Warning: The beginning of this post may contain serious content! If you feel you are ill-prepared for such a travesty, you can skip to this week’s mindless ramblings by clicking here. InvertedMind is not responsible for any sanity this serious content may cause.

Recently I’ve made it a rule to stay away from serious politics on the site. It gets my blood boiling, and I don’t need the stress. But I have to do it, this week. This is too good.

Okay, here goes…

The next time some liberal politician yells and complains that the wealthy don’t deserve tax breaks, I hope Warren Buffett tells them to go suck an egg.

A study released this week by the Tax Foundation (their logo says “since 1937″ so they must be good at something, even if it turns out they’re only good at surviving for a long time) points out that the 20 percent of households with the lowest annual income receive an average of $8.21 in various forms of government assistance for ever $1.00 they pay in taxes. On the other side of the coin, the wealthiest in the nation (the report isn’t terribly clear on what percentage) receive $0.41 for every $1.00 in taxes. The most telling statistic is that the bottom 60 percent of earners — that’s where the majority of us fit, at least if you’re reading this crap — receive more government funding than we pay for. Even the average middle-class family receives $1.30 for every single tax dollar.

So here’s something for the libs to chew on: the wealthiest 40 percent in America pays everyone else’s taxes. I’d like to think I’m pretty well off, but even Her Hotness and I don’t fit into that bracket, which means I suck more out of the government annually than I give back.

Let’s figure this out. Let’s assume a single individual who makes $25,000 per year pays out 15 percent of that in taxes, for a total of $3,750. They will, according to the study, recoup 841 percent of that, for a total of $30,787.50. Add (yes, add) that to their income of $25,000, subtract the original tax amount, and this person winds up with a total annual income of $52,037.50, with a total government benefit of $27,037.50.

Now, let’s assume middle-of-the-road. Take $70,000 with a tax burden of 30 percent. Their total comes to a whopping $21,000. Now, multiply those dollars by 130 percent (remember $1.30 per tax dollar) and the government pays them $6,300 per year ($27,300 - $21,000), bringing their net annual “income” to $76,300.

Here’s where it gets ugly. Just to be on the safe side, we’ll go with a relatively low annual figure of $5 million. Take out a whopping 40 percent in taxes for a gross tax payment of $2 million. Now factor in the government return of 41 percent of that, and this person (or perhaps family) pays a net total of $1.18 million in taxes.

Now, I’m all for assisting those who are not as well off. I’ve witnessed it most of my life first-hand. Speaking from years of personal experience, poverty isn’t fun. However, I also see no reason to literally punish people for being wealthy. As much as we like to vilify the rich, in the vast majority of cases they’ve done nothing wrong or illegal to achieve their level of wealth. They may have inherited it, or they may have spent their lives with their sleeves rolled up scraping for every penny and turning each one into dollars. They worked hard, just as you and I do. They’re take may seem disproportionate, and it may very well be, but people were willing to pay them that much. Their wealth should not be their burden.

Oh, and consider both Bill Gates and the aforementioned Mr. Buffett: they are inarguably two of the greatest philanthropists of our time. They give away their wealth even when not required to by law.

So, to all you richies out there, I’ll take your back the next time you are crucified for receiving a “tax break.” More than anyone else, you deserve it.

Now for the fun stuff…

Obviously, that’s an obvious obviousness
InvertedMind is full of study reports this week. One released last Wednesday shows that Chinese food is bad for your health. Now, while it’s true that Asians have lower occurrences of obesity and heart disease (I’m getting this information from Sleepy Stan’s Book of Unresearched Facts so please correct me if I’m wrong), I have to question how this is considered news. After all, it doesn’t take a genius to look at a Chinese buffet and realize that they’re staring at flavored, deep-fried MSG.

Chock Full o’ Nuts? (I’m so getting sued for this)
A festival…in Virginia City, Nev. …I’m trying not to regurgitate here…celebrates the eating…of sheep testicles. I kid you not, the 16th Annual Mountain Oyster Fry attracted enough people to eat more than 130 pounds of livestock cajones. I’ve been familiar with the concept of Mountain Oysters for a long time, having lived a fairly sizable portion of my life amongst the less-upscale side of the Redneck population, but this is beyond even my comprehension. They’re celebrating eating something I would consider chowing down on only after I’ve eaten my shoes, underwear and at least six of my own fingers.

Somehow, I’m not shocked
In yet another study released in the last week, it was found that as many as one out of every three people in Washington, D.C. is illiterate. Yeah, they’re called the House and Senate Majority.

Do you pee Earl Grey? I pee Earl Grey.
In a covert effort to show how greedy and unreliable the Chinese medical system is (after all, for millennia they’ve thought their food was healthy), a group of reporters pulled the old urine switcharoo. Results of their studies showed that six of the 10 hospitals found their urinal tracts to be infected. But wait, they didn’t switch bad urine with urine that was known to be good. It was brewed tea. What a whiz-bang effort by the reporters. I’m sure the hospitals’ management staffs were pretty pissed off. You’d think they’d file some sort of lawsuit over the invasion, but it looks like they’re too yellow. Complaints from former patients are no doubt streaming in. Their business is likely to go down the toilet. Stop me before I bad-pun myself to death.

…but I wonder how many accidents it has caused
Billboards are getting far more creative these days. But you have to wonder if something like this is having unintended consequences:

CNN continues to prove they hate the world
I will say this one more time, people (CNN, in particular). Nothing about Anna Nicole Smith’s death is front page news. There is far, far more important things in the world than a completely unsurprising autopsy report for someone who will be completely inconsequential to the rest of the world by May.

And finally (really, I mean it!), we’ll end on the lighter side…

No wonder he wished to remain anonymous
A Georgia teen was taken to the hospital for injuries sustained during a golf team hazing incident (yes, I said ‘golf team’ and ‘hazing’ in the same sentence) in which his new teammates gave him the wedgie of a lifetime. No, the injury isn’t funny (the circumstances are hilarious, though). However, the poor kid’s mom did everything she possibly could to get this kid labeled for life as Ultimate King Super Wuss Numero Uno. I wish I could say I was making these quotes up:

“It [The wedgie] was so extreme it ripped his boxer shorts in two.”

“He was bent over and couldn’t hardly walk. He cried for probably 30 minutes.”

This kid will eventually get over his injuries, but I’d wager his backswing will probably never be there same.

Andrew Riley is what you would consider a career criminal. He has more felony charges against him than the populations of some entire minimum-security prisons. The charges range from burglary and vandalism to intimidation. It all comes from a crime spree that spanned at least a year. His mug shot shows a face that expresses no remorse, and that is only augmented by the buzz cut and the hard chin.

Andrew Riley is 13 years old.

I really haven’t come to grips with the depth of all this. For a 13-year-old to commit a felony, let alone 128 of them, is basically unheardof in the world in which I reside. Maybe it was my old-fashioned, country upbringing. Maybe it was a result of being raised in a time when getting your butt whipped was the rule, not a crime in and of itself. Or maybe, just maybe, Andrew’s parents are really that worthless.

His stepfather said he had a rough childhood. There was no further elaboration. Did it mean he was abused? Raised in a poor home? Were his only friends cockroaches and mice? What, exactly, constitutes a rough childhood? And why is that an excuse? I grew up with virtually nothing. We were dirt poor. Her Hotness grew up in a nearly identical environment. But beyond the typical teenage mischief — tick-tacking, sneaking out once or twice, trying a beer before we graduated high school — we both have clean records. While we could have chosen to steal what we didn’t have, take out our frustrations on other people’s faces, or run amok in school, we didn’t. We didn’t, because our parents took the time to teach us right from wrong. And not only did they teach it, they enforced it.

Andrew will likely be in juvie until he’s 18. At that point, if authorities have been able to rehabilitate him and teach him what his parents obviously never tried to, he might be released into the world to try and make a life for himself. Or he may already be beyond rehability (Mike’s Made-Up Word of the Weekâ„¢), and will spend his life either constantly behind bars or in and out of the prison system because no one knows what to do with him.

All because mom and dad probably never spanked the kid.

Now for the lighter side: The Week In Denial:

Spring sprung early
For those of you who are champing at the bit to celebrate the first day of spring, you’re already too late.

We were all taught as children that spring starts on March 21st, the day of the Vernal Equinox. Well, a year isn’t exactly 365.25 days long, and the Earth’s orbit around the Sun isn’t even close to a true circle. That has resulted in one very important thing: spring rarely begins on the traditional first day of spring. In fact, we East-Coasters started the new season at 7:33 Tuesday morning (3/20). Never blindly believe what you hear in school.

…And Nessie was navigating.
If you’re caught driving drunk, take a lesson from this guy: make sure your alibi is at least plausible. Never tell the officer that a unicorn was driving your car.

And finally…

At least they showed respect for the dead
Those seat upgrades have never been cheap, but this is the first case of someone having to die to get a spot in First Class. British Airways announced that a passenger expired on a flight from India to the U.K., and the passenger was moved from the Economy class to an empty seat in First Class. Unfortunately for the lad in the seat next to her final Earthly destination, he was asleep when the whole thing was going down. Word has it that he tried to lodge a complaint about the situation after the flight. The rumored response from the airline?

“Bugger off.”

Post Script: Free Dunkin Donuts Iced Coffee today!
Just a friendly reminder to drop by every DnD you pass today for a free 16-ounce café-on-ice. Free all day long, March 21st.

Post-Post Script: March of Dimes Walk
Her Hotness and I are participating in a March of Dimes walk on April 29th. Your support would be greatly appreciated. To make a pledge, just go to http://www.walkamerica.org/mpfrazer. If you are interested in walking, you can join the team. Please, support the efforts of the March of Dimes to save premature babies.

I love the Geico cavemen commercials. They drive Her Hotness up the wall, but there’s an allure to the stupid, ironic humor in the commercials that mesmerizes me. The writers hit on several levels of comedy that can’t be understated.

First, they nailed it when it comes to the awkwardness of time-and-place transplantation. The idea of cavemen living in today’s world of high technology, fashion and microwavable meals is out-and-out hilarious in and of itself, and they did an excellent job introducing the characters to us way back with the guys sitting around a television watching the Geico pitchman utter the now-infamous words, “So Easy, A Caveman Can Do It,” and then conversing intelligently amongst themselves in the same dialect we now speak in. Therein lies the second level they hit, which is unpredicted intelligence. It’s happened for decades in entertainment, and anything that features a talking animal falls into the same category. It’s like in the Clerks movie series (Clerks, Mall Rats, Chasing Amy, Dogma, etc.) when Silent Bob says his one line per movie.

My current favorite commercial is the one in the airport with the caveman on a moving walkway. There’s no dialog, and the easy-listening music 1) helps to convey the point, and 2) really makes you feel like you’re in an airport terminal, waiting to see how long your flight has been delayed or, possibly, trying to pass the time by guessing how many thousands of miles by which you will be separated from your luggage once you’ve reached your final destination. It’s a fun way to pass the time, really.

I guess you’re wondering where this is leading.

It came to light last week that ABC has commissioned a pilot episode of a new television series featuring these very same cavemen. I’m seriously waiting very impatiently to see how this one turns out. If nothing else, it’s a fresh idea, which prime time TV has been lacking for years. With every station going the “reality TV” route — don’t get me started on how unreal reality TV shows actually are — ABC could strike gold by going to the absolute opposite extreme. It’s gold, Jerry!

In other remote regions of my brain…

Whatever floats your boat
As a child, I loved to build things. Heck, I still do, as evidenced by my Christmas-vacation excursion back into the world of Construx, going as far as creating a four-wheeled, motorized vehicle with working, wire-controlled steering. Still, as a child I never once dreamed of putting my Legos to use to create a scale model of the Italian city of Venice. Freakin’ amazing.

Caffeine high! Git yer free caffeine high!
Dunkin Donuts has joined the list of my heroes for giving me the option to feed my caff’ addition without paying for it. On March 21st (the first day of spring for the dense people in the audience) the Dunkin will be giving away free iced coffee all day long.

“…but you can say ’son-of-a-b*tch’.”
Most of you will miss the reference in the line above. It was from a 1990’s sitcom called Herman’s Head. I was reminded of the line because apparently three New York high school girls were suspended for saying the word ‘vagina’ in a theatrical performance. The parallel here is that students today get away with so much crap that would have gotten them suspended for a week when I was a kid, yet they can’t say the scientific name of a part the female anatomy.

Yes, it’s gotten that bad in schools.

I learned that word in elementary school health class. I’ve witnessed kids verbally abusing teachers with tirades that would make sailors blush, only to see them in class again 30 minutes later. I’ve personally witnessed single-day suspensions for students who attempted to physically harm others. Cutting class will usually net you detention for a day or two. But God forbid you mention a body part.

Watch out kids, you’ll get expelled for saying “spleen.”

And finally…
Borat, that crazy Kazakh, apparently has developed quite a large following in Kazakhstan. The character may have enraged the small nation’s government officials, but the citizens are willing to pay a small Kazakh fortune to have the DVD shipped in from the U.K. It’s nice to see that there is at least a small group of people who still have a sense of humor, even if Americans have nearly all lost theirs.

You probably noticed something a little different here.

For years I’ve written the code behind this site. I used it to keep my skills sharp and to experiment with new things. But anyone who knows me will tell you that I don’t need the practice. That’s not as arrogant as it sounds, because I don’t mean I’m that good. I just mean that Big Feet Media is generating more than I can handle at this point, so I’m getting my fill of writing code. Besides, with so many blog suites out there, why was I continuing to reinvent the wheel?

To that end, so ends a chapter in the life of InvertedMind. The layout now looks different because I’ve switched the site from my homegrown blogware, known internally as bfBlog, to WordPress. It has everything I want and then some, which means InvertedMind is better for you. It’s also more secure and has far more robust controls for writing posts than bfBlog ever did — simply because I was the only one using it, so it didn’t need to be more than the bare minimum.

Enough about crap you don’t care about. Along with the changes to WordPress comes something of importance to you: a schedule. My goal is to write a new post every Wednesday. That way I have a better way of providing you with entertainment, and you can be sure that when you check back Wednesday morning, you have something to read. Posts will be just as nonsensical as ever — come on, the site changed but I sure as heck haven’t.

So sit back and enjoy. Scheduled posts start on March 14th. Until then, you never know when or what I might write.