Pirates?! Pssh...

you know, at first i thought this whole somali pirate craze thing was kinda cool. i mean, pirates? in the 21st century? attacking merchant ships on the high seas? peril?!

yeah... i found this considerably awesome.

this, of course, is coming from a kid who's childhood vocational dream was to be come a pirate himself (after realizing that there was practically a 0% chance i was ever going to learn the ways of the force and own my own lightsaber).

i was obsessed with pirates growing up, and, like most other kids, couldn't shake the romantic view of pirates that hollywood and popular culture has capitalized on over the course of the last hundred years or so. keep in mind that this was way before that whole johnny depp franchise came along, too... had i been still a kid when those movies came out, there's a solid chance i'd be cruising around in a fishing boat in the indian ocean today carrying an AK-47 and flying a jolly roger.

but let's not kid ourselves, folks...

pirates, as probably most of you are aware of, are not nearly as awesome as we make them out to be. very few pirates - bartholemew roberts and edward teach (blackbeard) being the exception here - ever tooled around in large, man-of-war, galleons the type of which are considered the pirate standard in the pirates of the caribbean franchise. and pirates usually didn't steal gold, or spanish dubloons, or any other type of treasure from their captured prizes - nine times out of ten, they were gunning for spare sails and rope, food and medical supplies, ship hardware, and, of course, casks of rum.

but let me stop right there for a sec - i realize that i'm beginning to transform into mr. hough... giving all you folks a lecture in blog-form. not my intention. nay, readers - my reason for writing about pirates this morning is to simply state my opinion on the whole, on-going fiasco happening today with these somalian pirates.

since the somalian government collapsed in the early 1990s, the country's become a safe-haven for pirates. no order, no stability, no peace = pirate heaven. now, for whatever reason, the global community - with all its naval firepower, state-of-the-art intelligence and global positioning equipment, financial capital, etc. - simply cannot stop a handful of half-starved somalians from putting along in their rusty fishing boats with outdated russian-issued no idea. these guys are just way too damn much for the likes of us.

...are you kidding me?!

this crap is ridiculous, ands its pretty much gotten to the point now where if countries are going to consistently act like morons when dealing with this threat, than they deserve to be hijacked and plundered. that's the price for being an idiot, guys. quit whining.

me? i'd take a lesson from the annals of history (another reason why i teach social studies). before getting his ass handed to him by julius ceasar, co-consul of rome pompey magnus was - and is still considered today -the greatest pirate hunter of all time. he single-handedly wiped out piracy in the mediterranean sea, creating a 'roman lake,' around which the entire empire spread out. and the funny thing about this is that he did it rather easily - it wasn't a brilliant plan by any means, it only took a matter of months, and, for the life of me, i can't understand why the hell we're not doing this right now.

here's how it works:

1. create huge bounties on pirate leaders, and offer rewards for captured pirates

2. bribe major pirate leaders to take down fellow pirates

3. blockade pirate safe havens and raid strongholds(what's up, somalia?!)

4. increase naval supremacy in the region and take no prisoners when encountering pirates

5. execute everybody you can get your damn hands on

that's it. that's how we solve the pirate dilemma in the indian ocean. the pirates of tunisia and algiers in the last century B.C. were a hell of a lot more sophisticated and organized than today's rag-tag assortment of hoopleheads, and they were vanquished with little or no technological support. i see no excuse for the global community's complete and utter lack of smartness.

in closing, i hope you all thoroughly enjoyed your lesson today - your homework assignment is to do the section assessment on page 297, questions 1 - 7. have it to me by monday.

- mr. hough