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to risk capturing their Somali successors. They had been advised by Her Majesty’s Government that, under the European Human Rights Act, any pirate taken into custody would be entitled to claim refugee status in the United Kingdom and live on welfare for the rest of his life.16 There was a film series popular at the time: Pirates of the Caribbean. I doubt it would have cleaned up at the box office if the big finale had shown Mr. Geoffrey Rush and his crew of scurvy sea dogs settling down in council flats in Manchester and going to the pub for a couple of jiggers of rum washed down to cries of “Aaaaargh, shiver me benefits check, lad.” For his part, the U.S. Attorney-General, the chief lawenforcement official of the world’s superpower, was circumspect about the legal status of pirates, as well he might be. Obviously, if the United States Navy had seized some eyepatched peglegged blackguard off the coast of Somalia and hanged him from the yardarm or made him walk the plank, pious senators would have risen as one to denounce an America that no longer lived up to its highest ideals ... and the network talking-heads would have argued that Plankgate was recruiting more and more young men to the pirates’ cause...and judges by the dozen would have ruled that pirates were entitled to the protections of the U.S. constitution and that under ObamaCare their peglegs had to be replaced by high-tech prosthetic limbs at taxpayer expense.

Conversely, a 2010 headline from the Associated Press: “Pirates ‘Have All Died,’ Russia Says, After Decrying ‘Imperfections’ In International Law.”17 Perhaps it seemed just as funny at the time.

The Somalis had made the mistake of seizing a Russian tanker. When Moscow’s commandos took it back, they found themselves with ten pirates on their hands and the prospect of submitting them to an “imperfect” international legal regime. So, as a Defense Ministry spokesman explained, they “released” them. The Russians supposedly put them in a boat and pointed it in the general direction of Somalia. “They could not reach the coast and apparently have all died,” said the official, poker-faced.

Oh.

Bad cop or metrosexual Euro-cop? On the high seas of reality, it was not a tough call.

FIVE BILLION GUYS NAMED MO

To state the obvious, the world after America is a lot more Muslim. Between 2010 and 2030, the ummah—the worldwide Muslim community—was predicted to increase from somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of the global population to one third of humanity.18 By the time we got there, they wound up with a little more than that, the demographers having failed to take into account such icing on the ummah’s cake as the accelerating Muslim conversion rates on the Continent. But one third of humanity turned out to be a good ballpark figure, give or take. Non-Muslims did most of the giving, and Islam did the taking, especially of Europe. According to the UN, global population is supposed to peak at about nine billion in 2050, then level off and start to decline.19 If you were one of those now mostly extinct eco-fetishists who thought of humanity as a species, then that nine billion was the number to watch, up from six billion at the turn of the century. But, if you didn’t think of the world as one unified global parking lot, you were less interested in the big number and more in its constituent parts: on the road to that nine billion, almost all the increase in global population came from Islam and sub-Saharan Africa. Muslims would represent a third of the world’s population, yet, aside from a handful of rapacious emirs and a few thousand layabout Saudi princes gambling and whoring in Mayfair and Macau, enjoy almost none of its wealth.

That would come as no surprise if you recall that statistic about Egypt’s economic decline relative to South Korea. And Mubarak’s thug state was considerably less decayed than Sudan and other Islamic hinterlands where by the dawn of the third millennium they had done a cracking job of killing almost all human progress of the modern age. Nevertheless, they are one in three of the