The world's approach to the Somali pirate problem is to repel the bad guys with fire hoses or capture them with military ships, then release them unharmed. It seems there are no laws and no courts to provide the kind of justice that discourages buccaneering on the high seas. (A few, captured by the French, are to be tried in Kenya, but nobody expects serious sentences.)

You can predict the potential success of this weak policy by driving to a Barnes & Noble bookstore with a coffee shop with outdoor patio. Carry a drink and a bakery goodie out to the patio and sit down. Now watch the birds.

As I sit here sipping a latte and munching on a grilled blueberry scone, little dark-feathered birds begin to edge closer, their greedy little beaks pointed at the crumbs on my plate.

I shoo them off, but they quickly return. Across the way, a lady leaves a small cake on her plate while she goes off for more coffee. Immediately, two birds jump on the table and start dining on her cake, pulling large chunks of white fluff down onto the table.

This is the third year I have been shooing birds away from my scone. But each month the birds become bolder and bolder. One actually grins in derision. The birds get closer and closer. They look like Johnny Depp in a pirate suit.

More and more birds appear. I am having trouble swallowing my latte as my mind leaps to visions of Alfred Hitchcock and his horror film The Birds.

Now I am eating like an inmate of a Texas prison. My left arm is crooked around my food and drink so that other prisoners cannot steal my meal. Except it isn't prisoners I'm afraid of, it's the birds who are attempting to hijack my blueberry scone.

I vow never to use the patio again. There are too many swarming, aggressive pirate birds.

These birds are smart. They know there is no penalty for hijacking my scone. And because they pick up enough crumbs, they get fat. They lay more eggs, producing more young. They multiply and become increasing aggressive. Their brains tell them that pirating pays off. And there is no penalty.

There's not a great deal of difference between these birds and the Somali pirates. Both are getting fat on the pickings. With more and more ransom crumbs being picked up by the Somali buccaneers, their numbers increase and they become more aggressive. At first they pirated near shore. Then when the crumbs move a hundred miles off shore, they bought motherships which could sail out into the ocean and then launch small motorboats.

The Somali pirates are rapidly becoming bolder and more numerous.

And why not?

Like the birds, they know that the pickings are great. And there is no penalty for failure. All the world's navies do is capture and release, or shoo them away with water hoses.

Like the birds of Barnes & Noble, the Somali pirates will grow in number and aggressiveness as long as the world's wealth floats tolerantly by.

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