I have had for some time now an app called Flight Radar 24 which some readers may be familiar with. This isn’t a plug for it, but a little perusal of this app will doubtless surprise you. It did me. In the screen shot above you will see in real time the exact position of every plane (the little yellow things) in the air at the time of the screen grab – in this case North America. And the app covers the whole world. The app collects the flight data every civil aviation plane has to broadcast once it is airborne and even on the ground. If you get up close you can see each plane’s movement and with the correct settings, its flight path as well. Plus all available information about the carrier, the plane type, speed etc. It’s mind boggling to think of this many planes in the air at any given time. 5000-10,000 is one figure mooted and that doesn’t include military flights. And that is at any moment in any day, depending on whether the USA is awake or not. Over Africa there appear to be almost no planes at all which speaks volumes. A simple graphic of the disparity between the excessively rich nations and the excessively poor. Read on, it gets worse.
Yes it’s a beautiful picture but don’t be deceived. I don’t want to be alarmist (or maybe I do) but it’s not really beautiful at all.
Fact.
During take-off, a jumbo jet can devour 2 million litres (528,344 gallons) of air per second. In the first five minutes of flight, a commercial airliner can burn as much oxygen as 49,000 acres of forest produce in a day. According to Department of Transportation figures, flying a Boeing 747-400 from Washington, DC to San Francisco burns 17,232 gallons of jet fuel. (Fuel efficiency: 6.7 mpg.) A Boeing 747 averages 32 minutes taxiing, taking off and landing. During this time, it can generate 190 pounds of NOx – equal to the amount produced by driving a car 53,500 miles.
Research by NASA proved that in the North American corridor there are major climatic changes taking place, more than anywhere else. One of the world’s most troubled routes, the North Atlantic Flight Corridor (NAFC) lies between 45 and 65 degrees north latitude and runs almost entirely over water. In 1990, between 700 and 800 aircraft traveled this route between the US and Europe each day – amounting to more than 200,000 flights per year. 27 years later, do you think this has declined?
I haven’t had time to sit in front of FlightRadar24 and count them.
Aside from the air pollution aspect of this which is serious considering that even a recently engineered plane spreads a blanket of toxic gases miles wide, the sheer size of what is going on reflects the huge corporate and commercial activity going on at a global scale and which dwarfs the petty political squabbles taking place in the world which we get hypnotized by. So you get an idea of who is really running the show for their own advantage basically. For example, no mention recently of the $15 billion airplane contract with Iran being cancelled by Trump who pre-election vowed to tear up the nuclear agreement with Iran. They know too darn well that if they did, the order would go directly to Europe or even China. The White House is often called the east coast office of Monsanto for good reason. The Americans, having elected their lower self to the Presidency now have a rather unpredictable and potentially dangerous person running the show and they are having to live with it. Much of this information here is probably known to you all, and is all available on-line but I thought the app mentioned above might give you a tangible perception of what I have been discussing and why it’s worth a quick look. The global media drama serves to distract you from what is really going on.
So much is hidden from us and maybe just as well as I think the big picture might just be too much to take. About ten years ago I was traveling over the Oakland bridge in the Bay Area of San Francisco with friends just before sunset and suddenly we saw the enormous awesome plume of a space rocket moving silently and slowly into the upper atmosphere emitting a strange light. Up and up and up it went till with a big blast it vanished. I found out later it was a Star Wars test over the pacific from Vandenburg Airforce Base (the picture above is of a recent test by the US military of an unarmed nuclear missile from Vandenburg). What we witnessed was a $100m firework display by the American military – all over in a few seconds. On the west coast of America you get some idea of the vast and secretive world of the American military industrial complex that is given all it wants from the Federal purse, – whenever it is wanted. It is said that when the US is at war there is full employment on the West coast. In computer software and weapons research, the Federally funded Lawrence Livermore labs just inland from the Bay Area, is where even now research is being made into neutron bomb warfare amongst much else of strategic interest to the US.
Don’t lose sleep over it as you can’t do much about it.
But appreciating poetry is always a very personal thing and many people just don’t get it. It tries to express what cannot be expressed in any other way. I also loved the way Abdal Hayy’s words just tripped out of his pen as if they had minds of their own in his endless efforts to define impossible spiritual heights in verse. Loose, free verse. He didn’t really have time for rhyme though it would pop up every so often. In fact I asked him several times to write in rhyme so I could set it to music. I managed to make Raspberry Juleps, one of his poems from the Ramadan Sonnets into a song as it had a bit of rhyme in it. It was unavoidably and inevitably west coast sounding like a Robert Hunter Grateful Dead track. The words always flavoured the song:
Ian Whiteman 
Long Hopes and Personal Choices
I wrote this in late January after some outrage in the US by a white supremacist but sadly it applies now and probably for the foreseeable.
I would rather be writing on a more creative theme but current events seem to have interposed themselves unfortunately. I was sent the following article today by a friend which coming from a US Catholic professor I thought an excellent if alarming analysis of the state of play.
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/blog/executive-disorder-about-islam
In September 1962 I was playing football on an Essex sports field when enormous USAF B52s began screaming overhead above the grey wintery clouds. We shuddered. This was the height of the Cold War and on that day the high point of the Cuban missile crisis. The referee, who was our music master in fact, a rather nervous soul, went white as a sheet and went inside the school buildings and left us playing on.
Well I’m still here over 50 years later to tell the tale. Today, 1 February 2017 we are entering another rather perilous stage in our shared history but maybe there are some lessons to learn from my first teenage protest experience.
A year before the Cuban missile crisis I had been on an anti-war CND march from Wethersfield USAF base in Essex to Trafalgar Square in central London (photo above). One would have thought 100,000 people would make some kind of difference but actually it changed nothing – outwardly at least. But it did change me as I am sure it changed others. I was suddenly made aware of the outside world, grubby, wet, shouting and political. But it also highlighted new realities to do with civil rights in the USA and a whole new horizon of humanity in the world we were in at that time but ignorant of. We had been all shut up in our towns, our schools, our families, our country, pretty unaware of what was going on in the outside world. It was challenging to figure out where I fitted in that new world and who I really was. That world was suddenly a slightly frightening place but full of new and fascinating things nonetheless. Much transpired from that four day marching experience, sleeping rough with little or no money and being amongst the rain sodden anoraks, ordinary folks, the left wing politicos et alia. It was all full of portents.
Pretty much like the million man/woman march in 2003 (above) when central London was flooded to overflowing with the incredible sight of an ocean of people protesting the imminent invasion of Iraq chanting and singing …”War, what is it good for..absolutely nothing“. I walked on that protest march as well and was dismayed that it made absolutely no difference at all. It seemed that political realities and the fate of thousands of souls was all going to happen regardless of our protestations and on the meretricious whim of a power drunk egotist. We were just the escape valve. The faceless war mongers and their military machine would do whatever they wanted even if it meant lying about it. The dismay was accentuated because many of those marching had voted for Blair a few years earlier. The sweeping realities of war seem to happen in spite of humanity’s hatred of it. Man proposes but God disposes.
Individually of course the effect of the dramatic events of history are posing us all with a question. Much as we might be affected by the big news and the actors in the drama with our hopes vainly pinned on outcomes, we have in fact absolutely no influence over them other than a well directed prayer. The question each person is being asked is …..’Who are you and what to you choose to be?’ …..that is, forever, for all eternity. Each human soul is taxed with this test at any given moment but particularly in times of oppression or war. Are you going to be generous to the refugee, or even to your next door neighbour, or harden your heart and repeat to yourself the corrupting slogans and mantras of the arch-inciters who infest the newspapers, TV channels and web sites. Or at best do nothing.
For surely as night follows day, whatever is in your heart is what you will take with you, should death come upon you. Which is why so many people who cherish and nurture hatred in their hearts are in such a perilous position but are unaware of it. And if they don’t believe that then they will find out soon enough. Maybe they just lack imagination.
(This was not much to do with typography but I thought it would be of interest.)