War Against the Weak: The Movie has already been nominated by the festival for its Social Justice award. After years of intense research and collaboration with author Black, and painstaking filming from Long Island to Auschwitz by noted director Justin Strawhand and producer Pete Demas, the gripping film version of the groundbreaking investigation into the eugenics movement comes to the big screen. The production company's announcement comes as the movie begins the film festival circuit in preparation for mass distribution.
from cutting edge news: I was expecting a dark tale of gloom and doom, a post-apocalyptic tableau of a born-again, prehistoric oil-free society. After all, Edwin Black is the author of the chillingly revelatory IBM and the Holocaust, a disheartening exposé of America's disgusting attraction to the racist pseudo-science of eugenics, War Against The Weak, and other sobering and impeccably researched investigative works.
Black states the problem clearly and without hyperbole or hysterics. He then presents a sane and remarkably rational step-by-step scheme for quitting our fossil fuel dependency. Along the way, he cites published, noncontroversial works plus his own primary research, which keeps the proceedings well out of the realm of science fiction, except perhaps for one element...
IT'S NO ACCIDENT The fact that this unending and expanding thirst for oil is the world's economic and political choke point is no accident, as Black recalls from his previous book, Internal Combustion. Throughout history, fuel has been controlled by political and commercial interests that were, as now, two sides of the same coin. And despite the fact that oil pollutes, affects all other prices and forces us to play nice with interests that are antithetical to our own, a huge socioeconomic infrastructure supports and promotes its perpetuation. But rather than pound the obvious, Black calmly sets the table, then moves on to his recommendations for extricating ourselves from the nightmare.
RATIONAL IDEAS The required actions are all rational and involve the use of existing technologies - electricity, bio-fuels, hydrogen fuel cells and more. Black lays it out week by week, with each successive step building upon previous ones to move away from the petroleum morass. The auto industry will have to be a large part of the solution. One would consider this a no-brainer with the economy in the dumper right now. Manufacturing and selling gas-free vehicles could revive the industry. But according to Black, automakers that have already developed the technology are reluctant to fully roll out new vehicles to compete with their large stock of unsold gas guzzlers. But the good news is that they would be forced to do so as their business spirals downward.
The challenge is to get past the incumbent infrastructure. Between lobbyists, politicians and the public, the addiction to oil is entrenched. That's where The Plan requires some suspension of disbelief. With their profits on the line, we can expect a fierce and concerted campaign of fear, uncertainty, doubt and obfuscation to dissuade the migration from oil. The government, which should be part of the solution, is still a large part of the problem. The EPA, for example, makes conversion of internal combustion engines to alternative fuels more difficult, according to Black. And its determined indifference toward mileage standards has encouraged inefficiency, too.
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from spero news: War Against the Weak is to be released on January 24 at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, the film based on investigate reporter Edwin Black’s opus on the origins of the eugenics movement in the United States, and its connections with Nazism. Hollywood luminaries Clint Eastwood, Kate Winslet and Mickey Rourke will be attending the festival and receiving awards at the prestigious event being held at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in Santa Barbara, California.
