... and Really Bad Eggs. Drink Up, Me Hardies! Yo-ho!

     I was listening to N.P.R. this morning, as I do every morning, and an interesting story came on the radio. Apparently, the Somali pirate crisis is reaching a turnaround and the volume of acts of piracy off the northeast coast of Africa has gone down arithmetically over the past few months. According to the story, hundreds of pirates have been arrested and imprisoned by international law enforcement forces. What's more, most of the maritime criminals that have been incarcerated have been found to be leaders; higher-ups in the almost feudal system of piracy the Somalian crime syndicates have established. 

     The only problem that the Somalian "government" and INTERPOL face now is what to do with all the pirates.

     This whole scenario is ringing a bell, but I can't seem to figure out why... 

Oh, yeah! That's right! 

\

     Does it freak anybody else out that this is basically the situation that  is actually happening in the real world? The only difference is that, instead of an evil but efficient government, Somalia has, at best, a crumbling feudal state run by crime lords, which means that, inevitably, any pirates that are captured are just going to be back on the water. 

     It strikes me as cosmically hilarious and also primally terrifying that pirates, which are innately linked to an understood "before-time", are still a threat in the technologically advanced world we live in today. It's practically science fiction.  I understand that these Somali pirates aren't the swashbuckling, golden-toothed, dashing, Johnny Depp-ish heroes of fantasy that people think of when they think of "pirates." That doesn't change the fact that, right now, pirates exist at the same time as artificial intelligence. 

     In a way, I'm grateful that there seems to be some cosmic force conspiring to make even the most ridiculous fictional ideas become reality. 

I'm also scared shitless.