10 Comments

  1. anonone
    April 14, 2009,

    Hopefully, we’ll reach a point someday when killing human beings is no longer used as a way of keeping score.

  2. anon
    April 14, 2009,

    Speaking of graphs…

    It is well-documented that “…there is a statistically significant inverse relationship between pirates and global temperature.”

  3. Unstable Isotope
    April 14, 2009,

    Time for global cooling, anon!

  4. anon
    April 14, 2009,

    Madison was a moderate.

  5. John Tobin
    April 14, 2009,

    If you are judging your presidents by the number of pirates killed, you need to go back to Thomas Jefferson, who took out the Barbary Pirates during the period 1801-1805.
    It sounds like at the Battle of Derna in 1805 had Barbary casualties in the thousands, although with cannons bombarding the city I am thinking a lot of the dead were civilians.

    On February 15, 1804 Stephen Decatur led a group sent to retake the ship “Philadelphia” from Barbary Pirates. As a pirate reported later, the Americans “sent Decatur on a dark night, with a band of Christian dogs fierce and cruel as the tiger, who killed our brothers and burnt our ships before our eyes.” Decatur’s men wielded tomahawks and killed twenty pirates in as many minutes, chasing the rest over the side. Only one raider was wounded before the Philadelphia was set afire in four places. Then the Americans withdrew (Castor, 1971).

    http://www.earlyamerica.com/review/2002_winter_spring/terrorism.htm

  7. John Tobin
    April 14, 2009,

    Sorry I missed the 2nd graph.
    I was scrolling down too fast.

  8. cassandra_m
    April 14, 2009,

    For heaven’s sake anon — that graph now means that wingnuts will blame Al Gore for pirates now.

  10. Susan Regis Collins
    April 15, 2009,

    What happened to my comment? It was # 3.

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