Can Paranoids Prosper?

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Thursday April 16, 2009 · 5:18 PM PDT

2009/04/16 · 17:18

From The Daily Event, published by Tolmitch Press, www.heywoodgould.com

Ivan Yopsvoyomatsky, editor of paranoiaisfact.com and columnist for The Daily Event, answers readers' questions.

Dear Igor,

I just shot my broker. He had assured me that quant funds would earn great returns no matter which way the market went. This morning I nailed my banker as he was getting into his car. He had urged me to take a sub prime mortgage, saying the rising value of my home would be my collateral for high yield investments. My boss called me a sissy and told me my 401k was safe because the ratings agencies had Triple A'd every derivative and anyway AIG was insuring them. I blasted his fat ass in the executive washroom after lunch. Now I'm standing over Bernie's (that's my broker) body with a Glock in my hand, getting up the nerve to use it on myself. It seems certain that I will die a failure. Is that paranoia or fact?

Troubled,
Greenwich, Connecticut.

Dear Troubled,

That is paranoia. Reading between the lines I would guess that you are penniless and your family has abandoned you. But don't despair. You can still go out with a bang, proving to the world, your embittered wife and scornful children, that you are a savvy investor.

tolmitch

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Saturday March 28, 2009 · 12:46 PM PDT

2009/03/28 · 12:46

From The Daily Event, published by Tolmitch Press, www.heywoodgould.com

THE DAILY EVENT FUTURE BEAT

Sparing no expense in its determination to pique the interest of its demanding, easily distracted readership, the Daily Event has sent reporter Dale Arden hurtling at near light speed--and great personal risk--through a space/time wormhole into the future. This is her first dispatch.

tolmitch

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Thursday March 05, 2009 · 4:33 PM PST

2009/03/05 · 16:33

From The Daily Event, published by Tolmitch Press, www.heywoodgould.com

NORTH HOLLYWOOD, Ca, March 5...At the age of 102, blacklisted screenwriter Art Ostrovsky says he is witnessing something he never thought he would live to see--the overthrow of Capitalism.

His rheumy eyes brighten, his crabbed fingers tremble around a glass of vodka. "I waited 80 years for the Revolution to come to America," he says. "Now I can feel it in the wind..."

In this rundown garden apartment complex off Magnolia Boulevard in North Hollywood, Ostrovsky is a puzzle to his neighbors, mostly new arrivals from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. They call him "el viejito" in humorous reference to a popular brand of Tequila and know him as the skeletal old man teetering on his walker in a daily promenade around the courtyard, with a stoic West Indian home care worker in attendance. They occasionally look in on him in the cluttered apartment where along with floating dust devils, spider webs and the resident mouse scurrying in the crawl space he has lived for sixty-two years, among fading photos of the authors, politicians, actors and directors he knew in the "Movement."

tolmitch

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Wednesday February 18, 2009 · 2:49 PM PST

2009/02/18 · 14:49

From The Daily Event by Heywood Gould, published by Tolmitch Press, www.heywoodgould.com

CLARENCE CENTER, N.Y. Feb. 18...On a gloomy Thursday afternoon (Feb. 12) a random sampling of Americans boarded Continental Connection Flight 3407 departing Newark Airport en route to Buffalo.

Psychologist Mervyn Fliegel calls them "the givers."

On that same day another group in D.C., New York, Dallas,Miami, Chicago and Hollywood, were desperately phoning, emailing and texting their lawyers, agents, flacks, trainers, astrologists, aromatherapists--anyone who could help them salvage their public lives.

Fliegel, research director of PUNS (Psychologists United for a New Society) calls this group "the takers."

Several hours later the "givers" were lying dead in the burning wreckage of flight 3407.

The "takers" were still single-mindedly trying to burnish their tarnished images.

"It's an American irony that you can take a random sample aboard a commuter plane and find people with more talent, character, courage and dedication than you'll find in the centers of political, financial and artistic leadership, " Fliegel says.

tolmitch

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Friday February 13, 2009 · 2:16 PM PST

2009/02/13 · 14:16

BROOKLYN, N.Y. , Feb 13...The economic crisis is being prolonged by faulty terminology that distorts perceptions, dampens expectations and crushes optimism, an analyst charged today.

"Our nomenclature is counter-productive," said Efraim Durg, founder and CEO of NeuroBrands, a marketing consultancy. "We say one thing, but the listener reacts in a totally different way."

Durg released a study that he claimed proved that the words used by policy makers often produce the opposite effect of what was intended.

The study was done with an "eclectic" group of volunteers--executives with the Carlyle Group, inmates on Death Row at Angola Prison and residents of the Hebrew Home For the Aged. The participants were wired with electrodes attached to the pleasure and pain centers of the brain. Words and phrases were flashed on a screen in front of them and simultaneously spoken in their earpieces by a soothing female voice. Their neural responses were recorded.

tolmitch

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Tuesday February 03, 2009 · 3:03 PM PST

2009/02/03 · 15:03

From The Daily Event Newspaper by Heywood Gould, published by Tolmitch Press, www.heywoodgould.com

ACTIVIST INVADES PLUTOCRATS'
POVERTY PSYCHODRAMA

Robert Polet, Gucci Group CEO, an AK 47 to his head, pleaded for help.

"Please, please help me find my children," he cried as soldiers pinned him to the muddy floor of a refugee camp.

In a moment of high psychodrama, pampered executives learned what it's like to be one of the 32.9 million displaced persons who live in squalid, brutalized conditions around the world.

The simulation, presented by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) in coordination with the Crossroads Foundation and the Global Risk Forum, a Davos non-profit, was meant to heighten executive sensitivity to the problems of the oppressed. Polet, who was called Mustafa in the play, flinched as an actress stepped on a make-believe land mine and was stretchered away, gushing stage blood.

tolmitch

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Friday January 23, 2009 · 3:36 PM PST

2009/01/23 · 15:36

From The Daily Event Newspaper by Heywood Gould, published by Tolmitch Press, www.heywoodgould.com

Igor Yopsvoyomatsky, editor of paranoiaisfact.com and columnist for The Daily Event, answers readers' questions.

Dear Igor,

My plumber Fritz went berserk when he saw the Obama commemorative plate on my kitchen wall. He says Obama is the front man for a secret organization known as "the Intelligentsia", who plan to infiltrate our minds and turn us all into robots. Is this paranoia or fact?

Scared,
Fort Prion, Miss.

Dear Scared,

This is fact. But not robots. The Obama branch of the "Intelligentsia", or "nudge nazis" as we call them, want to turn you into docile sheep who will get plumper and happier under their benevolent herding.

But first, a little background. There was a moment in prehistory when a burly Neanderthal felt an irresistible urge to bang somebody--anybody-- on the head with his thorny club. An undersized cave man, fearing for his ovoid pate, piped up:

"Hit the hairy fat guy by the fire and I will sing a song in praise of your bloodlust."

And the Intelligentsia was born.

It flourished in authoritarian societies --tribes, monarchies, empires, dictatorships, capitalist oligarchies,

tolmitch

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Wednesday January 21, 2009 · 12:32 PM PST

2009/01/21 · 12:32

WASHINGTON, D.C., Jan. 20...Can a man who has been honored by the Queen of England, given a TED award for social activism, named a Time Magazine Person of the Year, nominated for an Oscar, a Golden Globe, a Grammy and a Nobel Peace Prize be all bad?

Leah Schildkraut thinks he can.

Bono, lead singer of U2, billionaire financier and globetrotting philanthropist, has devoted much time and energy to raising money for African causes.

But Schildkraut, Emerging Economies Specialist, with the Anarcho-Feminist Alliance, thinks he and other celebrities are doing more harm than good.

"Africa doesn't need handouts," she said. "It needs a level playing field."

tolmitch

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Thursday January 15, 2009 · 12:40 PM PST

2009/01/15 · 12:40

From The Daily Event by Heywood Gould, published by Tolmitch Press, www.heywoodgould.com

LONDON, England, Jan 12...Insurance companies face "total extinction" if the global economic crisis continues, an executive warned today.

"We are being inundated by a tsunami of fraudulent claims," said Walter Neff, VP Adjustments for AIG. "Our trust is being betrayed by desperate, unscrupulous insurees. Forget the bankers, brokers, auto makers and porn merchants. Our boat is the leakiest. We need a bailout now."

Neff told attendees at the annual Assurers and Actuaries convention that failed business people, destitute mortgage holders and disgraced CEO's had put an "intolerable" burden on the system.

"We're optimists, we make our money betting against disaster," he said. "We trusted our clients to stay in their homes, keep their jobs and outlive their insurance policies. And they let us down."

Since the recession began three years ago, "insurees have been wreaking havoc on our actuarial tables," Neff said.

tolmitch

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Monday January 12, 2009 · 9:59 AM PST

2009/01/12 · 09:59

From The Daily Event by Heywood Gould, published by Tolmitch Press, www.heywoodgould.com

Igor Yopsvoyomatsky, editor of paranoiaisfact.com and columnist for the DE answers readers' questions.

Dear Igor,

My son came home for winter break with a new culture hero--Slavoj Zizek. Zizek had taken his university by storm, giving two sold-out lectures and sitting for an online interview that lasted hours. "He's a post-modern ironist," my son said. It was nice to hear him use words I didn't think he knew. It was great that he went to hear a philosopher-any philosopher- give a lecture. But then I read some of Zizik's essays and I was appalled. Zizik says that Islamic terrorists are not fundamentalists or even revolutionaries, but the casualties of global capitalism. That on 9/11 a paranoid America got what it had been fantasizing about for decades. That Mohammad Atta and his terrrorist hijackers represented the "good as the spirit of and actual readiness to sacrifice in the name of a higher cause." That when prisoners were tortured in Guantanamo they were really being initiated into the true essence of American culture. And if Americans really believed in Democracy they would not vote themselves, but would let the rest of the world choose their leader. My son says I should

tolmitch

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Tuesday January 06, 2009 · 6:44 PM PST

2009/01/06 · 18:44

From The Daily Event by Heywood Gould, published by Tolmitch Press, www.heywoodgould.com

NEW YORK, N.Y., Jan. 6th...Fast food franchises are "insidiously" planting sexist, anti-labor and neo-imperialist propaganda in their commercials, a consumer advocate charged today.

Leah Schildkraut, Corporate Malfeasance specialist with the Anarcho-Feminist Coalition, called for an immediate boycott of Taco Bell, Carl's Jr. and Burger King.

In a press conference to kick off a nationwide campaign, Schildkraut spotlighted three commercials which she said "reinforced reactionary tendencies in the young male demographic."

In the Taco Bell ad, a customer is about to tip the counterman. "Keep the change," he says. But his friend stops him and says he can get another Taco Bell for what he just tipped. The customer changes his mind and quickly scoops up his change. "You only pushed a button," he explains to the stiffed counterman. As he walks away his friend shrugs as if to say "sorry, but he's right."

tolmitch

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Tuesday December 30, 2008 · 5:21 PM PST

2008/12/30 · 17:21

From The Daily Event by Heywood Gould, published by Tolmitch, www.heywoodgould.com

BEIJING, China,...Dec. 30 A top-secret report prepared for China's Ministry of State Security (MSS) predicts that none of President-elect Obama's appointees will be in office at the end of his first term.

They are all qiao zong huo fan," the anonymous author says, using the Chinese term for bridge burners. "They will depart, leaving flames in their wake."

The report, which was leaked to the Daily Event by officials who prefer to be nameless out of fear of summary execution, analyzed bios and interviews to compile a profile of the typical appointee.

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