Rrrrrr?

This blog is about pirates- not the Orlando Bloom hot friendly pirates- or the ones worshiped by the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster but the ones in Somalia currently causing problems for basically anyone in the ocean at this rate.

Somalia is a failed state by all definitions offered- there is a "government" but it doesn't really do anything. Initially it kind of made sense to be a pirate, take a few people off a boat get a crap tone of ransom money (an old NY Times article talks about how they live in the nicest houses and drive cars and such). But then they got greedy and really picked up the action- I believe there are currently over 100 people being held hostage by pirates at this point in time. We really should have done something once the traffic picked up- weirdly while terrorists are not covered by International Law (it is slow to adapt) pirates are- from my understanding they are considered stateless people which means anyone who wants to can deal with them. The cruelest but most effective thing to do might have been to send in the Chinese or some other state that isn't that concerned with its human rights record and let them do the patrolling. (Currently France seems to be the one making the large patrolling effort).

The pirates then got really greedy and stupidly decided to attack a ship under an American flag. It did not go well and all they got was the hostage that volunteered himself- the Americans also stupidly lost their hostage without getting their captain back. In the end because Obama kicks ass the Seals went in and the Captain is safe. For some reason this really pissed off pirates who were not even involved with it. On declared that America was the aggressor (why he thinks killing people who were about to kill our guy, who was I dunno... kidnaped, makes us the aggressor is a bit confusing to me).

Now the pirates claim no Americans are safe, if any are on crew they will be shot on the spot. This creates a huge problem for the pirates, they make their money from ransom... if you shoot the person you cant get ransom money. This also shows that the situation is getting really desperate. Come on countries of the world they are pirates in tiny little row boats! One you have to be able to see them coming for a little while, two I am pretty sure Navy weapons guns trump whatever massive guns they have. This is a problem we could easily take care of, we could also label it as self defense, aka we dont shoot at them if they dont shoot at us. That should make some of the human rights people happy.

All in favor of replacing the cranky pirates with orlando bloom types? Rrrrr