I am an agnostic when it comes to Valentine’s Day (shoulder shrug), but OH MY HEART today’s Google Doodle is bewitching and lovely and you should listen to it right now! Right. now.

It’s basically a mini-episode of This American Life, replete with earnest Ira Glass intro and instrumental soundtrack. Behind each candy heart lies a 90-second love story and a simple, delightful animation. (If you click on another tab the audio will stop, so don’t open another tab you naughty hyperactive attention-deficit-disordered internet addict, you!)

If you’d like to know more about how this project came together, here’s a little video.

To quote Glass: “Happy Valentine’s Day to you. From… the internet!”

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Fred Armisen’s totally on point, previously un-aired impersonation of Ira Glass has been rescued from the dustbin of history, and for that we can all give thanks. It was filmed in a Saturday Night Live dress rehearsal in 2011 but left out of the final cut. Armisen nails Glass’ intonation and uptalk, Seth Meyers is the perfect straight man, and there’s a delightfully accented Mexican factory worker.

p.s. Bonus link! You can hear Armisen and Glass co-host an episode of This American Life (called Doppelgängers, natch) here. Don’t try to keep track of who’s who! Just relax into the slightly creepy Twin Peaksy vibe and enjoy.

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• Liel Leibovitz does not like Lena Dunham’s new show, Girls.

• A Gyllenhaal family affair in Tribeca.

• HBO is working on an Ira Glass series centering around a segment of This American Life.

• Israel Horovitz, playwright and father of Beastie Boy Adam Horovitz, was made a Commandeur of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres at the French Embassy (the younger Horowitz, meanwhile, will be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of fame this month. Not too shabby).

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Thank you This American Life, giving us a reprieve from the disaster and despair that’s been clogging the airwaves for the past two weeks, to give us an episode of sun soaked-summer fun via an “Amusement Parks” episode.  Without a doubt, amusement parks are part of the American experience.  Pretty much anyone I’ve ever known grew up in somewhat close proximity to an amusement park.  For those that didn’t, there were always the summer county fairs, which of course doubled as ground zero for teenagers to let their hormones explode during nauseous Gravitron rides or inside hidden funhouse nooks.  Yes, amusement parks are part of the American dream and this week Ira gave another tiny piece of heart so we could all take one long, life-affirming ride together.

In Act I we meet a Cole, an amusement park enthusiast who, at 14 got his first job at mid-sized park in Kansas City.  Shoot forward 11 years later, and Cole is still working at the same park as manager of the games department.  Cole takes the job very seriously, or not seriously depending on how you see it.  As a boss, Cole thrives on bringing his employees into his world, one where working in an amusement park is literally the best job a person could ask for.  He shows up in costumes, creates characters to go on as guest speakers, makes You Tube Music videos (which thanks to TAL are rounding 7,000 views) and organizes elaborate competitions throughout the summer.  We follow his employee’s battling through one such “Sweet Sixteen Tournament” to see which two employees can procure the most cash for their game by the end of the day.   We follow Ira around as he watches these high school-aged employees build intricate sets, sew costumes and devise schemes to lure the most customers into their game.  In a sense, Cole has turned this job into a summer camp for these kids.  Meanwhile, Cole has let his own growth fall by the wayside.

Ira soon points out that Cole actually neglected to finish college in order to take this job, and that in grand scheme of things, he’s pretty low on the amusement park totem pole.  Cole via Ira, tries to come to terms with the fact, that he can’t run his mini Amusement Park summer camp forever.  Yet, he admits that he feels as happy at this job as he thinks he’ll ever feel.

The show goes on to compare Cole to The Office’s Michael Scott, a character that, though gone, has clearly become a part of the American zeitgeist (this episode, by the way, comes on the heels of the news that James Spader will be semi replacing Steve Carrel as the new Dunder Mifflin Scranton manger in next season’s Office.)  Cole, like Michael Scott is immediately lovable in this week’s episode.  It brings us to wonder, what is it about this character archetype, the guy who is such a goof that he transcends goofiness, a guy who’s truly content in his menial-ness, what about this is so attractive to the modern American psyche?

In Act II, a slew of listeners share their stories about amusement parks.  Guys proposing on a rollercoaster only to lose the ring, carnies doing tricks on the Gravitron, carnies saving babies and lots of vomit.  But the most common theme amongst listener’s stories was love, or teenage lust.  Which leads us to our next act from Jonathan Goldstein about the summer he moved to Wildwood, NJ as a last hurrah before dedicating his life to g-d by joining Yeshiva.  Jonathan’s story reads like a more nebbish Shalom Auslander story.  After spending an entire summer working tedious boardwalk jobs in hope of getting “L’ed,” Jonathan has his first sexual encounter via a drunken stranger on the boardwalk that randomly plants a wet one on his lips and walks off.  He points out that this minor interaction would turn him into the dark kid at Yeshiva, the one with a past.  Throughout the story, Jonathan paints Wildwood as a creepy, dilapidated town where the fun is a mere afterthought.  But then we realize, as does he, that Wildwood is the only place in the world where that stranger would walk up and randomly kiss him on the mouth.

For me, the Amusement Park theme brings to mind, rather than a specific memory, a film.  When I was in high school, in the days before Mark Wahlberg become known as the guy responsible for poisoning the TV world with Entourage, a film called Fear would define the sexuality of millions of teenager girls contemplating how and when they would go to third base.  Wahlberg, then on the heels of being known as the guy who always dropped his pants under inappropriate circumstances, managed to become a sex symbol incarnate thanks to Fear.  He did so by doing the following: threatening his girlfriends parents with violence, ferociously beating his bare chest to make it look like his girlfriends father abused him, trying to seduce his girlfriends mom.  In the film, he does all of this so that he could achieve his goal of going to third base with Reese Witherspoon on a rollercoaster.  Soon after, the entire rebellious teenage female population of the US (or at least New Jersey) wanted to follow in Reese’s footsteps, or rollercoaster seat as the case may be.

Well, looks like we’re out of time.  Till next week I’m Jon Reiss, and may all your loop-de-loops be loopy.

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Act 1: And it’s been decocainized there since 1903.

Coca Cola’s ongoing secrecy about their exact recipe has gone on for more years than there are gallons of sugar in a can of the stuff. However, in this very special act, Original Recipe, Ira goes Glasnost on their ass and gives the people what is theirs. Dubbing the flavor concoction Merchandise 7x, sneaky grandaddy Pemberton did God’s (Freud’s) work in spreading cocaine’s pride across this great land in the secret sauce. So what if prohibition meant no more of his original wine-cocaine-caffeine swill? “So he kept the two other ingredients, the cocaine and the caffeine, people love those, but when you mix the cocaine and the caffeine together, they’re bitter, so he pours in a ton of sugar to cut the bitterness, and voila, Coca Cola. Pemberton called it his temperance drink.”

From Pemberton’s hand to our ears (by way of several druggist, inventor, and widow hands over 133 years), and with the assurance of Mark Pendergrast’s research, Ira reads a recipe found conspicuously hanging out in a 1979 news clipping that we are fairly confident had some relation to, if not today’s, Pemberton’s original spritz. File away Ira’s recipe card for your collection, in case you come across some decocainized coca in Jersey.

This act is grand because it is the perfect cocktail: one part TAL, one part Mythbusters, one part experimental consumption. After easily buying cocaine products online, they set out to make the recipe with the folks at Jones Soda (whose work with Ira now pardons their shameful retiring of a fine chocolate soda).

“I have this feeling like I’m going to drop acid right now,” confesses Ira, made vulnerable by the lifemilk before him, which, after turning to an Orange County flavoring company to turn down the orange in the recipe, was as good as any President’s Choice cola knockoff on the market, it sounded.

Coca Cola’s Glavlit toned down the certaintly of the act: “Could it be a precursor? Yeah. But is it the one that went to market? Probably not.”

“That tastes like my childhood,” said one taste tester, whose nostalgic heart could never love the wannabe soda more than her corn syrup teddy bear.

Act 2: MM shall never discuss nor reveal to any persons the specifics of the said relationship between her and JFK

This is the story of John Reznikoff, a document expert and artifact collector, whose eyes turned into diamonds when Lex Cusack sang Happy Birthday, Mister President to him. Cusack turns out to be a better actor than John and Joan, fooling even himself as he presented the possible proof of the relationship between Marilyn and John. Doc experts, vet status, and even Seymour Hersh seem on board with this new reality. Yet again, journalism paves the way of investigative truth-telling as Cusack’s appearance on Peter Jennings’ hot seat uses typography (Prestige Pica Selectric, “which didn’t exist until the early 1970s”) and other chronological clues to expose his lies. Meanwhile, Reznikoff retains his seat in lala land beachside, unable to comprehend that he had been duped. “If he was this military hero, in my mind, these can’t possibly be non-authentic.” That this was a career-making find, complimented with the trickster’s claim to army status, and add to that his self-confidence as a researcher, Reznikoff narcissistically shifted conflict to the outside world, claiming the makings of a Kennedy conspiracy. Could be, and reporter Jake Halpern suggests that listeners try to empathize:

“Before you scream to yourself, how could he be so stupid, consider that Jon’s realization about Lex meant dismantling everything he understood about himself. John’s entire career was based on knowing the real thing when he saw it…so while it may sound crazy that he believe that Lex was MI5,  it made even less sense that John was a sucker.”

An ongoing trend in recent or perhaps all TAL episodes, which suggests that it is part of the episodic formula, is the point at which this American realizes that his perceptions of reality have gone unquestioned for too long. Whether he’s Reznikoff, or she is a woman of mystery who must reevaluate her life’s work after banking on a CIA fantasy career, falling asleep at the wheel generally results in a wake up call that becomes the pinnacle of the act. This sort of runs parallel with the fundamental ethos of public radio, to suggest alertness with one’s own life and in the external world.

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Ira takes us to the Tough Room, environments of high pressure caliber in the everyday. Beginning with the cliche Thanksgiving dinner setting in which every interaction is a ticking bomb, the Ohm family proves not as meditative as their name after a terrorist’s sexy factor is considered and army dad loses his shit. It’s a pretty clutch prologue that does a good job getting the laughs going before we walk into a room full of comedians trying to brutally impress each other with their one-liners.

Act 1: Thirsty mayor drinks the whole town’s water supply

At the Onion headquarters, their filter is better than Brita, knocking out the boring.  It’s surprising to hear how attached the writers are to their proposed headlines that fall victim to their “academic precision that they are proud of.” I had heard of Todd Hanson, one of the paper’s founding fathers, from a Chicago Trib editor who talked about his old buddy like he was an engineer in a garage. I can’t help but picture Hanson on Bloomberg radio proclaiming, “If you can’t find something legitimate to say within the context of the joke, no matter how silly it is, I don’t see the point of it.” The conversation with the staff reveals that the fruit of the joke resides in the top-heavy titles, where if Pam Anderson were an Onion story, her rack would be the headline.

Act 2: These grown ups sitting there drinking wine tumbled off their white couch laughing, and I felt like a superstar

The star of the act is a girl destined to be a raggedy barfly. Rosie Schaap is our very own TALian Hailee Steinfeld who finds a niche among the older crowds on the train she frequented to get to therapy in the city, a crowd she gelled with via tarot divination bartered for beer. I was especially all hers as she recalled, ”The next week, after therapy, my fortune telling for alcohol scheme began in earnest.” Let’s just ignore the probability that her shrink is not hearing about these scenarios at their sessions.

Act 3: Le livre de Mormon? Au revoir!

The sounds of Mormons selling Mormonism to Manhattanites intermingles with the classic TAL organ tunage, highlighting the bad pitches being thrown around more vigorously than I had to throw at my first job out of college selling babies on the street. Their numbers, 3-4 newcomers at the church each week, are about the same as those I was responsible for at the nonprofit. That these boys did not seem to display any signs of the marked misanthropia for the hundreds of pedestrians so quick to say no is a true sign of deeper love of man than I was able to muster up for my fellow Chicagoans who wouldn’t consider for a minute helping undernourished children abroad. I hated them, and I hated my job. Say what you will about the Mormons, but I am certain that these gentlemen were right in their absolute conviction in their positive response to Jane Feltes’, “Are these skills you’re going to bring to your career?” Their ability to handle intense levels of frigid rejection in stride and to move on to the next good idea gives them a one-up even on some Onion writers.

Act 4: My name is Brett, and I cry over movies on airplanes.

GQ’s Brett Martin highlights the experiences of various high fliers whose tears hit it hard in the box in the air. His articulate description of the “sterile infantalizing travel purgatory” sums up perfectly the state that holds us captive and makes us vulnerable to the elements of B movies and other media. Yo, it was hard enough dealing with the baby to my right on my last flight, not to mention the dude in headphones sobbing on my left shoulder. This life, man.

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Contents Unknown is the junk drawer in which three acts relate to each other by way of hidden realities inaccessible to truthseekers due to lapses in history, memory, or rent. Journalist Ron Rosenberg introduces the topic in explaining the strange British phenomenon of last resort letters. “It’s Kubrik territory–It’s Dr. Strangelove territory.” The open fact that this fail-safe exists seems to make it defunct, says Ira. Such small, safe arenas of truth are the Eden of logic that we strive toward with all our capacities.

Act 1: You’ve got to get up in there like a proctologist

This infamous act on self-storage unit auctions reveals a hoarder’s utopia. Informal bidders have their niches like specialized archaeologists, lotto-eyed dreamers who are seeking their fortunes in other people’s extras, assuming riches in lots that they are not allowed to preemptively explore. Yet, their amateur anthropological skills are impressive to say the least. “Someone’s gotta be on drugs to do this,” unabashedly concludes one auction winner of the previous owners in his makeshift dig upon seeing bicycle spokes mutated with extra limbs made of hangers protruding in ways that make the bike unusable. Meanwhile, one career-storage scoper tells the tragedy of losing his entire life as a kid when his parents chose to buy more drugs instead of paying for their storage unit, a claim that wouldn’t impress most immigrants.

Act 2: The Byzantines had sophisticated mass production techniques thousands of years before the industrial revolution

It’s the sexy story of academics fit for cinema in which Fred van Doorninck and George Bass uncover an era and even create an entirely new field in science, underwater archaeology. Jackpot. The second consecutive act engaged in truthseeking by way of archaeology, the duo discovered the Cairo Geniza of the Byzantine empire in the form of a ship that neither was enthusiastically seeking in the first place or second. And after fifty years, they had found how the ship fit in the global politics of the day, namely connections between church and army efforts and the presence of the mass-producing spirit of Henry Ford. Like Ford and the Byzantines, van Doorninck and Bass developed standards for their field, creating solutions to aquatic explorations still relevant today.

Act 3: The nurses claimed I was the most entertaining psychotic they’d ever had

One of the top TAL acts, no wonder it is on constant replay. David MacLean’s tale is the scariest of the episode, his contents unknown being personal memory caught in vaccine-induced delirium on a yearlong Fulbright in India. Best parts are assumptions made on the parts of Indian authorities, lumping him with troubled foreigners caught up in drug binges. His tabula rasa eventually begins filling in with hallucinations, propaganda, and family memories. “These names mean as much to you as they do to me” sais MacLean, producing a classic TAL mix of comedy and dysphoria that pulls the audience into the narrator’s experience.

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People (and circumstances) that are Slow to React are considered on TAL this week, as rationalizations of reality alter expectations while romances go unpursued, moles keep growing abnormally, and unacknowledged pregnancies continue to result in babies.

Ira and the TALian ladies peruse this last scenario in speaking with a girl from the hit Discovery show I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant who did not know she was preggers until three days before she gave birth. More astounding are the numbers finding that this is not so uncommon, especially among teen pregnancies.  Best advice Ira’s ever given us concludes the prologue: each time you see a woman who looks pregnant, confront her about it because she might not know she is.

Act 1: I felt like a werewolf had bitten me, and it was only a matter of time before the full moon rose.

This is the messy account of journalist David Holthouse whose memories of his childhood rape warrant earmuffs for all adolescent listeners. Although the attack went down when he was seven years old, he never got around to telling his parents despite the memory never fading, prioritizing their warm memories of his childhood before his own pursuit of remedies. Rationalizing here in survival mode, the scary reality he can’t escape is as twisted as the gang signs your Aunt Sarah’s toes have been throwing out below mumus for years.

Interestingly, he never buried the memory, feeding it facts (like the Colorado statistic that measures the mean victims for child rapists to be 184) until it fattened up into a homicidal craving for rapist blood decades later. Even then, on the verge of murder, his strange rationale is expressed as a need to protect his retired parents from the knowledge of his rape more than to protect potential victims. His wanting to control information is tarnished by his parents’ own version of Wikileaks a la spring cleaning and childhood diaries. At this point, it seems that closure had begun its course.

Act 2: They danced to Led Zeppelin

Another Denver man stalls his fate, this time sacrificing a heart. Fam spinster, Uncle Mark suffers a fate that is “Slow to React” because he is a mama’s boy. It’s beautiful when we can find similarities between cultures, finding universalities as with the matriarchal yenta spanning cultural continents in one Gaia of guilt. Although narrator Sean Lewis does not dwell on that quality of Mark, rather focused on how weird it seemed that out of the blue, he was marrying a Korean broad he met 17 years before in warfare. In reality, his mother’s refused blessing brought him back sans special lady friend, but he was not dormant. Because he tracked Ms. Ha down and wooed her in letter-writing, that he could be called slow to react is unfair. He was just smart in keeping nosy nay-sayers out of the loop. Best metaphor of the episode describes Mark relative to the rest of the fam: “He was the tortoise in a family full of hares…to us it appeared he was barely moving.”

Act 3: When I go on those cancer message boards I feel like some old-timer in Appalachia

Slow to react in this case is a Chicago steak, good yet rare. Jonathan Menjivar delivers tiptop reportage of Katherine Russell Rich, who dwells in the 2% who lives beyond her life expectancy with stage 4 cancers. No longer expecting treatments to equal cures, she describes the array of actions she’s taken to continue winning.

The biggest fail that Kathy recognizes is that doctors are not studying her, an anomaly in the medical world. She speaks of a sense of helpless blackness as an individual without a system–doctors, police, family–to take care of her. She conveys that eventually, the thing that is limiting you most is not the first thing on your mind and you have to focus on continuing to live.

“What’s the worst that can happen?” questioning reveals the liberating answer that allows her to live vibrantly: nothing.

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When Ira introduced an episode that descended the disorienting cloud of politics onto the world of children, I wasn’t expecting to hear any revelations about people’s relationships to their governing systems–how could a child possibly make more naive decisions than Daley? But on the contrary and as to be expected, this week’s show, Kid Politics, zooms in on individuals’ responses to being a part of a system, and reveals how moldable a person’s analysis is by sources of information.

Ira opens the floor with a PBS plug for the doc they aired, Please Vote for Me, on Chinese babycakes running for class offices and implementing negative campaigning that results in tears. Most interesting is the chirping of little democrats trying to balance their power hunger with their comrades demands in a leader; most naturally, the first thing to go was Honest Abe politicking.

Act 1: That is another correct response according to President Reagan.

A rare treat these days, Jewcy interviewee Starlee Kine returns to WBEZ with a darling childhood recollection of idyllic field tripping to the Nixon Library. Her memories of meeting Nixon aide H.R. Halderman that day gave hope that the oblivion of future generations might erase the burden he still carried from Watergate.

Jumping to the Reagan Library today, equal portions of propaganda are rationed out as fifth graders play a choose-your-own-adventure with Reagan’s invasion of Granada. In a cheery voice, the library’s tourguide uses good old circular logic to steer the tabula rasas to anti-pinko, anti-journalist conclusions.  In this vein, an intimidating alarm goes off each time non-Reagan choices are made by the mini-mes. As reporters are demonized and indirectly blamed for the death of soldiers in Grenada, “one by one you can see it on the student’s faces, how it could have been perfect if it weren’t for the press.” It can be argued that the library’s bias is obvious in the very name of the building. It’s just that they pass these conclusions off as products of the students’ own critical thinking that is misleading and so very Reaganite.

Act 2: Global warming is propaganda, that’s what I believe.

Ira speaks to unicorns in the form of Glenn Beck-loving teenagers at his DC rally. Our host beautifully uses his role as journalist to connect skeptic with expert to instigate dialogue. as global warming nonbeliever Erin Gustafson, high school freshman, speaks with Dr. Roberta Gustafson for a stance on warming Glenn Beck shits on daily. Gustafson’s skepticism is promising brain activity, and it seems that hers is not a closed mind, yet. After Ira asks if she could picture her reevaluating her stance, she says,

If I saw both sides arguing both completely side by side, then maybe I can see how it would be true, or even more definitely, how it isn’t true. I just personally feel like this is almost like evolution where people will say, ‘Yes, this is fact and this is what happened,’ and there are other people who would say that this is theory…and then there would be people who say this is completely untrue.

Meanwhile, Ira poses the root question to the doctor: Do you think it’s hopeless to reach certain people once they are skeptical?

There’s a spectrum of belief. I have to remain hopeful that when people have open minds and are equipped to analyze evidence that they’ll come to rational conclusions.

We can only hope.

Act 3: What the hell is a whore?

A similar craving for open minds continues and is satisfied in the environment of the Brooklyn Free School. There, where “the inmates run the asylum,” Jyllian Gunther brings us an excellent story on democracy in action in the ungraduated. The decisionmaking power and advocacy allowed to the students makes for a totally different democratic atmosphere that generally resides in utopia. As active as kefir culture, their democratic meetings have put the students in the habit of not falling asleep at the wheel. Such delving questions are posed by the kinder, as when voting on whether to continue to implement “No Screens Week” (when digital screens of all types are outlawed in the brownstone school), “If you can trust someone to learn what they need to know without encouraging them, shouldn’t you trust them to know when to turn a computer off?”

In dialogue with the last act, these students, when faced with disagreeable issues, are not afraid to speak up. In contrast, when Ira asked Gustafson if she ever brought up her counterpoint on global warming with teachers, she answered no, that she simply regurgitated that which she knew was expected of her. This lack of opportunity to put ideas in conversation is probably the most un-American thing of all.

The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next. -Abraham Lincoln

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The Invention of Money is Family Plot meets Wall Street. It can be subtitled from the mouth of Michael Douglas: “Money itself isn’t lost or made, it’s simply transferred from one perception to another.” And just as our times necessitated a remake of Gecko’s take on greed, so too must the experts dissect even the most fundamental quandries. Picture Ira and crew congregating around the hookah in Pillowland contemplating the current state of affairs, asking what Ira dubs their most stoner question in the midst of the financial debacle, “Where did all that money go?” Furthermore, how much money to create? Where does the money come from? Does the created money add to the deficit? Simple answers end up being the pipe dream, as the hour is dedicated to two fun-filled acts ushered in by the Mensa-elite on the Planet Money team.

Goldstein and Glass inquire as to where the cheese is at in twenty-eleven by way of studying rare limestone currency on the pre-industrial island of Yap. Not representing gold anymore, what then does money stand in for? Conclusion: money is fiction. Already in the prologue, things are getting strange in Iraland. And as we’ve learned from HST, “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”

Act 1: The minute you get paid the clock is ticking on your money.

Chana Joffe-Walt reports on the dire need for pros in the political and economic climates of Brazil following five decades of inflation and a presidency that literally took all the money in its system and ushered in a much appreciated impeachment. “When a government does that, you lose people’s respect.” As the men behind the curtain looked for reformation in Brazil’s entirely overinflated fat man of an economy, the country’s best intellectuals were escorted in to perform financial liposuction.

And in the midst of changes, some Latin American Magical Realism was served up, complete with citizen dreams of money walking off on its own from dressers. Basing their math on faith, Brazil worked through five decades of inflation to become the world’s eighth largest economy. “People had to be tricked that money had value when all signs told them that was absolutely untrue.” This propaganda machine established URVs as legit currency

This was a rare case in which a system actually changed itself and the very reality of its economy to benefit its individuals, the equivalent of the rare wet wall accompanying a WET PAINT sign.

Act 2: The joystick presumes a very precise control, which is exactly what they don’t have.

Speaking of out of control inflation, the team turns to the surprising example of our own Fed. The goliath sugardaddy clicking cash into banks warrants more questions of what is real. The Fed’s Houdini tricks mirror those in Brazil in that legitimacy of the system depends on the public’s embrace, an interesting nod at Nietzschean speculation that complaisant sheep fuel the flourishing of a system.

Kestenbaum and Blumberg focus in on the magic hat that is the Fed with the specific lens of post financial crisis evolutions of policy in emergency mode, toxic assets and mortgage backed securities becoming the gold standard of our time.

Best of all are the talking heads that make waves in this act, including a nostalgic snippet of Kramer losing his shit on Mad Money over Bernanke, and a word from Ron Paul (who wishes death to the Fed and is also the homicidal parent leading House oversight on the previously unchecked piggy bank).

Theoretically, shifts in the Fed’s spending should revert to more conventional forms of collateral and spending after the war on debt is controlled. However, another unanswerable is posed: “Once you go crazy how do you go back to being boring?” Expecting such a thing would be like trusting Illinois at its word in converting moneymaking tollways into freeways after the budget goals for which they were originally built were met. Best keep your trust with the dollar where it belongs, for your own sake.

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