacks, but what about Asians, Europeans, Indian, Mexican, etc and not to mention the subcultures within each groups that are further segregated based on their beliefs or other factors.

The issue of the treatment of slaves in American history should be put in context to the larger issue of how the overall segregation has become an issue one that must be dealt with on an overarching approach instead of focus made to just one race or group of people. Make no mistake we are at a critical juncture here where we as humans, all people created equal, will need to unit and come together and put our differences aside for a greater good. I don’t make excuses or assertions that those divides do not exist and the meaning behind them are not still painful, but the more that we put these labels on color and race and beliefs, we will further ingrain into our very DNA the idea that people can be judged without knowing the person and just purely on superficial markers such as skin color, dress, gender, or other religious markers.

Martin Luther King Jr. was just one man, and in the face of these new challenges it will take many more good people of all different walks of life to make the small changes that will in effect turn the tide in the many. We look at his actions today and should feel inspired not just to have another day off, but to reflect internally on how we can make a difference and in each of us make the change in our judgement, in our very behavior that will lead others to follow in our footsteps. By changing the way we act and behavior in small steps we can look to make the larger social changes needed to forgive ourselves and to bring us all closer together. Only through these measures can we bridge the divides that are caused by segregation and inequality and create a better future for our children and children’s children. If we do not take these steps now, we give them a world in which they will have to come up with these answers themselves. Just like the issue of global climate change if we do nothing, then we condemn future generations to pay for our mistakes and misjudgment and leave the burden on them to figure out how to solve what seems to be unsolvable issues. Look within yourself today, and look at the people around you and wake up from your previous beliefs and judgments and see them for who they are today and what we all are capable of doing tomorrow and in the many days to come.