Having gas pains?
 
Americans have been living in an American Dream world for half a century now.
 
Europeans have been paying two to three times as much for gasoline as we have for at least fifty years. 
 
We have wallowed in this “entitlement” and have developed an ever more distributed lifestyle as the distance between urban work clusters and home in suburbia, and now exurbia, have steadily increased.

Rather than prudently developing efficient and convenient mass transit to service this distributed lifestyle, this "entitlement" has spawned a very wasteful one-person-per-gasguzzler style of transportation to support our "birthright" of convenience uber alles.

Now we are in danger of being singed by the Chinese Fire Breathing Dragon, a huge and growing beastie that is fueled by petroleum.  
 
It’s time for us to wake up.  The Second World War was the pivot point that established the New Roman Empire, and we had it all our own way for three or four decades.  That's history, and we are now ruled by “fat sleek headed men” that give us “bread and circuses” instead of leadership.  They do this to divert our attention from the barbarians at the gate and the crises of leadership engulfing the empire.  We should be mounting a "Manhattan project" to get off the oil addiction, but Erectus Maximus Derrickii fiddles while Rome burns and the empire goes down the Chennyus Cronyii "energy policy" tOILet.

We are entering into a new phase in world competition.  And the Chinese are a formidable competitor for natural resources.  They are not going away, nor is the crises of limited resources and exploding global demand for those resources.

Chinese anyone?   
 
It’s should come as no surprise that the Chinese are eating our lunch but we are the ones getting the gas pains.