A few hundred years ago, I could understand the trepidation of being a pirate. You had to find food, weather storms at sea, and the military would attack and either kill you or capture you and put you on trail (and likely hanged). However today, it pays to be a pirate! You can take hostages, threat to kill them, even kill a few, and in exchange for not killing, you can get millions of dollars! Best of all, if you get caught, all that happens is you lose your guns, lose your hostages, and are free to go! What a great deal! Guns are cheap, and hostages are plentiful! Easier than playing Battleship...

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090419/ap_ … /af_piracy

The real question is not what's wrong with the pirates, but WTF is wrong with governments who won't let seamen defend themselves or use any force to stop these pirates?! Here in the US, if you took people hostage at gunpoint and demanded millions of dollars, SWAT would shot you dead no questions asked! However a Somali pirate gets a slap on the hand, and a big fat memo that says "try not to get caught next time"! Does anyone else here think something is SNAFU with "justice" today?

-avatar!

I believe it has more to do with avoiding an international incident than anything. If the United States were to open fire without express permission on another country's denizens, criminals or not, the government would certainly react.

React? You mine by saying things like this (after 3 pirates were killed):

"We are delighted," Foreign Minister Mohamed Abdulahi Omaar said. "This is a capability that we need to be able to undertake ourselves."

http://www.latimes.com/news/la-fg-capta … &track=rss

and lets say they don't like it. What are they going to do about it? Will they scold people who are protecting themselves from getting killed? Don't think so... although to be fair, I realize politics are unnecessarily complicated, but I really think in this case there would be no "incident" if pirates started getting killed.

cheers,

-avatar!

Avatar, I'm voting you most likely to be diagnosed with depression in the next three years.

I remember reading in Scientific American that it's always advantageous to cheat, since the odds of getting caught are so low. In fact, if you're a cheater, then it's even more advantageous for you to report other cheaters. The article was about drug use in sports, but I can see it being extended to pirates as well. I would imagine there are more successes than failures. In other words, more pirates scurry than get scurvy. All a pirate needs is one successful hostage/ransom deal and that's enough to retire very comfortably in that part of the world. I wonder, though, how they divide the money up amongst themselves. I can picture several of them being killed with each ransom claim, so someone gets a bigger cut. But, if they really are teenagers, then they can be more easily controlled by some older person. They might not know how much money the ransom is and what trifling amount they receive may seem significant to them.

'Ms. Depressia and The Eternal Boredom', a New York Times bestseller??

Kind of reminds me of grade school, actually...I'd get picked on by some bully, and I was the one who always got reprimanded for trying to fight back...it's kind of like, why not try telling that to the person picking the fight in the first place?!

I attribute such failures of justice to left-wing politics...which would explain why I like to lampoon them every chance I get. Them and their ant-war policies and politically correctness...

f---, I hated that. It was always me who got into trouble for not standing up for myself, but the one time I did, I beat the hell out of the guy, and I still got into trouble.

You sound like Kenneth Baker (ArmsTech) from MGS.

heheh

Next thing you know he'll be talking about MUF (material unaccounted for)

"many of the barrels are corroded and leaking..."

sorry, couldn't resist

That man and his MUF.

haha
Thanks, but if you new me you would realize you are as far from the truth as possible! You're talking to a guy that doesn't smoke, drink coffee, alcohol, or do anything of that nature. I would say the two things in life that I really want at this moment are

a)finish my PhD
b)find myself the right gal

and a distant third I suppose would be world peace.

cheers,

-avatar!

Meryl's muff always keeps Snake's erect solid in the bitterest of arctic Alaskan climates.

(don't Hayte the player, Hayte the game).

Just KNEW that was coming.

Hell is Coming Here!!

"There is currently no formal procedure for NATO personnel to follow once they have apprehended pirates, Davies noted. Their weapons are confiscated and they are then typically given provisions and released."

http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/africa/04 … index.html

Given provisions? We have starving people in the US as well as every country in the world, and yet we give pirates provisions?! I suggest NATO should also giving them badges, and once they accumulate enough badges they can trade them in for rewards, such as a Nintendo DS, a HD television, or a even a new ship!

Avatar, you straight edge, homeslice! I'm eatin' THAT sandwich, lemme tell you.

As for the gal, I remember Schala at one point asking me what I had in mind for marriage, and I weakly responded with something like I don't got the confidence for women. That's changed, but I'm still a clumsy fool when I'm around the chicks I'm into, so the most I can hope for at this point is a gal who digs my wackiness.

Also, Shoe? Was the way you spelled "hayte" a reference to David Hayter, who voices Snake? Just had to ask.

You are definitely a candidate for depression if you think that avoiding those substances grants immunity against it. I'm currently 73 pages into a research paper (that I'm writing myself) on that topic and not one cause has anything to do with smoking, drinking, or anything of that nature. In fact, I'm glad you made this post. I never once thought that my healthy lifestyle would protect me from depression, because I didn't plan to get depressed. As I had posted previously, it is often caused by a cascade of events over a period of many years. If you do get depressed, you'll then be faced with the challenge of determining which events caused it. It's not easy to do that, because those events are not necessarily related to "bad" behaviors. You might be doing something wrong right now and not know it. Since criminals that don't know how to stop eventually get caught, your wrong (criminal) behavior will eventually get caught by your brain. Think of your brain as the police force monitoring your behavior. You can trick your brain for a while, as criminals can do with the police. But do it enough and you'll get caught. Unfortunately, your brain does not even hint at what the laws are.

Oh but of course, me lovely friend.

I strive for the obscure jokes and wacky references and quotes wherever i can find them.

I was at my peak in the whereabouts of 2005, but i can't recall whether you were an active member here back then?

(and right now i'm a little tired so i dare not click on that 'Archives' link right now..)

EDIT: I think Adam took down the 'Archive' feature, maybe for bandwidth reasons.

'Doing something wrong' as in trying to predict the future?

What's yer definition of 'doing something wrong'?

By the by, did you know that a German named Stephan Grothgar voices Snake in the European version?

Leben?

Fallen?

VOLKS MANTISE (tm)

Tom's brain wants him to be a man with a great fortune, a lot of girlfriends, security in work and property, high intellectual capacity, an ability to be socially dominant and get things his way.

But then, when he always make choices which doesn't make him any of that - and doesn't even bring him closer to the goal in any regard - he does something wrong. Like, when he wasted 5 - 6 important years in early adolescence on games. He couldn't understand why he didn't feel well, until he stopped playing them. Suddenly everything was ok. He made the right choice!

I ... can't guarantee that is his definition though.

Regarding pirates: Someone told that the piracy accounted for over 1/2 of Somalia's annual income. Why would we take all that off their hands?

I been here since at least 2003. I remember posting as early on as my middle year in high school, and that was that year. I don't know how active I was, though.

Einhander background reference?

Yay, Grassie for great post of the day.

Yes, things that we enjoy on one area of life can often have unintended affects on other areas of our life, but it's often so subtle we don't notice those affects until much later.

Ah, but what came first? Are we social losers because we play video-games, or do we play video-games BECAUSE we're social losers?

Have we met in real life or somethin'?

Yeah baby, remixed with Mantis's choice of fashion apparel.

I wasn't able to find out what I was doing wrong until I became depressed. It has nothing to do with wasting time (on video games, for example), as one may suspect. It is very logical to assume that substance abuse and entertainment abuse are responsible for depression. It is also logical to assume that the Earth is flat.

  I'm not going to elaborate here, but I have organized some of the wrong things.

  Chorological Behavior, Conformist Behavior, Expected Behavior, Non-Goal Oriented Behavior. The most shocking thing about them is that they are almost totally psychological. That's shocking because it makes sense. One would expect physical behaviors to cause depression, but depression is a mental problem and is thus aggravated by mental wrongdoings. Chorology is the study of spacial distribution and it plays a large role in depression, and it's the only one that is not psychological.

That's the opposite of what I've always thought and personally experiencedin the past; I always thought depression led to entertainment abuse as a form of escapism and not the other way around.

Awesome response.

Thank you, Jodo.

Ashley, you're right.
Jodo, you're wrong. Go talk to some doctors (people who have actually studied depression, and are not just basing their ideas on self-studied notions). You'll be amazed to find out drugs are a MAJOR component in MANY people's depression. That's not to say that drugs are the only component, although they can by themselves lead to clinical depression. People become addicted and dependent on something (say for example alcohol) and the rest of their life suffers greatly because they can't break the addiction and they become depressed. Also, as Ashely mentioned depressed people want to "escape" from their depression, so they find things to amuse and sometimes abuse. Sometimes that leads to an even greater addiction on drugs (which might have been the original cause of the depression), although sometimes it might be something like sleeping all the time, or just watching TV. Clinical depression is very serious Jodo, and it's not something that you can just "think" through. I have friends (in the medical community) that deal with substance abuse and psychological disorders, and they'll tell you that living a healthy lifestyle and refraining from drug use as much as possible is the best way to avoid depression (and many problems in general) and I tend to believe them!

cheers,

-avatar!

Yep, avatar, you are right. Jodo has jumped on one of his own theories and run with it. It's fun and interesting but uninformed.

There can be many psychological triggers and contributing factors of course (like dwelling on morbid news stories!). Though it should be noted that, like with lung cancer, people can live the most healthy of lives and still get depression. As you say, clinical depression is very serious.

Were you under a different handel back then?

Indeed.