Tonight there are no lights. Like the New York City of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged”, the eyes of the country were plucked out to feed the starving beggars in abandoned occupied buildings which were once luxury apartments. They blame the weather – the government does – like the tribal shamans of old who made sacrifices to the gods in the hopes of an intervention. There is no food either; they tell the people to hold on, to raise chickens on the terraces of their once-glamorous apartments. There is no water – and they give lessons on state TV of how to wash with a cup of water. The money is worthless; people now pay with potatoes, if they can find them. Doctors operate using the light of their smart phones; when there is power enough to charge them. Without anesthesia, of course – or antibiotics, like the days before the advent of modern medicine. The phone service has been cut – soon the internet will go and an all-pervading darkness will fall over a feral land.

The marathon of destruction is almost finished; the lifeblood of the nation is almost gone. No, there is nothing heroic or epic here; ruins in the making are sad affairs – bereft of the comforting mantle of time which lends intrigue and inevitability. And watching it has, for me, been one of life’s great tragedies.

The 3 letter agencies are going to do what they want, regardless of what the "law" says, just like they do now.

The inevitable bursting of the bubble in the early 1990s was truly spectacular. The Nikkei lost over 80 percent of its value, land and home prices almost completely flattened, and GDP growth crashed to an anemic 1 percent. When economists refer to Japan's "lost decade" they refer to Japan's post-bubble economy. Yet, Japan now finds itself creeping into a third decade with minuscule growth. The Nikkei and asset prices have never recovered anywhere near their previous highs. Anyone getting into the Nikkei in 1990 would, after twenty-six years, have returns of roughly -50 percent. Keynesians and other economic interventionists would do well to view Japan as the canary in the coal mine. The United States and Europe have doubled down on Keynesian alchemy this last decade but our leaders need only look at the devastation these schemes have brought to Japan — a nation that has tried to borrow, print, and tax itself into prosperity for thirty years. Japan is in the late stages of Keynesian cancer and policymakers in the rest of the developed world would do well to take notice.

The bright flash occurs because when sperm enters and egg it triggers calcium to increase which releases zinc from the egg. As the zinc shoots out, it binds to small molecules which emit a fluorescence which can be picked up my camera microscopes.

Over the last six years this team has shown that zinc controls the decision to grow and change into a completely new genetic organism.