Here’s an article chronicling the failures of leadership by Barack Obama and Dan Akerson, GM’s CEO, in their “success” in turning the former automotive powerhouse around.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/louiswoodhill/2012/08/15/general-motors-is-headed-for-bankruptcy-again/

Their lesson is one that far too many “leaders” today need to learn:  being smug, all-knowing, ridiculously entitled, arrogant, condescending, and out of touch while consistently delivering nothing but incompetence and failure is not leadership.

During my unplanned hiatus, we lost one of the giants of rock, keyboardist Jon Lord of Deep Purple.  There will never be his like again.

Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit had a good roundup last night of the accelerating trouble in China, here:  http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/148570/

I predicted China’s descent years ago, not because I’m particularly good at political or economic prognostication, but because it was very clear that the leaders of that country were willing to do everything BUT what it would take for the nation to succeed:  freeing their people.  But of course, that would have cost those leaders their jobs, so that makes them the more common “leaders” that the entire world is afflicted with almost universally these days.

Wow, has it really been since December that I’ve posted anything?  Since my last post I started a new job in a new field in a new state, so things have been a bit busy.

It’s been a real lesson in how well my basic leadership philosophy would stand up to some serious tests and trials:  in just a few words, very well indeed.  More about that later.

I’ve finished a great many books in that time — my wife and I invested in Kindle Fires before all the move stuff started, and that’s been a godsend.  More on that later as well — for now I’ll just say one quick thing about progressive hero Teddy Roosevelt, whose African hunting safari book I’m just now finishing:  dude was a badass killing machine.

The fam and I also invested this summer in a very nice pop-up camper, in which we’ve had several wonderful trips already.  Here’s the whole rig with the boys showing it off, in Champaign, Illinois:  home of REO Speedwagon, of course.

It’s good to be back!  More to come soon.

I for one admit I had no idea the Voyager spacecraft were still transmitting, much less still out there learning stuff for us.  Now they’re headed for interstellar space, the first craft of mankind to do so.

Yet another h/t to Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit.

Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit is my hero lately.  He gets credit for pointing to this post by Roger Kimball expressing the same contempt I’ve long had for the TSA.  Seriously, folks, this is America; is the TSA really how far we’ve fallen?

Another one from Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit.  Amazing stuff.

I couldn’t help but be vexed and frustrated by the hullaballoo over a single message on a bag sold by Lululemon, a purveyor of yoga-oriented soft goods.  The message was “Who is John Galt?”  Some of you may recognize it from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.

And the wails that one item has raised!  The New York Times felt compelled to weigh in here, and there was this commentary at the Just Marketing blog.

Well, here’s the comment I left at that blog site:

Milton Friedman was absolutely correct in his devastating critique of what we now laud as “corporate social responsibility.” So in an ideal world, I’d agree with the argument that Mr. Wilson is misusing his shareholders’ money.

But that debate is long since lost, and we’re now constantly pummeled by foolish and destructive left-wing activism from almost all sizable corporations. It’s deeply disingenuous at this point to accuse Wilson of establishing some negative new precedent.

Or is it? Because I suspect that the reason this particular bit of corporate activism is raising such hackles is that CSR is perfectly acceptable to those doing the complaining now — just so long as it adheres to the already-established precedent that it ALWAYS serves the destructive progressive agenda. Mr. Wilson’s touting of a message that instead supports free markets and individualism threatens to crack the current rigid ideological uniformity of the CSR racket, which is why you hear so much screeching about this one tiny instance of independent thought and action.

I shouldn’t be surprised at the shamelessness and hypocrisy of those forcing CSR down our throats, and yet I am.  For those unfamiliar with Friedman’s commentary on the matter, it’s here.

H/T to Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit.

The debate over where China is headed is picking up steam.  As with our own markets, it’s fascinating to see reasonably intelligent people look at the same set of data and evidence and come up with diametrically opposing predictions.

As is the case with these two recent articles:  Steve Rattner’s “Will China Stumble?  Don’t Bet on It” from the New York Times, and the editorial from The Wall Street Journal, “China’s Hard Landing:  The state-led growth model is leading the country into trouble.”

Whom to believe?  The Journal has certainly gotten plenty wrong.  Still, their case is much more predicated on data versus mere opinion, I think.  Plus, Steve Rattner, Obama’s former “car czar,” loves state direction of industry, so of course he’s a Red China fan.  However, his appalling wrongness on the auto bailouts makes his whole use of GM’s China operation as evidence that China is on the right path a joke.

Plus, as I read Rattner’s cheerleading, I can’t help but wonder if he’s paid any attention at all to Japan the past fifteen or twenty years.  Because on Rattner’s own telling, China sounds an awful lot like the last Asian powerhouse we all fretted about, and we all know how well that turned out.