What’s the hottest little piece of “I Hate America!” being shown to your kids behind your back?:
THE STORY OF STUFF!
And who’s the vaguely Carrie-Fisher-looking broad hosting it? Why that’s Annie Leonard!:
Leonard is coordinator of Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives and serves on the boards of International Forum for Globalization and the Environmental Health Fund. She previously held positions with Health Care Without Harm, Essential Information and Greenpeace International, and is currently coordinator of the Funders Workgroup for Sustainable Production and Consumption.
Fair! And Balanced!
Well, at least *I’ll* balance it out in the next few days…
[By the way, you can spend hours picking out all the lies in this thing, but this one (at 15:05) I can’t let go without comment: that we’re targeted by 3000 ads per day. A little math says this is 125 an hour. So apparently we’re watching TV 24 hours a day, and seeing nothing but 28.8 second commercials]
Oh, and a shiny new donkey if you can actually sit through the whole thing without turning away in disgust at least once.
Hint: I don’t get a donkey.
UPDATE: Surely SOMEONE is strong enough to claim this glistening beast of burden!
UPDATE 2 (5-13-09 10:30AM): For those without YouTube viewing capability, the full referenced and annotated script:
Sorry, no donkey for reading these.
Sorry made it to the 2:02 point and blew a gasket….guess I don’t get a donkey.
Somebody needs to make a rebuttle to this video called “Collectivism and You: Why You Won’t Have Any Freedoms When You Grow Up.”
I made it to to 01:15 or so.
You might as well just watch this instead. Shorter, and it gets to the point A LOT faster.
Sorry, dude, couldn’t stomach past 3:01. Took this chick 10 YEARS to figure out the start/stop process? Government’s “job” is to “look out for us” and “take care of us”?
Just another libtard who fails to recall Jefferson from History 101: “When the people fear their government, there is tyranny. When the government fears the people, there is liberty.”
The tank idea, though, is pretty kick-a$$ when faced with moonbats and teroritz.
I guess fear of catching a Jap harpoon got this fat dyke out of the open water…
5 minutes 11. I stopped counting the flat out lies at 5 (point reached well before I stopped watching)
I say the narator should move to Somolia, No business, no production, no government. Surrounded by those rightous 3rd world people in their native state.
Just read the @#$%#%$ NYT puff piece you linked not one lousy word about the fact that the piece is innaccurate and easily shown to be innacurate in key details (even in the first 5 min and 11 seconds)
I guess I was naive to expect better from the NYT .
This is the biggest piece of Marxist fear mongering garbage I’ve ever seen in my entire life! It was so bad I almost thought it was a parody at first. “Some friends of mine think I should use a tank to represent the government…” If these people ever get control of our country we are in some serious doo doo.
I got sick before 3:00 and stopped it at 3:34. Not only is she spewing great deal of LIES like our military consumes nearly half our budget (BTW it’s 6% now, and something like 15% during WWII), but she’s also spewing communist talking points.
Sorry man I just can’t stand it.
2:52, thats as far as I could go. The naiveté and flippant nature of this is sickening, especially in the talking to little kids tone she uses throughout.
An obvious frontrunner for the DFC award.
(dumb fu– ng c–t)
Well it looks like the classless disgrace in the white house has his commie “environMENTALists” out in force. That digusting simian lover harry reid and all of the democRATs are backing this crap 100%. pelousy and dodd are standing up for this crap. At least the great Tom Coburn is adding pro gun legislation to some of these America killing bills.
I don’t even get to see this. I guess that’s OK; I’m getting the distinct impression that the host out to be immolated in lieu of alternates to incinerators…
And I’m totally for that. Immolating the host, that is.
5:02 – that was it. To this point she hadn’t said anything that we all haven’t been bombarded with a thousand times before. I quit more out of boredom than annoyance.
I knew that I would have my work cut out for me some years ago when one of my kids came home from school with the sad news that “mankind is the enemy of the whale.” Enemy? That implies an active, passionate hatred and a will to destruction. I have since convinced my kids that mankind is NOT the enemy of whale, but that mankind IS the enemy of the libtard.
I had to watch this and write a reaction for my economics class last semester. Once I stopped laughing at how stupid it was, I wrote about how idiotic she is and called her a communist.
I got a perfect score on the assignment.
Secondly it’s not a linear system it’s a cycle. Funny thing about trees is they have these things called seeds. When the seeds go into the ground new trees sprout up! And the same thing could be said about fossil fuels and such. Now is there a possibility that something like oil could be used up before it’s replaced? It might be possible but I can’t say for sure, however why should I inconvenience myself and cut back for “the sake of humankind” when people are not gonna cut back for me? Everything that I use it’s because I either need it or I paid for it and I want to enjoy it as much as possible.
2:10 and I had to hit pause because I was shaking my head to much to view the video and my snorts of laughter/disgust prevented my hearing her grating condescending voice. Will whiskey help? Let’s find out.
I wonder if they would like to change the image at 2:33 where we find the black-and-white guy shining shoes. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anything more offensive. But I haven’t seen the rest of the video yet, so we’ll see.
Anti-capitalism is one thing, but illustrating our glorious messiah-president as a shoe-shine boy crosses the line.
Why would I want a donkey anyway? Didn’t even attempt the transcript. A+ for effort to those of you with strong stomachs who tried.
And God bless Conservative home-schoolers; may He protect you and increase your numbers…it’s our only hope for the generations behind us.
Wow. Just feckin’ wow. It’s times like these that make me wish it were not stringently against the law to pound the unholy living stupid out of brainwashed nanocephalics like that.
Eight shots sheems to be the required whishkey level to watch the…uh…thish um… thingy.
Hey why are yoush all having a problem with thish clever video. And Shes so freakin HOT!!! Did you see how hot she ish?!!?!
Oh man. Shesh shmart tooo (wait ish tooo spelled whf 2 or 3 o’s) urp.
I actually did sit through the whole thing, but with friends, much cringing, and MST3K riffing. It should really be a party game. But anyway, stuff is bad – including the stuff presumably used to film the video, do the graphics, run the servers that host it, etc etc. Unless they made all the drawing ink from crushed, naturally-fallen leaves mixed with their own tears, and drew it on paper made from their own collected and pressed dandruff.
I can’t even stomach the thought of clicking on the play button.
But hey, Harvey put up my award! Cool!
Got through the first 3 paragraphs in the transcript.
I am firing everyone that works for me from an ” elite” university.
What no one tells the mindless morons who buy into these types of home movies is that folks like Al Gore and Annie Leonard never actually give up THEIR stuff. It’s rationalized that THEY need special perks (and lots of money funnelled their way) to do the “important” work of taking everyone else’s money and stuff.
Oh, and I love her warm and fuzzy description of the government. And, these are the same hippies that were “speaking truth to power” just six months ago.
This video makes me want to go on a hippie punching rampage!!!
I totally made it to 8:00, that donkey is mine!
We greedy Americans are breaking the world! It’s all our fault! Obviously China, Mexico, India, and every other industrialized productive nation are just victims of our evil capitalistic ways!
This cow should be hung, drawn and quartered for vomiting these lies in schools. She even managed to squeeze some anti-Military and anti-Bush talking points in there…
The moment I heard her say that it was a straight-line system and we can’t have THAT on our fragile little planet that could kill us all with a shudder, I shut it off. My stomach and brain just can’t handle that much distilled and concentrated stupidity and rhetoric.
I think that green replaced red a long time ago…but I suppose that employing the term watermelon (green on the outside, red on the inside) would be politically incorrect to apply to the Obama administration.
Where, pray tell, does propaganda hippie chick, get her numbers? Even her comrades on wikipedia don’t estimate the US military budget to be over 25%, let alone close to 50%.
I hope this is shown in Schools throughout America; because our kids need more sleeptime, and the classroom is a good place to get it.
@ 3:00 Doesn’t the hippy left have a basic understanding for agriculture? aka renewable natural resources aka rather than “wiping out all the animals”, harvesting some animals for human consumption & allowing the animals reproductive cycle to replace the moo cows that area presently turned into tasty hamburgers?
Well, in the moonbats’ collective defense, Captain Ahab was the enemy of the great white whale.
So is this just a more intelligent version of Al Gore’s movie?
I read the transcript (thanks, Harvey) and it takes all of about three paragraphs before you get to the one term that incites panic among the sheep:
“Crisis”.
If you’re a self-righteous opportunist like that woman above or the Algore, you know that’s one of the key words that reels ’em in almost every time.
Crisis of Climate Change
The Health Care crisis
The Energy crisis
The economy
Iraq
Nuclear weapons
Childhood obesity
Global overpopulation
Race relations in America
The Mid-East
The list could go on & on…and probably will. But you say crisis, and it stirs up the feelings of anxiety that you just gotta do something!
And since everything is capitalism’s fault – at least everything that isn’t Bush’s fault – what better way to get “proactive” (another weasel word, like “crisis”, “sustainable” & “viable”) than by buying their *stuff*!
BTW, ‘The Story of Stuff’ and ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ aren’t exactly communally available or free to the the bleating followers; you have to BUY them. As in, an exchange of capital for goods and/or services.
Some might call that capitalism.
Hey #31, I think your list there just might be God’s way of thinning the herd!
“Never let a crisis go to waste…if it’ll help thin the herd.”
Got to 2:50…bleah. “Exploitation” and “trashing the planet” just got me too riled up to continue. And this is being shown in schools? The old 3 R’s are being replaced by new ones – Recycling, Reds, and Retardation.
Well…
She is a dolt, idiot, moron, moran, etc. and so on..
I watched the whole thing out of sheer, morbid curiosity. She pseudo-brags about having an old fashioned, clunky white CRT monitor (not giving in to the man saying she should be consumerist, I guess) while softly chiding her coworker with a flat panel. She does realize that LCD monitors use a fraction of the energy, and therefore the dreaded carbon, of CRTs, right? So, American consumerism and the drive to get the best, cheapest, coolest, fastest, has produced new technology that is, in fact, better for the Earth.
Then she talks about how she got a mini-radio for $4.99. “How could this be? It must have cost more to get the materials than $4.99!” Clearly, for as much as she bashes it, has no understanding of production, manufacturing, beyond her anti-capitalist, production/consumption is bad presupposition. The main way we get those types of goods for so little is through economies of scale. As we mass produce many identical items in an economy of scale, the cost of each item goes down. For example, I make oodles. When I start, making one oodle might cost 1.00; but, due to overhead (machinery, gross materials bought in bulk) being a sunk cost, producing two oodles would then cost me $1.75 total, three $2.00 and so on. Meanwhile, those poor workers in developing countries she mentions (that we heartless American bastards are exploiting), have jobs thanks to U.S. Oodle Manufacturing Corp. Say Oodle Corp. pays its 3rd world workers $1.00 per day. “That’s a shame,” you might say. But poor, helpless third world worker is now in a higher income bracket due to the fact that (in this scenario) he is also probably a subsistence farmer, the local economy is much weaker and more impoverished than the poorest U.S. slum so goods and services will be cheap and there will be a large degree of barter/trading, and now with $1.00 poor, helpless worker has purchasing power with an international currency.
The whole video is really not about the environment. It’s about the fact that the U.S. consumer and household is the driver of the world economy; and to them, that sucks.
Now where’s my damned donkey?
7, 26: The 50% “fact” about military spending comes from the “clever” trick of also counting all the interest we’ve accrued by racking up the debt in the past. Of course, she fails to mention that then by that metric, the Great Society and New Deal’s lingering programs account for, i don’t know, probably like 500% of our budget. And, of course, I love how she conveniently disregards the preamble to the Constitution, about how the one thing the US should provide is the “common defense” when she makes up her own version of it that’s too idiotic for me to repeat.
I turned it off when she said something like only 4% of our forests remain.
“Aw, people can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. Forty percent of all people know that”
Beat the clock. I watched it yesterday. the whole thing. I want a donkey. Used to sit through entire lecture on/in Greek. Have to say the Greek lectures made more sense. Enviro-speak is a dead language and it is killing me/us.
environazi hippies bad me smash!
This is where I lost it:
“…..Like BFRs, brominated flame retardants. They are a chemical that make things more fireproof but they are super toxic. 24 They’re a neurotoxin—that means toxic to the brain. What are we even doing using a chemical like this?Yet we put them in our computers, our appliances, couches, mattresses, even some pillows. In fact, we take our pillows, we douse them in a neurotoxin and then we bring them home and put our heads on them for 8 hours a night to sleep. Now, I don’t know, but it seems to me that in this country with so much potential, we could think of a better way to stop our heads from catching on fire at night”
I am willing to bet a couple of dollars that this wench would be the first person to hire a lawyer if her pillow actually caught fire and sue anyone she could serve for not putting the appropriate protections in the “Stuff” she buys.
2:28 Wait, is she saying it’s a bad thing that corporations are slightly more involved in the economy than governments?
2:58 Yes, companies that sell meat want nothing more than the extinction of all animals. Did you compete against Obama in the Olympics? (I’m not surprised that she’s apparently unfamiliar with the concept of reproduction)
3:24 http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/wikipedian_protester.png
4:37 “They don’t own the means of production.” Subtle. Real friggin’ subtle.
5:33 I’d rather be poisoned than burned to death. This video is doing both.
5:44 If you’re eating your computer, then it’s too late for neurotoxins to do anymore damage.
6:03 Heads catching on fire: silly. People dipping pillows in toxic waste for the hell of it: SERIOUS BUSINESS.
6:25 Letting babies drink breast milk that might be poisonous: Heinous. Sucking babies’ brains out and throwing them in closets to die: A victory for women’s health. Liberals just use infants as human shields when convenient.
6:42 The Constitution says it’s the government’s responsibility to watch out for our breasts, right? It’s in there somewhere.
7:02 “Many of these factory workers are women of reproductive age!” So should we be putting old ladies in there instead? And what about the men of reproductive age, dammit?
9:05 Those greedy corporations! How dare they sell things at low prices! If they really cared about us, they’d make it so expensive that we couldn’t afford any of it! And then we wouldn’t get any toxics! And all those third-world people wouldn’t have to have jobs!
11:53 Here comes the conspiracy theory…
12:06 I just realized — this video has ads on it. This is a conscious decision on the part of whoever uploaded the video. They became a YouTube partner, meaning they get to upload longer videos and put ads on their videos and get paid for it. HOW IS THAT NOT EXACTLY WHAT THE LADY IS DENOUNCING.
13:10 PROGRESS IS BAD.
13:27 SHE IS A FRICKING TECHNOLOGICAL GENIUS.
14:33 Flat-panel monitors “make you look like you’re driving in Spaceship Central.” STOP TRYING TO TALK ABOUT TECHNOLOGY YOU IDIOT.
16:10 Yes, we had a lot more leisure time back when we were farmers.
16:45 Well, we could “just stop” if we didn’t also spend money on FOOD.
17:30 Incineration is evil. Who cares if it makes trash take up less space and creates energy? The point is it INVOLVES GARBAGE. Garbage made of toxics.
19:30 “People working on blocking landfills and incinerators” WHERE THE HECK ARE YOU PUTTING THE TRASH THEN? ARE YOU EATING IT? ARE YOU SENDING IT TO THE MOON? IT HAS TO GO SOMEWHERE!
All right, I made it. I’ll pick up my donkey now.
I had to watch this sh*t in a university class. Couldn’t keep up with all the bullsh*t being spewed so I just tuned it out after the first few minutes.
its a little hard to take any of her other figures seriously after she says the military gets 50% of our money… wiki says in 2007 the defense got less than social security so that would be more than 100% what about the rest? i estimate it all adding up to about 150% if you use her defense figure instead of wikis…..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget,_2007
our military gets so much money that my base is now not working every other monday because we have so much money!
forget about the part right below the budget breakdown which lacks citation! its…… lacking for proof to put it another way
catch on fire or be slowly poisoned until i die at the average young age of 76…. i’d rather die at 76
Yeah, she said a lot of stupid things, but I do hate planned obsolesce. The reason Toyota is more popular the GM/Chrysler? US Car companies wanted you to buy a new car every 5 years. Toyota doesn’t mind selling to you less frequently, so long as it sells you every one.
The first time I made it through all of twenty something seconds. It was until she said something about linear systems in a finite world being unsustainable. I shuddered and shut it off. But after reading some comments, I thought “Perhaps this movie is an elaborate hoax, a satire of liberal banality?” So I proceeded to watch it again, hiding my rage and disgust in laughter. This time, I made it just past ten minutes before I decided:
I would rather take my Chinese made Cuban cigar chopper, made with non recyclable pastic and energy costly stainless steel, to chop off my FU finger, than watch another minute of this torrid putrescence. Ugh! Vile filth!
Talky talky talky. I really WANT to listen, she’s got a nice voice, there’s FANCY visual effects.
But the dirty commie message is messin it all up for me.
No donkey for me. I hate it when they talk over my head and use technical terms like “super-toxic” and “yuck”.
I thought that the last 35 years of lib drivel in the school system was responsible for Obama but imagine the mind-dead clones this version of Sesame Street is going to crank out!
BTW, anyone know where I can get one of the $5 buck radios?
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Why do I have a sudden desire to yank my kids out of public school? I’ll take being annoyed by having my kids around 24/7 any day over letting them be brainwashed like this. I am outraged!
I lasted till about the “rape and pillage the environment” spot before retching. Good lord… hyper-ventilate much?
.. just.. whatever you do.. no *not* read the YouTube comments. It reminds me of an Obama rally. Ms. Leonard must be auditioning for EPA Secretary.
This story of stuff is a giant, smelly, steamy pile of commie pinko STUFF!!!
Nope didn’t make it either… if this is the kind of crap the school systems are making our kids sit through in class…no woder there are more guns in school, I want to shoot someone right now…
I am a respectable, right winged extremist, tea bagging, trailer park living, bigoted, racist, gay bashing homophobe,
democrat slamming, liberal trashing, ACLU cussing, gun toting, Muslim hating, SUV driving – gas guzzling, hippies use the side door to enter,
cigarette smoking by the No Smoking sign, beer drinking, meat eating, resource wasting, free internet porno watching,
God fearing Christian, employed full time, white trash, taxpaying redneck and single.
Like I always say, it could be worse.
John Wayne could be the one narrating this video, (as in, agreeing with it)
or this lady could be president (my guess is Obama will make a few photo op moves towards environmentalism like increasing funding for the EPA or making a modern day CDC. I don’t expect Kyoto round 2. If he tried, he probably get pushback from Europe.)
Or this lady could have been in charge 50 years ago and we wouldn’t have BFR-treated computers to watch this on.
I get a donkey, so send it posthaste. And DARNITALL, that pischer at How The World Works has already done a video critique of it, so I’ve been denied the pleasure. I had a whole bunch of it written already too!!!! I mean, there is SO MUCH THERE to blast apart.
Now tell me; I didn’t see a notice on the youtube page that this is being shown in schools – thank god I’m going in for high school education (in math, none of these sissy subjects) and not early childhood education or I’d lose my mind daily once I get there. So…how do we know it’s being shown in schools? I’m sure it is, I just didn’t see the cite.
The best part about this is as a Conservative, I have never bought into the garbage she is talking about. As a Conservative I AM thrifty. It is the dummy liberals who are miserable and always trying to keep up with the Joneses. So, once again it is the liberals who have created the problem by being conspicuous consumers and now some uberliberals think they have the answer. Another thing which struck me as odd is that this pinko wants us to go back to the stone age which is what the muslim terrorsists want too. Ergo, liberals are terrorists. Ain’t I a jeaneus.
When I went to the April 15 tea party a bunch of students held up a HUGE (like 50 feet by 7 feet, with them holding poles to hold it up, silently not looking at anyone) banner that was supposedly a chart of the US budget, with military taking over 75 percent of it. And it included state governments. At the next protest, I’m taking copies of not only the debt from Obama but the budget itself since even things kids learn in high school civics are no longer common knowledge among adults.
Anniee – First link in the post leads to a NY Times story that talks about its use in schools.
Relevant paragraph:
“So far, six million people have viewed the film at its site, storyofstuff.com, and millions more have seen it on YouTube. More than 7,000 schools, churches and others have ordered a DVD version, and hundreds of teachers have written Ms. Leonard to say they have assigned students to view it on the Web.”
I liked the part where we blew up mountains, chopped down trees and killed animals, can we find some more sh*t to blow up and chop down and kill?
Man.. I couldn’t even make it through the PDF. How sad is that?
This is mainly due to the fact that I kept reading the annotations and “references”. Not a single empirical source was cited. It’s all merely leftist ranting and conjecture in her “sources”.
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Oh laaaaaawwwwdddddd, made it! Listen to the last 2:30-3 minutes for the Socialism angle….
Damn near 3 minutes, right after the “corporation” bashing. I counted 3 outright lies before hand, especially “50% of our money goes to the military”… bullcrap. Most of it goes into federal debt with Social Security and Medicare, entitlement programs like the Carrie Fisher look alike (although Fisher is more attractive even now) and other libs want.
OK, so she makes some big-government-sounding proposals.
But the facts are the facts (I checked, and hers are mostly well sourced). The overall presentation makes some very good points which should not be blown off. Like the fact that we buy so much crap from China which is intentionally designed to break.
It’s really stupid to continue to ignore environmental problems just because we can’t always see them in our own backyard. I’ve traveled a lot and seen a lot of the destruction that goes on around the world, first-hand. And yes, it does still happen in the USA.
Also, I for one want off the rat race of materialism. It’s the tyranny of numbers. Because the economy and the GDP are measurable, we obsess about them to the point of ignoring other less measurable but more important things– like family unity, strength of friendships, happiness. We use GDP as a proxy for happiness, which only works up to a certain point (when basic needs are being met). I’m not saying government policy should be made on the basis of measuring such intangibles, but that our whole culture should learn or re-learn to value those things more.
The facts are the facts, but her presentation selects facts and puts them in proximity (while omitting others) in order to point uninformed viewers toward an inaccurate conclusion.
If a car salesman did the same thing, I’d have legal recourse.
As for pollution – yeah, it’s a byproduct of capitalism.
The byproduct of non-capitalist systems, though, is starvation and oppression.
Pick your poison.
As for you personally, go ahead – leave the rat race, stop worrying about the GDP, and focus on your family. Just please don’t (as she does) advocate government policies that interfere with other people’s right to enjoy working in their jobs. One man’s “rat race” is another man’s “calling”.