kissing butt

This is the first article of today ( to make up for yesterday ). Tune in at 1pm for my regular article.
KISSING BUTT
I just got done reading the book "Churchill, Hitler, And The Unnecessary War" by Patrick Buchanan. Actually, I read about half of it. You think I can blather on and on, pumping up a few simple ideas into near book length, you should try reading this sleeping pill. So, I read the first third and then skipped around reading whichever chapter sounding good. Basically, from before the First World War on, how poor leadership decisions led to an unnecessary conflict ( or, two of them ). It was fascinating history, but it did tend to just drag on. It had sound conclusions, but I think too much blame was laid in certain laps. What tended to be overlooked was the fact that even if details had varied by alternate decisions, the end would have been about the same. Really, little else could have been done. The First World war finished off the finances of Great Britain, the opening salvo fired off during the economic conflict between her and Germany for some time before the first guns fired. Look at the wars end. Britain had increased her debt fourteen times. Germany was worse off with reparations. Yet Germany bounded back and became a first class economy again. Yes, a war based economy. But then, so was a recovered United States decades later. But Britain did little except continue her decline. In the end, before the Second World war started, she was finished off through appeasement to the US ( in fear of paying back loans ). She destroyed much of her navy, scrapped her friendship with Japan ( which worked out well during the first war and would have continued to provide free Pacific naval policing she could ill afford ). By being in such dire straights economically, she was forced to make one poor decision after another. Each one hastened her fall, although each was thought to be necessary to buy more time.
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Today you can see similar short sighted policies being agreed on because of energy. Topical news subjects bring up the Ukraine and its natural gas supply being held hostage by Russia. Germany, to avoid the same fate, is busy kissing Russian Bear butt. One can't imagine the consequences being as dire from this action as the fate Britain invited eighty years ago, but you never know. The US is, however, doing much worse with its energy policy. Since we import the bulk of our energy, we are so busy kissing butt to gain cheap and abundant energy that it seems natural enough to not even seem like anything other than normal. We have pretty much allowed uncontrolled Mexican immigration, in large part to appease their government who controls the petroleum fields down south. It is only incidental that corporations benefited with downward labor pressures. But as a result of this immigration, we have seem a population explosion that will help speed up resource depletion, especially food. We've doubled our population in the time it took our oil production to halve. And been busy paving over farmland the whole time. Those policies will come home to roost soon. And that is just to get Mexican oil. What idiocy have we embarked on for Saudi oil? Look no further than our two current wars. And that is just the obvious. You can add in a lot of financial shenanigans that have cost us dearly. Even past wars can be attributed to some kind of oil fix.
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The point is that once you start making decisions based on a weakening economy, the door is open to increase your decline through the need to pick the least bad choice. Either choice is bad, but you pick the one that will give you the breathing room to continue to survive. Even if that decision will hasten the fall of your empire years down the road. Just listen to our last leader and the new one waiting to be crowned. They tell us deficits our grandchildren must pay are bad. Yet, they must act now to combat our terrible economic problems. You don't need to be the sharpest marble in the bag to tell they are making the least bad decision and that it will bite us in the butt big time. I would go into the terrible bargains we have made by kissing the ChiComs butt, but something tells me they will be in as worse straights than we are and thus it doesn't matter a whole lot any more. Of course, depressions invite war. Not that either country will invade the other, and more than likely we won't nuke each other. But if conflict is seen as the least bad decision, who knows what will take place. Because we have trashed our economy, we must continue to kiss butt to some, and make poor decisions regarding others. We've spent more bailing out the bankers ( which seems to have had no good result ) than on fighting in Iraq, so it might seem like that conflict can't do as that much harm economically. But, again, if that decision was made partly to seek favor with Saudi Arabia, it is another domino leading to our demise. I don't know the end point of all these bad decisions, other than something less than desirable.
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