Tell Me Something I Don't Know

[ParadiceCity9]

thank you unriggable.
I did not know map.

[Dancing Mustard]

have any of you read The Dispossessed? Interesting book that deals largely with this kind of stuff...

Classic book that, loved every page and I'd recomend it to anybody. Funny you mention it actually, I was thinking about it while I was in the shower only yesterday. Coincidence is a funny thing really...


Oh yeah, informed literary critique for all the intellectuals out there: f*ck Earthsea and all associated bollocks that resided in it. Dispossesed is where Le Guin's A-game was at. Word is bond.

[fireedud]

I raped you last night.

[Dancing Mustard]

Kim Jong Il's annual purchases of Hennessy cognac reportedly total to $700,000, while the average North Korean earns the rough estimate equivalent of $900 per year.

He earned that luxury with his incredible lyrical skills though, and most other internationally acclaimed rappers run up that kind of tab on booze in a month.

Look, check out this brief example of him flexing his lyrical muscle:

My name's Kim Jong! The US is wrong! Continue foreign aid or taste my dong!
I gots mad flo when I eat my pho, capitalist pigs I overthrow!
We're an Axis of Evil! Like the Knievel! No chance of Japanese civilian retreival!
IAEA criticize us, I say that's insanium! DPRK right to enrich uranium!
I don't mean to boast but you guys are toast, Taepodong-2 can reach the west coast!

[heavycola]

^^Irrelevant pedanticism.

you just summarised your entire output. Welcome to self-awareness.


PS love the dispossessed. Can't believe it never came up in any of the anarchy threads that used to proliferate here.

[daddy1gringo]

The official coffee of the Vatican is Puerto Rican.

[ParadiceCity9]

aragorn, lord of the rings: the fellowship of the rings, about to kick the asses of like 50 urikhai *spelling is way off*, just saved frodo

[Stoney229]

6 things you don't know:
#1: 27 million slaves exist in the world today
#2: that's more than twice the total number of slaves that were brought from Africa in the entire 400 years of the transatlantic "Triangle Trade"... and more than there has ever been before.
#3: the average cost of a slave in 1850 in Mississippi was $40,000 (USD adjusted for inflation)... a major investment that was protected much more than the even-more-abused, disposable slaves of today, which average $80 a person.
#4: Two fifths of the world's cocoa comes from farms that use slave labor (not just child exploitation.... but real slave labor)
#5: Millions of us indulge ourselves daily with the pleasures of chocolate and coffee at the cost of the the lives of millions, who had their lives stolen by the traffickers that we support by buying chocolate.
#6: You can, and should, make a difference, by buying "Fair Trade Certified" chocolate and coffee, which is certified to not support slavery, but ensures taht all laborers involved are paid a fair price. By refusing to buy traditional "free trade" chocolate and coffee, and instead demanding that retailers offer Fair Trade items, the Fair Trade market will grow, and major chocolate manufacturers will gradually lose the benefit they have from using slave labor cocoa/coffee, eventually ending much of the modern slave trade altogether.

Thanks for posting this. My family and I use a lot of both products. Can you elaborate: what countries is the slave labor ocurring in, what brands of coffee and chocolate are "fair trade Certified", or how do you find out? Actually, I mainly need to know about chocolate. We buy coffee that is grown here in Puerto Rico, which I'm sure is safe.

Thank you for asking. Sorry it took me so long to reply... I stopped getting emails for this thread... so I'm glad I happened to come back again.

Slave labor occurs in every country in the world, actually. It can be very hard to track... for reasons I won't get into right now for brevity's sake. Even in the US- the CIA estimates that 15,000 are trafficked into the US every year (mostly domestic slaves and sex slaves-personal and commercial- as well as some agricultural slaves).

43% of the world's cocoa comes from The Ivory Coast (a country in western Africa)... and according to my memory of this documentary, 90% of the cocoa farms there use slave labor.

There are many companies that sell fair trade chocolate and coffee (the coffee is a lot easier to find right now), but the company I get my chocolate [bars] from is called Divine Chocolate. You can learn much more about Fair Trade and where to buy it here.

My mother told me she recently emailed the major grocery store in her area, "Schnucks", telloing them that she will only buy Fair Trade certified cocoa products, and asking them to sell it, and to my surprise, they promptly responded asking what manufacturers would have products they could buy. My point in saying this is to encourage you to also do the same... inform local retailers of your support of the Fair Trade market, and ask them to participate, and it can potentially make a huge difference.

If you have any more questions, please let me know.