Here’s a suggestion: Put heavily armed marines on some civilian ships.

Meanwhile, the British have instructed their navy to ignore pirates, out of the remarkable fear that any captured Somali pirates might have asylum claims on metropolitan Britain. I am not alone in thinking this an ignominious day for Britain. But it is a double whammy for unintended consequences: it is unlikely that it was ever intended that asylum law would be read to create a municipal duty for Britain regarding detentions for piracy off the coast of Africa — but it was equally unlikely that it was ever contemplated that a state would appeal to asylum law in order to abandon what might otherwise be seen as an affirmative international law duty to maintain the law of the seas….

Britain continues to sink below the waves, not because the seas are rising, but because they’re being borne down by the sheer weight of their own legalistic cowardice. Here’s my advice - don’t capture any pirates. “Sorry, they all drowned. Terrible shame, terrible.”

Then again, we’ve already de facto modified the Geneva Conventions so that it’s not OK to summarily execute terrorists. Why shouldn’t we expect pirates to walk back into our oh-so-modern, oh-so-enlightened world through that wide open door? Who’s next, slavers? Cannibals?

This is the true price of pacifism and multiculturalism. When good people are prohibited by their own laws and morals from destroying evil, there is no other possibility but that evil will prosper.

The proper answers to piracy remain what they always were. “Millions for defense, not one cent for tribute” and “Neca eos omnes, Deus suos agnoscet.”

In the city: When seconds count, the police are only minutes away.

In the ocean: When minutes count, the coast guard is only hours away.