Instead, as an $819 billion stimulus bill wends its way from the House to the Senate, the Democrats and Republicans obsess over who's getting the larger slice, and whether the other guy got more whipped cream.

The Democrats' complaint: Taxpayer bailout money is going to pay bonuses to bankers. Even President Obama's carping about John Thain's $87,000 rug! The press mostly shares their outrage. The New York Times sniffed: "Some bankers took home millions last year even as their employers lost billions."

That ignores several realities:

• Bonuses are the primary way bankers get paid, in good years and bad.
• And what was the average bonus paid in 2008? $112,000, an order of magnitude away from "millions."
• Wall Street pay is crucial to the tax base of New York, a Democratic stronghold.
• Interior decorators need to earn a living, too.
• Those bonuses buy fancy designer suits, generating revenues for fashion houses which then advertise in magazines which employ editors and writers.

The Republicans' complaint: The stimulus package contains "wasteful spending," like funding the National Endowment for the Arts, preventing of sexually transmitted disease, and re-sodding the National Mall, so recently and thoroughly trod by the boots of inauguration attendees.

Hello, wasteful spending is pretty much the point here! An AFP analysis quotes John Maynard Keynes, the patron saint of stimulative government spending:

To create jobs, he wrote, the government could "fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coal mines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again."

(Photo by St0rmz)

Everyone is covering their asses now that the Senate Armed Services is looking into just who decided to give the CIA authorization to torture the fuck out of people, but Condi released some documents blaming John Ashcroft and Donald Rumsfeld for everything. Except of course that she was in the same goddamn room and her proud stand against the program was to ask Ashcroft to personally review the legal documents that Bush lawyers used to justify violating the Geneva Conventions.

REMEMBER HOW OUR PRESIDENT VIOLATES THE GENEVA CONVENTIONS?? LIKE, REGULARLY, BECAUSE THAT IS HIS POLICY?? WTF!

Anyway. This is fun. Our CIA actually began kinda torturing people weeks before our executive branch drafted a legal memo authorizing them to kinda torture people! The FBI objected to the torturing and "ultimately withdrew from Mr. Zubaydah’s interrogation." It's funny when the FBI is the voice of reason! Funny in a "why did we all agree that the last 8 years didn't happen" way.

Basically we'd like a 9/11 commission thing, here, to figure out what happened when a bunch of career conservative fuckers and their cherry-picked law school moron lackeys ran the country for eight years and basically blew it up, from the inside. Can John McCain race back to Washington and work on that?

Bloggers have to stop thinking of themselves as white-collar creatives and more like rank-and-file workers. After all—that's how they're paid!

Some bloggers get paid per-post, like pieceworkers in a 19th-century factory. Some get paid for pageviews, which is even more idiotic from a worker's perspective. It means you're not paid for your labor (except your monthly minimum) but paid instead on a sort of gamble—how well your product will perform when it's thrown into the open marketplace.

(The pros and cons of that system have been thoroughly discussed elsewhere. There are definitely flaws, but hey, at least I'm receiving money for my blogging.)

It's easy and idealistic to say, but seriously: stop writing for free. This means you, if you're one of the many Huffington Post bloggers who don't get paid. Have something to say? Write an op-ed or a letter to the editor. There are some times in a young writer's career where you have to make the decision to write for free. I've done it; you've done it. The trick is knowing when to stop.

Just about anyone can argue with my line of reasoning—"it's more complicated than that," etc., and on some level it probably is. But on the actual working-to-live level it's not. It's not more complicated than that. If you're blogging for someone other than yourself (not as a commenter, not as a personal blogger; those are labors of love and don't count) you deserve to be paid.

If you're an employee or an independent contractor or a freelancer and some entity or website is making money off your labor, you deserve to be paid. It doesn't matter how solvent the company is—they're still selling ads and making revenue.

It's not only for your own good that you should demand to be paid, either. People working for free (or for depressed wages) drive down the pay for bloggers who do get paid for their work.

Blogging for free, no matter what the circumstances, is not being a good, loyal employee. It isn't a way to hang on to your job. It isn't some sort of heroic act.

Remember, free-bloggers: someone is making money off your work and your content. It's just isn't you.

Although she doesn't seem to mind. Julia prints e-mails from her readers often, and this is pretty typical. It's also meaningless: "Time to feel happy about the stuff you do right, then get back to the hard work of being genuinely you.." These types of comments are the equivalent to the kitten posters in the dentist's office.

On one hand, having a personal blog is sort of asking for this type of thing, and not everyone minds it! Some people find it nice to hear that a bunch of strangers sort of care and are reading—however misguided their advice may be. (It's my opinion that girls have it worse than guys with this type of comment, maybe because they often make themselves more vulnerable in their writing or "lifecasting" or whatever it is they're doing.)

But please. A little unsolicited advice to the unsolicited advisers—a therapist will let you act out and purge these issues and rescue fantasies in the safety of a clinical setting. Leave bloggers out of it.

Slate's ever-griping press critic, Jack Shafer, has already made the point that the Pulitzer judging process is arbitrary. "There's no real science or even fairness behind the picking of winners and losers, with the prizes handed out according to a formula composed of one part log-rolling, two parts merit, three parts 'we owe him one,' and four parts random distribution."

And the former journalist who created HBO's Baltimore drama, The Wire, made one of the last season's villains an editor who boasted of his understanding of Pulitzer judges, because he had once been one. The Wire's semi-fictional Baltimore Sun pretended that its reporting had influenced Maryland's policies with regard to the homeless, because that would prove the impact of its reporting.

But the newspapers' Pulitzer-chasing is most damaging because it distracts newspapers from their real challenge. Rather than impress colleagues with the seriousness of their reporting, US newspapers need to engage a readership that is drifting off to television and the internet. Pulitzer-winning journalism will win Pulitzers; it won't save an industry which is experiencing double-digit annual declines in advertising revenue.

Take a look across the Atlantic. The British Press Awards are so lacking in respectability that, after a particularly rowdy show in 2005, several newspaper editors decided to boycott the awards. A shocked New York Times reporter wrote: "last night's ceremony — a mind-numbing parade of awards in 28 categories — was not a mutually respectful celebration of the British newspaper industry fuelled by camaraderie and bonhomie. It was more like a soccer match attended by a club of misanthropic inebriates."

And yet the British newspaper industry is in much more robust health. To be sure, circulations are in gradual decline. And standards of journalism are as sloppy as ever. But newspapers such as The Guardian have a much greater share of the online audience than their American counterparts. And the papers, while lacking much of the worthy reporting that wins Pulitzers, are way livelier.

The connection? The respect of peers is a luxury that US newspapers have enjoyed because, for much of the second half of the 20th century, they were local monopolies. They could afford to be respectable, because they didn't need to pander to readers. In the UK, by contrast, 12 national dailies are in vicious competition. Editors fear the loss of their jobs, not their honor.

It is not as if the New York Times and Washington Post can magically invigorate themselves by eschewing the Pulitzers. America's vastness, which mitigates against national newspapers and produces smaller local markets which can only support one title, is an unalterable fact. But, while the Washington Post and other winners may celebrate today, they should recognize a harsh truth: the same monopolies which have allowed a public-service mentality to flourish have also left newspapers unprepared for new competition. These Pulitzers are the totem poles of the newspaper industry; beloved relics of former glory.

• And right on cue: Seattle Times announces it is cutting about 200 jobs.

Rucker, a retired mathematics professor, says, "We tend to very seriously undervalue quotidian reality." He then goes on to scold the starry-eyed futurists who predict smashing up the real world to make way for a virtual world as varied and granular as the one we live in now:

I might ask why someone would passionately want to believe that we can be translated from flesh into bits? There's something ascetic and life-hating about the notion. It's a bit like a religious belief; one thinks of the old "work now, get rewarded in heaven" routine.

We know that our present-day videogames and digital movies don't fully match the richness of the real world. What's not so well known is that computer science provides strong evidence that no feasible VR can ever match nature.

This is because there are no shortcuts for nature's computations. Due to a property of the natural world that I call the "principle of natural unpredictability," fully simulating a bunch of particles for a certain period of time requires a system using about the same number of particles for about the same length of time. Naturally occurring systems don't allow for drastic shortcuts . . . Natural unpredictability means that if you build a computer sim world that's smaller than the physical world, the sim cuts corners and makes compromises, such as using bitmapped wood-grain and cartoon-style repeating backgrounds. Smallish sim worlds are doomed to be dippy Las Vegas/Disneyland/Second Life environments . . .

Come on, if you want to smoothly transform a blade of grass into some nanomachines simulating a blade of grass, then why bother pulverizing the blade of grass at all? After all, any object at all can be viewed as a quantum computation! The blade of grass already is an assemblage of nanomachines emulating a blade of grass. To the extent that you can realize an accurate VR world, the exercise becomes pointless.