Following years of wilting revenue and waning stature, Playboy is rumored to be on the chopping block. Known for its centerfolds, its on-again, off-again status as both public menace and free speech icon, and the well-worn joke about it being popular for its articles (which have often exceeded the quality of supposedly respectable publications. Remember that Playboy once published folks like Wodehouse, Nabokov, and Lenny Bruce), the magazine has been in the news following discussions about it potentially passing into new hands.

Deal or no deal, one has to marvel that the magazine even remains in existence. With all the free, easily accessed Internet naughtiness out there, I can’t understand how Playboy is still drawing breath. The days of centerfolds transitioning into greater fame seem quaint and yellowed, and the last time the magazine snagged a buzzworthy celeb, she was a literal blue hair.

Perhaps cultural conservatives should take solace from the fact that there are still fuddy-duddies who need their smut classed up a bit. Maybe it is a good sign that Playboy didn’t immediately fold amidst the onslaught of gratis, more hardcore fare. The survival of a guilty pleasure that actually does have articles and emphasizes frivolity over creepiness may even be a harbinger of tradition making a comeback. Besides, attending a party at the Barely Legal Mansion just doesn’t have the same ring to it.

In today’s peeping tom media maelstrom, even Hef himself comes off a tad old-fashioned. In the end, his real legacy might not be his bathrobe, but his pipe.

When I was growing up, there was a grave perception that Japan was going to conquer the world. Not with bombs, but with its thought to be unstoppable economy. Then the Nikkei popped, Japanese property values curtsied to the ground, and the country entered its Lost Decade(s). Suddenly, Japan didn’t seem so formidable, and the idea of a Mothra-like economic threat from the East subsided.

Then came the noughties and China’s real leap forward. Now the Middle Kingdom is probably more feared than Japan ever was, not only due to its manufacturing muscle and huge population; but also thanks to its massive holdings of U.S. debt.

Last week Ambrose Evans-Pritchard made the case that Japan may actually be a bigger global risk right now than Uncle Sam. The problem is Japan’s ability to keep managing its preternatural debt levels. The fear is that it would only take a modest rise in Japanese bond yields to incapacitate Japan’s debt servicing and send the nation over the brink.

How might Japan raise funds to fight this off? If they try raising taxes, the horror film scenario is that their aging citizens would then sell their JGBs, forcing bond yields even higher and making Japan’s debt problem all the more calamitous. This could affect Japan’s ability to keep giving America loans to nowhere and leave us in our own debt service abyss.

All decade long we’ve been hearing that China was about to “foreclose on America.” How many times has the specter of China pulling the plug on our debt and sending us back to the Stone Age been invoked? Who would have guessed that Japan might be the U.S. creditor to blink first, not because of some maniacal strategy, but because of, well, a lack of strategy. How perverse would it be if the long forgotten fear of a Japanese takeover of the global economy finally did come to pass, only in the absolute wrong direction. There is a lesson here that America has refused to learn for itself, so it may be up to the Japanese to learn it for us. Deficits do matter.

The next financial sucker punch is expected to come from the commercial real estate market. Given how leveraged this sector is, the consequences of its collapse are bound to splatter all over the economy. And while the securitization part of the commercial bubble was largely handled by Wall Street, much of the liability for this pending catastrophe is actually nestled in the smaller (and so far “healthier”) regional banks. Now the 64 trillion dollar question: Does anyone really believe this market is going to be allowed to collapse without Geithner and friends leaving their cloven footprints all over it?

We just learned that Fannie Mae will now be moonlighting as rent collectors on foreclosed residential properties. With that precedent in place, it is likely that once the government begins commandeering the commercial realm, it will become at least the partial owner of many retail/office buildings and the securities tethered to them. We have already witnessed the government’s unwillingness to let house prices plop to realistic levels. So what will they do to prop up commercial property and protect the firms (big and small) exposed to them? Rent control. All in the name of “stabilization,” of course.

It is well known what small scale rent control does to residential property, so just imagine what will unfold when commercial rent control is enacted en masse. America’s already dog-eared cities are about to start looking a lot shabbier. Office workers and mall shoppers might want to brace themselves for the hot new architecture trend: Detroit-Deco.

Here’s a truly scary Halloween tale told to me by a long suffering resident of America’s leading hipster landfill; Williamsburg, Brooklyn. For those unacquainted with this Mecca of pretense, let’s just say the folks there don’t wait for Halloween to act like brain-dead zombies.

So yesterday my friend was in a video store, and a little girl waltzed in dressed as an axe murderer. She was covered in fake blood, and was wearing an apron with something hanging from it. The predictably bearded hipster at the counter took a break from mentally undressing Obama to ask what was on her apron. The girl told him it was a severed hand.

The hipster’s apparently earnest reply?

“Ugh, in a vegan neighborhood?”

Is there any way we can get these emotional invalids to just secede already? How about a Civil War that forces them OUT of the Union? I say give them Long Island. They can call their new country Indignation.

Unfortunately, my friend lacked the presence of mind to chop off the hipster’s hand and give it to the young lady. Nothing says Brooklyn like a little authenticity.

Regarding Nina Kouprianova’s “Motherland” piece, it has long seemed to me that most thriving civilizations have been undergirded by two tenets:

1) A recognition of something greater than itself (i.e., a God or gods)
2) A recognition of something lower than itself (the animal kingdom and natural habitat).

Most Western nations have largely forsaken both premises. They have become much more secular (adios “something greater”) and now fret more about the environment and its suitability for the local frog population than they do about having progeny of their own. Some even recommend foregoing children to ensure greater frog comfort (effectively demoting themselves to the “something lower”). 

What’s more, many Westerners see the spread of religious skepticism and the growth of environmentalism as signs of progress. What they do not seem to compute is that for all of their advances, what they are ultimately doing is progressing themselves out of existence. Naively, they appear confident that they’ve won the debate about whether one should still believe in the Divine and in man’s place atop the food chain.

Well, it all depends on how you define winning. Looking at the numbers, I wouldn’t even call these Pyrrhic victories. All that folks on Team Progress have to show for their triumph is their replacement by those sticking to the something greater/something lower model. The debates’ “winners” are simply being exchanged for people who didn’t hear the ref blow the whistle.

My instincts are to laugh at government sloganeering. Still, at the very least it is refreshing to see a campaign that equates patriotism with living for your country rather than dying for it.

To ensure Takimag readers remain the web’s most informed, I wanted to share some recent headlines I caught while browsing the news sites:

From Fox:

Northeast endures chilly weekend, climate change scientists silent

Yankees lose to Angels just days after Obama’s NY fundraiser

Did Soupy Sales die early to escape death panels?

Meanwhile, over at CNN:

As cold front hits northeast, how are Latinos handling the space heater gap?

Anaheim’s changing demographics bring challenges, late inning baseball heroics

Death of old white guy paves way for Wanda Sykes

What would happen if Barry Manilow and Woodrow Wilson had a lovechild? I’m not sure, but I have a sinking feeling the unlucky spawn would grow into something like Bono Vox.

Unlike other “rockers with a conscience,” Bono has gone to great lengths to make it known that he actually studies the issues. This does seem true; he is definitely more thoughtful than your average Rock the Vote blowhard. That makes his naive NYT op-ed about Obama’s Peace Prize all the more annoying. Bono writes:

“We will support the Millennium Development Goals, and approach next year’s summit with a global plan to make them a reality. And we will set our sights on the eradication of extreme poverty in our time.”

They’re not my words, they’re your president’s. If they’re not familiar, it’s because they didn’t make many headlines. But for me, these 36 words are why I believe Mr. Obama could well be a force for peace and prosperity.”

Had Obama uttered these words during his first day in office, and were Bono responding to them on day two, perhaps the rocker could be forgiven. The problem is they came several months into Obama’s presidency, after Barack had already pulled shenanigans like attacking Pakistan. Bono might want to get on the ZooTV phone and ask the Pakistanis how they’re liking that peace and prosperity.

Lest we forget, George W. Bush also made bold, idealistic statements early in his reign, like when he vowed to “rid the world of the evil-doers.” We all witnessed (and continue to witness) the legacy of that thundering gibberish. But because Bono seems determined to remain ga-ga over Barack, he manages to ignore how much the new President’s actions already conflict with his high-minded words.

Vox goes on to share this:

These new steps — and those 36 words — remind the world that America is not just a country but an idea, a great idea about opportunity for all and responsibility to your fellow man.

Incurable dreamers relinquish bladder control when discussing the allegedly utopian idea of America. Conveniently, they always seem to leave out the less utopian parts of that idea.

Furthermore, the broad tone of this op-ed is an ode to Obama‘s pledges for “a global plan,” which in practice means sacrificing American sovereignty to less than accountable international bodies. Isn’t it interesting that these democracy worshippers are always looking to dilute democracy by empowering the unelected? They want democracy everywhere, except in those places they wish to meddle (which pretty much means everywhere).

I am always happy to hear Bono announcing what is best for my money, since that is all these foreign aid Ponzi schemes amount to. I couldn’t be more delighted to watch someone I didn’t elect, and who isn’t a citizen of my country, looking for new places to blow my lucre. I would like to tell Mr. Vox to fund his own lemons with his own funds, but alas, my pleas would fall on tone deaf ears. A megalomaniac always considers it a birthright to put other people’s money where his mouth is.

Simple political cost-benefit analysis makes it a strong bet that Columbus Day will get a makeover in the next ten years. In the coming decade, as the government starts betraying its financial promises, empty gestures of sensitivity will be all the rage as politicians scurry to appear useful. In light of this, a safe target like Columbus Day will be just too tempting. 

How will the Columbus Day airbrushing be handled? My money is on these two approaches:

1) Dilute Columbus’s status by incorporating other figures into the occasion, i.e., change Columbus Day to something like Lee-Jackson-King Day. Who might be picked to hyphenate Columbus? Cesar Chavez comes to mind, since his inclusion would play well in the Southwest and afford politicians a chance to publicly practice their overpronunciation skills.

Another candidate is Sitting Bull. Namedropping him makes it easier to assuage pro-Columbus holdouts by saying, “We’re not really changing anything. America’s roots are what Columbus Day was all about.” Bringing Sitting Bull off the icon bench is also a clever way of demoting Columbus without having to make any messy new fiscal concessions. IHS hospitals are already government-run fiascos, so there would be no need to nationalize them “in Sitting Bull’s name.”

2) Convert it to a generic, themed holiday built around the anodyne theme of discovery, complete with a daring and creative name like…Discovery Day. This sidesteps the awkwardness of pinning specific names to the occasion, while giving officials a platform to highlight more politically correct adventurers like Amelia Earhart.

Given that option one would trigger the same problems as Lee-Jackson-King Day, I see the Discovery Day approach as more likely.

If Columbus and his journey remain in the picture at all, the narrative will be retrofitted to reflect some newfound thread of inclusiveness. Sure, school kids will still draw pictures of the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria, only now they’ll have to color one ship white, one brown, and one yellow to celebrate all the colors of the human rainbow. We might even learn that Columbus wanted to sail to Asia so he could experience more diversity.

In either scenario, Christopher Columbus will exit the public stage as a red-headed stepchild. Poetic, since Columbus possibly belonged to the most blighted tribe of all; the Ginger.

Am I the only one who feels like Roman Polanski has more defenders right now than David Letterman?

Okay, cheating is one thing, but what is this hubbub about it being so taboo to date a coworker? Sure it can get messy, but don’t you also know plenty of folks who met their significant others at work? Inter-office romance and sexual harassment are not the same thing, and it is stupid to confuse the two.

What surprises me is that we don’t encounter scandals like these more often. With the ubiquity of camera phones and the ease of saving and sending photos, it seems like we should be averaging 20 such scandals a week.

Showing his knowledge of film noir, the alleged blackmailer is reported to have been massively in debt. This puts him in the same sinking boat as many other Americans, which is one reason I think these schemes could become a trend. As America comes to resemble the Third World, with a declining rule of law and a widening gap between rich and poor, it seems plausible that America will exhibit more Third World pathologies.

A much discussed issue for the rich in Latin America is kidnap for ransom (don’t laugh, kidnapping gives you better odds than Powerball). That won’t happen here!, cries the American exceptionalist. Maybe it won’t. But in a nation so debt-addled and litigious, it hardly seems far-fetched that the American rich will become ever greater targets. That today’s technology makes extortion both low cost and easy to execute probably won’t help matters.

We already have kidnapping insurance. Perhaps we will see the growth of “morality insurance” and various other anti-blackmail products. Who knows, AIG may even rise from the ashes as American Infidelity Group.

By now you have no doubt heard that Florida Congressman Alan Grayson—who looks disturbingly like a hybrid of Peter Griffin and the Bob’s Big Boy mascot—ruffled some feathers Tuesday night by saying the Republican healthcare plan could be summarized as “die quickly.”

Facing demands for an apology and the threat of formal rebuke from Georgia Representative Tom Price, Mr. Grayson ruffled still more feathers with his Wednesday “apology:” “I apologize to the dead and their families that we haven’t voted sooner to end this holocaust in America.”

You may recall that Grayson made a name for himself some months back when he gallantly caught Ben Bernanke flat-footed while quizzing him about some mysterious swaps with foreign central banks. Showing he’s no one-hit wonder, Grayson has once again seized the topic of the moment and propelled himself onto the viral video charts.

If Grayson wants to stay there, the best thing he can do is keep refusing to apologize. After all, contrition won’t win him any Republicans, and by remaining defiant, he becomes a hero to the Democrats who think Obama sold out on healthcare. If the Republicans do bother tagging him with a demerit badge, the smart play would be to wear it proudly. Why not? Grayson has already shown his knack for prop comedy.

Regardless of how this plays out, it will no doubt lead to further cries about the “decline of public discourse” and the ugliness of a “partisan” and “polarized” nation. And look for at least one hack to claim Grayson’s “apology” insults Hitler’s victims, to be followed by retorts that that accusation insults Grayson’s own ethnic background.

More on this non-story as it develops.