I watched Tora! Tora! Tora! recently. That movie is supposed to be the most historically accurate and truthful ever made about the attack on Pearl Harbor. It was an entertaining and informative movie packed with good performances and some of the most spectacular plane crashes and stunts on an airfield I’ve ever seen.
And at the same time, the sequence of events that led up to the Japanese attack were almost inconceivable. The level of incompetence, stupidity, bad luck, mistake-making, and almost deliberate failure to let the Japanese attack be so successful defies imagination. This was one of those legendary sequences where truth is stranger than fiction.
When the radar crew (which stayed longer than their night shift required) spotted the incoming Japanese planes, they were mistaken for B-17s being delivered to the airbase and the radar station was told “yeah? Well don’t worry about it.”
When intelligence services using cracked Japanese codes figured that an attack was imminent, they were unable to radio Hawaii about it because the atmospheric conditions were bad. So they sent a telegram, which was shelved for eventual delivery because it wasn’t marked “urgent.”
On and on it went, delays, mistakes, confusion, circumstances, almost a perfect set of events that if you read about them in a book you’d complain was too contrived and unbelievable. That would never happen! you’d cry and close the book in disgust.
But that’s what really happened.
Christopher Taylor, “TORA TORA 9-11”, Word Around the Net, 2014-09-10.
December 7, 2014
QotD: December 7, 1941 – the truth is stranger than fiction
July 19, 2013
Protectionist law from 1920 strangling economies of Hawaii and Puerto Rico
Keli’i Akina wants the US government to amend or (better) repeal the 1920 Jones Act:
What’s the best way to destroy the economy of an island or largely coastal region? From the Peloponnesian War to the 1960s confrontation between Cuba and the United States, the answer has been to impose an embargo. In effect, that’s what the United States has been doing for decades to its non-contiguous regions such as Hawaii and Puerto Rico as well as Alaska and much of the East and West Coasts. The culprit in this economically self-defeating practice is a little-understood federal statute called the Jones Act. The 1920 maritime cabotage law specifies that ships carrying cargo between two American ports must: 1) be built in the United States, 2) be 75% owned by U.S. citizens, 3) be largely manned by a United States citizen crew, and 4) fly the United States’ flag.
In 2012, the Federal Reserve Board of New York issued a warning to the federal government that, unless Puerto Rico is granted an exemption from these Jones Act rules, its economy would likely tank. Following suit, the World Bank released a statement announcing that it will cut back its financing of projects in Puerto Rico and begin encouraging investors to look to Jamaica as a new international shipping hub. Puerto Rico’s legislature, governor, and resident commissioner in Congress have voiced loud objections. They join a growing chorus of outrage which includes Alaska, whose legislature has passed a law (Sec. 44.19.035) requiring the governor lobby Congress for reprieve from the Jones Act.
The Jones Act creates an artificial scarcity of ships due to the inefficiency and the extraordinary cost of U.S. ship construction, driving up cargo costs and limiting domestic commerce. Through World War II the United States was a leading producer of merchant ships. Today we build less than one percent of the world’s deep draft tonnage, and the ships produced domestically for the commercial market come at a hefty price.
September 19, 2012
Hawaii Five-0, the most unrealistic cop show yet
As usual, Gregg Easterbrook’s weekly NFL column contains a fair bit of non-football stuff. This week, he spends a bit of time detailing just how unrealistic the rebooted TV show Hawaii Five-0 is. It’s a rather overwhelming list of unlikely, unrealistic, and just plain silly TV:
All action shows contain some nonsense. As the television critic James Parker has noted, an action series that consists entirely of nonsense is an art form. Parker thought 24 was an achievement in that sense. Inheriting this mantle is the reimagined Hawaii Five-0, whose third season kicks off Monday. Five-0 has emerged as television’s most entertaining delivery system for pure nonsense.
An episode begins with a prisoner on a commercial flight killing the U.S. marshal escorting him. The murder weapon? I am not making this up: Two plastic airline knives held together with a rubber band. Passengers were unaware a murder was in progress onboard, because the marshal inexplicably did not fight back or cry out, although it would take quite a while — probably hours — to kill someone using two plastic airline knives held together with a rubber band.
[. . .]
On Hawaii Five-0, a small group of cops has an omniscient supercomputer the CIA would envy. Plots regularly involve automatic-weapons fire on the streets of Honolulu. The Aliiolani Hale, a Hawaii landmark, is presented as the secret headquarters of Five-0, as if a Washington, D.C., detective show presented the Washington Monument as a secret headquarters. “I confer on you blanket immunity from prosecution, so you can go outside the law to stop crime,” the governor tells McGarrett. Gov, think about what you just said! Not even Oliver North had advance immunity.
There’s a long list of laughable TV cop tropes, including the inability of bullets to even slow down Five-0 agents, immortal super bad guys, better-than-SF crime-solving technology, plus the usual imaginary laws, ignoring both common sense and the laws of physics, and so on. But he also points out a serious flaw in most modern TV representation of police and other law enforcement activities:
On TV, cops in street clothes just say, “Police” or “NYPD,” and instantly are believed. In a CSI: Miami episode, the David Caruso character, asked to prove he is a cop, dismissively waves his badge too far away to be seen. In a Five-0 episode, a person being questioned asks McGarrett for proof of who he is. “This is all the proof you’re going to get,” McGarrett snaps, flashing his badge so briefly no one could know whether it was real, let alone read his name.
Why do TV script writers promote the idea that it is unreasonable to ask law enforcement officers to establish identity? No honest cop objects to this. Fake badges can be purchased in a costume store, and criminals pretending to be police are a long-standing problem. If a guy banged on the door of a Hawaii Five-0 producer, claiming to be a detective but refusing to show ID, that producer surely would dial 911.
Of course action shows are preposterous. But it is troubling that television crime dramas imply that law enforcement officers should never be questioned. Why does Hollywood think this is a notion the American public should be force fed?
