EL REALITY SHOW FRENTE AL MAR DE MARÍA CORINA por Federico Ruíz Tirado

 

​Hay una metafísica perversa en el espectáculo actual, una suerte de geometría del absurdo donde las tragedias humanas no se miden por el peso de sus escombros, sino por el encuadre exacto del lente. 

Cortázar intuyó que el más crudo horror habita en la rutina intercalada con la fantasía. Sabato también lo sintió en esa soledad abrumadora donde la condición humana queda reducida a una farsa burocrática y estéril. 

Actriz de cartón 

​María Corina Machado, en ese interminable set de televisión al aire libre, asistió esta semana a otra de sus funciones estelares. ​La cronología del segmento presenta datos tan registrados que no necesitan adjetivos para otorgar a su espectáculo ni un milímetro de parafernalia: su sola existencia expone la grieta y para los pelos de punta a una masa un tanto inespecífica de esta Venezuela de hoy: un síntoma que no debería existir, pero sí, ahí está, como el dinosaurio de Monterroso. 

​La impuntualidad como método

Han transcurrido cuatro meses desde que la tierra se abrió. Cuatro meses de desamparo, de polvo asentado y de angustia acumulada. Lo califican como el "Doblete Sísmico". Es como esas pesadillas que no logran despertar a nadie.

Nada impedía su llegada, como se encargaron de precisar con fría precisión, portavoces del propio gobierno estadounidense. Pero la tragedia, como los buenos guiones, requiere que los actores principales elijan el momento de su entrada, y en su caso, que la Divina Providencia le moviera el corazón para colaborar en metálico con algunos habitantes de la Guaira que, sin ánimo para escuchar el cuento del gallo pelón del nobel de la paz, esperaban tal vez agua mineral o pintura multicolor.

Cuatro meses después, la escena finalmente consideró que el decorado estaba listo.

​El itinerario de las prioridades

Mientras algunas de las víctimas del terremoto aprendían a contar los días, su agenda pública demandaba compromisos de mayor envergadura internacional. Había que recoger un Premio Nobel y la platica que lo acompaña, alternar en las galerías del poder global, estrechar las manos de dignatarios y posar ante los reflectores del mundo.

La gestión de ayuda material para los damnificados, al parecer, resultaba un asunto demasiado vulgar para ser incluido en la maleta de viaje.

​El agua que no llegó: La visita a La Guaira completó la parábola. Se puede cruzar un territorio desolado e ignorar la sed de los sobrevivientes, lo que resulta insostenible es no llevar consigo ni una sola caja de agua mineral. Hay en esa omisión un rigor casi poético: la negativa a aportar lo indispensable para no arruinar la pureza del símbolo.

​Lo que ocurrió no fue una jornada de auxilio ni un acto de presencia "institucional".  Fue, en el sentido más técnico de la cinematografía contemporánea, una sesión fotográfica.

​El turismo de tragedia  que fascinaría a los teóricos del vacío— requiere de ruinas auténticas como fondo para resaltar la figura del visitante. El dolor ajeno deja de ser una realidad biológica para convertirse en la escenografía perfecta. La mirada no busca el rostro del que sufre, sino el ángulo donde la luz favorece la narrativa de la compasión abstracta.

​El teatro de lo absurdo

​No queremos habituarnos a vivir en una producción continua donde las necesidades humanas derivadas del sismo sean únicamente insumos de producción, ya basta María Machado. La tragedia no existe si no genera contenidos, las víctimas no importan hasta que sirven de extras en la toma final.

​Al final, queda el silencio de las ruinas y la certeza de que el espectáculo continuará mañana. Porque en esta tierra habituada a los milagros al revés, las promesas se evaporan tan rápido como el agua que nunca llegó, pero las fotografías, impecablemente editadas, permanecen para siempre en la galería de los simuladores.

The Doomsday Government: Preparing for the End of the World, Not the End of Power

 By John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead

Global Research, October 28, 2026

Region: USA

Theme: Intelligence, Militarization and WMD

This time of year, there is no shortage of monsters to frighten us.

Hollywood has given us vampires, zombies, mad scientists, masked killers and creatures that emerge from the darkness to prey upon the unsuspecting.

But perhaps the most frightening monster of all is the government that has become so accustomed to wielding extraordinary power that it cannot imagine a future in which that power is diminished.

Enter the Doomsday Plan.

In what sounds like a plot lifted straight out of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, the Pentagon has unveiled an initiative designed to keep the war machine running even if a catastrophic war devastates the country’s civilian infrastructure.

Under an initiative called FORTRESS, the military is preparing major installations across the United States to operate independently for at least 90 days in the event of a catastrophic disruption. The plan includes portable nuclear reactors, independent power grids, stockpiles of fuel and ammunition, backup communications systems and arrangements for civilian factories to switch over to wartime production.

The Pentagon calls this preparedness.

The rest of us might reasonably wonder: what good is a government that can survive the end of the world if the people it was created to serve cannot?

Of course, governments have a responsibility to prepare for emergencies. But there is a world of difference between preparing to protect the nation and preparing to preserve the power of those who govern it.

That distinction matters, especially when the same government that prepares for catastrophic war also helps create the conditions in which such wars become not only likely but imminent.

The Pentagon has been anticipating a future in which the military can continue fighting, even when the civilian infrastructure that sustains ordinary Americans may no longer function.

Consider the Pentagon’s chilling training video, Megacities: Urban Future, the Emerging Complexity, made public in 2016.

The video envisions a world of sprawling urban centers overwhelmed by poverty, disease, unemployment, overcrowding, failing infrastructure, environmental disasters and civil unrest.

It is a bleak portrait of the world as military planners fear it might look by 2030. In this vision of the future, cities become battlegrounds and the citizenry are viewed as the enemy.

As the video warns, there will be a need to “drain the swamps.” Only in this dystopian future, “we the people” risk becoming inhabitants of the swamp that military forces are preparing to clear out.

That is a dangerous way for any government to view the people it is supposed to protect.

It is particularly dangerous for a nation whose founders explicitly rejected martial law and enacted constitutional bulwarks to guard against the rise of a police state.

Yet this is where the country has been heading for years.

We’ve witnessed the steady militarization of domestic law enforcement, the expansion of surveillance networks, the deployment of military equipment into American communities, and repeated efforts to blur the line between policing and warfare.

Under the Trump administration, those boundaries have been tested even further through domestic military deployments, aggressive immigration enforcement and expansive claims of executive authority in the name of national security.

The message is increasingly unmistakable: the military is increasingly being presented as the solution to every domestic crisis.

Yet this is also why the Pentagon’s latest Doomsday preparations cannot be considered in isolation from the government’s longstanding continuity-of-government plans.

For decades, federal officials have maintained arrangements intended to preserve essential government operations during a catastrophic emergency, including secure facilities, alternate command centers, succession procedures and protected communications systems.

These preparations are hardly limited to military installations.

Even Trump’s controversial White House ballroom project includes plans for fortified underground facilities, bomb shelters, secure communications and medical facilities, ostensibly to ensure that the presidency can continue functioning during a national emergency.

The government is making elaborate preparations to preserve its leadership and military capabilities in the event of catastrophe.

Some of these measures are practical: a functioning government is essential to coordinating rescue operations, maintaining order and rebuilding after disaster. But continuity-of-government planning also raises a constitutional question that is too often overlooked: what exactly is being preserved?

The Constitution establishes a government of limited, divided powers, accountable to the people and constrained by law.

Preserving that government means more than ensuring that the president can issue orders, military commanders can communicate and federal agencies can continue operating. It means preserving the checks and balances that prevent power from becoming absolute. It means preserving Congress, the courts, due process, freedom of speech, freedom of the press and the right of the people to challenge government abuses.

It means ensuring that an emergency does not become an excuse to dispense with the very constitutional restraints that distinguish a republic from a dictatorship.

Otherwise, continuity of government becomes little more than continuity of power.

That is what makes the Pentagon’s doomsday planning so unsettling.

The problem is not that the military wants to keep the lights on during a national catastrophe.

The problem is what happens when keeping the machinery of war functioning becomes the overriding measure of national survival.

So where does that leave us?

President Trump and his self-serving administration of war hawks have squandered so much of our resources, our goodwill on the world stage, and our role as a champion for liberty and justice.  Now having pushed us to the apocalyptic brink of devastation, they’re building bunkers to save their own necks while the rest of us are left to fend for ourselves.

Enough is enough.

“We the people” should be demanding a government that works to prevent catastrophe, protects civilian life, respects constitutional limits and remembers that its continued existence is not an end in itself. And if they won’t march in lockstep with our expectations, throw the whole lot of them out.

Because as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the danger comes when the government forgets that it exists to serve the people, not the other way around.

A government that survives by abandoning the people and the Constitution has not saved the country.

It has merely saved itself.

The Constitution was not written to ensure that the government would survive at any cost.

It was written to ensure that freedom would survive a tyrannical government.

*

Click the share button below to email/forward this article. Follow us on Instagram and X and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost Global Research articles with proper attribution.

This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org.

Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

They are regular contributors to Global Research.

Resolving Structural Phase Transitions Down to 12 K with Laboratory X-ray Diffraction

 

Low-temperature XRD using Empyrean and the Oxford PheniX cryostat

06 October 2026

Crystal structures can change when materials are cooled to cryogenic temperatures. These structural phase transitions may be closely connected to a material’s magnetic, electronic, mechanical, or other physical properties. Identifying the transition temperature and understanding how the crystal structure evolves can therefore be important in studies of functional oxides, magnetostructural materials, superconducting materials, correlated-electron systems, and other materials with temperature-dependent behavior.

Powder X-ray diffraction, or XRD, provides a direct way to monitor crystallographic changes during cooling. A phase transition that changes crystal symmetry can alter the positions and profiles of selected diffraction reflections. In some cases, a single diffraction peak above the transition separates into multiple components below it. Detecting this peak splitting requires an experimental configuration that combines reliable cryogenic temperature control with sufficient diffraction quality to distinguish closely spaced reflections.

Why Cryogenic XRD Measurements Are Challenging

Low-temperature structural transitions can be difficult to resolve because the resulting changes in a diffraction pattern may be subtle. Peak shifts or splitting may occur over a narrow temperature interval, and the selected reflections must be measured with enough clarity to reveal their evolution. Measurements near the lowest accessible temperature are particularly demanding because the experimental system must maintain suitable temperature access while continuing to produce interpretable diffraction data.

This application note examines a laboratory configuration based on an Empyrean diffractometer and an Oxford PheniX closed-cycle helium cryostat. The system was used to collect temperature-dependent powder XRD data from 320 K down to 12 K. A 1Der detector provided energy discrimination, which is relevant when rare-earth-containing materials are measured using Cu radiation because fluorescence can otherwise contribute to the measured background.

Monitoring Transitions in TbVO₄ and DyVO₄

TbVO₄ and DyVO₄ were selected as representative materials with structural transitions at different cryogenic temperatures. TbVO₄ undergoes a transition at approximately 33 K. Above this temperature, the selected reflection appears as a single diffraction peak. When the material is cooled below the transition, the peak separates into distinct components.

DyVO₄ provides a more demanding example because its structural transition occurs at approximately 14 K. This is only 2 K above the lowest temperature used in the experiment. The temperature-dependent data nevertheless show a distinct change in the selected reflection, with peak splitting remaining visible close to the 12 K measurement limit.

Using Isoline Plots to Visualize Structural Evolution

Temperature-dependent isoline plots display diffraction intensity as a function of diffraction angle and temperature. This format makes it possible to see when a reflection begins to split and how the resulting components develop during cooling. The onset of splitting provides a direct visual indication of a change in crystallographic symmetry.

The full application note explains:

• How the low-temperature XRD measurements were configured and performed
• The measurement conditions used with the Empyrean and PheniX system
• How diffraction-peak splitting revealed the transition in TbVO₄
• How the transition in DyVO₄ was detected near the lowest measurement temperature
• How isoline plots support direct interpretation of structural evolution
• Which research areas may benefit from this laboratory approach

Improving Raman Spectral Quality in Autofluorescent Biological Samples By: Dr. Dieter Bingemann, David Creasey

 

Raman spectroscopy offers specific, non-destructive analysis of biological samples, enabling identification and quantitative measurement with minimal sample preparation. Advances in laser technology, sensors, and spectrometer design have expanded its use beyond specialized laboratories into a broader range of biological and medical applications.

A persistent challenge in these applications is the strong autofluorescence of biological samples, which can obscure or overwhelm the Raman signal. This article examines strategies for improving spectral quality, including longer excitation wavelengths, reducing excitation and detection volumes, and advanced post-processing techniques.

---

Raman in Biological and Biomedical Applications

Over the past decade, Raman spectroscopy has increasingly been applied not just as a substance identification tool in security applications, but also as a valuable analytical tool in the biological and medical fields. Raman specificity not only enables identification of single compounds, but also the characterization of complex mixtures, such as tissues or cell cultures. Differences in the spectrum correlate with the cell type, bacteria identity, or antibiotic response.

Compositional information in biotech production is key to controlling the process tightly, thus optimizing yield, quality, and overall productivity. Raman spectra are recorded without breaking the sterile seal, the measurements are taken through a view port or a dip probe that is part of the sterilized reactor. This allows simultaneous inline real-time measurement of multiple compounds, whereby monitoring the feedstock level as a critical process parameter steers the microorganisms from proliferation to production of the target molecule.

Strategies for Autofluorescence Reduction

Unfortunately, in these application spaces, the often very strong autofluorescence of biological samples can overwhelm the generally weak Raman signal. Traditional approaches to dealing with fluorescence can be limited in their effectiveness or require increased complexity and expense.

In the most common approach, a baseline correction algorithm is applied to fit a smooth function below the Raman spectrum, which is subtracted in a second step.1,2 Multiple algorithms have been published,3-7 but many require to manually adjust some fit parameters and from inconsistent fitting performance. The most significant drawback is the fact that the significant shot noise of the high fluorescence signal is carried over into the baseline-corrected result. While the fluorescence signal is removed, its associated noise can still hide the Raman peaks.

Figure 1: Reduction of autofluorescence by selection of a longer Raman excitation wavelength

A second traditional approach is a switch to a longer laser excitation wavelength, which has shown to generate lower levels of autofluorescence.8 Figure 1 shows the decrease of the background fluorescence relative to the Raman signal for increasingly longer excitation wavelengths for a sample of glucose. The greatest fluorescence reduction is achieved with 1064-nm excitation, the NIR wavelengths, however, require the switch to the more costly, and less sensitive, InGaAs detector technology. For this reason, 785-nm has thus emerged as the most common Raman excitation wavelength.

Other approaches have been developed, such as Shifted Excitation Difference Raman Spectroscopy (SERDS) and time-resolved Raman spectroscopy. In SERDS, the laser excitation is switched between two neighboring wavelengths, about a typical Raman width apart. As only the Raman peaks shift with this wavelength change, but not the fluorescence, the difference spectrum cancels the fluorescence. Time-resolved Raman utilizes that Raman is an instantaneous process, while fluorescence emerges after a short delay. The instantaneous signal therefore discriminates against fluorescence. Both methods, SERDS and time-resolved Raman, however, require more sophisticated and higher-cost equipment.

In this article, we evaluate two novel strategies for the autofluorescence problem, reducing some of those limitations: advanced post-processing and reduction of excitation and detection volume – and the combination of the two. Rather than leading to a more complex instrument, these methods are realized on a new, pocket-size, Raman system.

Materials and Methods:

Two setups are employed in this article. In the fermentation demonstration, we use a Wasatch Photonics compact Raman spectrometer with 785-nm laser excitation, fiber-coupled to a probe inserted into a stirred solution of 50 g/L glucose and 2g/L yeast. The fermentation is observed over 14 hours, with spectra collected in ‘batch mode’ every two minutes at 5 seconds integration time as an average of 20 scans.

For the cell culture experiments we use a handheld WP 785 XS Raman system, with integrated 100-mW single-mode laser and probe optics, both with the standard 19-mm focal length front optics as well as with a 50x microscope objective for the tighter focus comparison. The system is mounted pointing down and positioned with an x/y/z stage to focus onto various cell cultures grown on standard nutritional agar plates. Individual, non-averaged, spectra are collected with 2-second integration time only from a narrow vertical band in the center of the 2D CMOS detector of the Raman system.

In both experiments, the resulting Raman spectra are processed using WP Raman XD, a custom neural network of the U-Net type, which was trained to remove fluorescence and noise from input spectra, while preserving Raman peak intensities.

Results and Discussion:

Fermentation Experiment

The original Raman spectra of the fermentation process (Fig. 2) show the growing overall background due to the increasing yeast cell count in the broth. They also reflect the appearance of the ethanol product with its Raman peak at 890 cm-1. The finer details are hidden under the strong fluorescence background.

WP Raman XD post-processing extracts background- and noise-free Raman peaks from the original spectra, as shown in the middle panel of Fig. 2. The comparison to pure Raman spectra for glucose (feed) and ethanol (main product) in the bottom panel of Fig. 2 illustrates the good agreement between the WP Raman XD-processed and the expected peaks.

In addition to glucose and ethanol we also see peaks for side products of the fermentation, at around 700 and 1800 cm-1. Additional comparison measurements show that these peaks are associated with the production of carbonic acid.

Figure 2: Top: Original 785-nm Raman spectra recorded during a 14-hour fermentation of glucose with yeast to form ethanol. Middle: Background- and noise-free Raman spectra extracted from the raw spectra using WP Raman XD post-processing. Bottom: Glucose (feed) and ethanol (main product) spectra for comparison.

 

The WP Raman XD-processed spectra reflect the expected evolution of the fermentation: decrease of glucose peak intensity and increase in the ethanol peak height, illustrating the quantitative nature of the post processing step.

Cell Culture Experiment

Cell culture Raman spectra are traditionally recorded on larger, research-grade Raman microscopes. These instruments yield spectra with a good ratio of Raman signal to fluorescence background signal, better than what is achievable with standard, compact, Raman systems using the same samples. Two main factors are responsible for this difference: Raman microscopes use single-mode laser excitation for a tighter focus and confocal detection for out-of-focus rejection. This restricts the signal detection to a small sample region with the highest laser power density, which leads to saturation and bleaching of fluorescence, while the Raman response remains linear in excitation power.

For compactness, the WP 785 XS system integrates a single-mode laser diode for Raman excitation. With its tight focus, it covers the first aspect of the Raman microscope advantage. As the top left panel of Fig. 3 illustrates, the focus generated by the 19-mm focal length front optic is not tight enough to improve the Raman to fluorescence ratio to the desired levels. A shorter-focal length, 50x microscope objective improves this ratio further (Fig. 3, top right panel).

To reduce the detected volume in sync with the excited volume, we reduce the vertical height, known as the region of interest (ROI), which is read from the CMOS detector to just 4 pixels (15 um). As the non-astigmatic lens system of the XS spectrometer bench images a point from the slit 1:1 onto a point on the detector, this dramatic reduction in effective detector height constitutes a confocal detection scheme, equivalent to using a pinhole in the optical path.

As shown in the bottom left panel of Fig. 3, this confocal detection leads to a significant improvement in the overall Raman to fluorescence signal ratio. However, the reduction in detector height also decreases the overall signal to noise ratio of the spectrum. To counteract this loss, the confocal spectra are post-processed with the WP Raman XD neural network to generate the spectrum shown in the bottom right panel of Fig. 3.

Figure 3: Sequence of stepwise improvements of Raman to Background ratio for cell culture spectra. Top left: Standard 19-mm focal length front optics. Top right: Tighter single mode laser focus with 50x objective. Bottom left: Reading of narrow detection window to mimic confocal detection. Bottom right: Post-processing with WP Raman XD to remove remaining background.

To assess whether this captured and post-processed spectrum consists of typical Raman bands seen in cell cultures. To evaluate, we overlay the observed peaks with the Raman shifts listed for various biochemical compounds typically observed in Raman spectra of tissues and cell cultures.9 The comparison shown in Fig. 4 illustrates a good alignment of expected and observed peaks. This shows that the WP XS Raman system with tight focus, combined with advanced post-processing, can reveal details in the resulting spectra for a cell culture that are typically associated with research Raman microscopes.

Figure 4: Interpretation of WP Raman XD-cleaned confocal-like narrow focus cell culture spectrum recorded with WP 785 XS Raman system. Expected Raman shifts taken from Ref. 9

Conclusion:

We present two approaches that allow us to record high-quality Raman spectra for biological samples. For a broth of glucose with yeast, as an illustration for a biotechnology application, we demonstrate effective reduction of fluorescence background and noise. Combining this post-processing with a tight single mode focus and confocal detection in a miniature Raman system, yields higher clarity spectra for a cell culture, with a quality that is commonly associated with research Raman microscopes.

 

References:

• Wei, D., Chen, S., & Liu, Q. (2015). Review of Fluorescence Suppression Techniques in Raman Spectroscopy. Applied Spectroscopy Reviews, 50(5), 387–406. https://doi.org/10.1080/05704928.2014.999936
• Liland KH, Almøy T, Mevik B-H. Optimal Choice of Baseline Correction for Multivariate Calibration of Spectra. Applied Spectroscopy. 2010;64(9):1007-1016. doi:1366/000370210792434350
• M. Galloway, E.C. Le Ru, P.G. Etchegoin. “An Iterative Algorithm for Background Removal in Spectroscopy by Wavelet Transforms”. Appl. Spectrosc. 2009. 63(12): 1370– 1376. 10.1366/000370209790108905
• M. Zhang, S. Chen, Y.Z. Liang, Z.X. Liu, et al. “An Intelligent Background-Correction Algorithm for Highly Fluorescent Samples in Raman Spectroscopy”. J. Raman Spectrosc. 2010. 41(6): 659–669. 10.1002/jrs.2500
• G. Schulze, R.B. Foist, K. Okuda, A. Ivanov, R.F.B. Turner. “A Model-Free, Fully Automated Baseline-Removal Method for Raman Spectra”. Appl. Spectrosc. 2011. 65(1): 75–84. 10. 1366/10-06010
• J. Cadusch, M.M. Hlaing, S.A. Wade, S.L. McArthur, P. R. Stoddart. “Improved Methods for Fluorescence Background Subtraction from Raman Spectra”. J. Raman Spectrosc. 2013. 44(2): 1587–1595. 10.1002/jrs.4371
• Liu, Z. Zhang, S. Liu, L. Yan, et al. “Joint Baseline-Correction and Denoising for Raman Spectra”. Appl. Spectrosc. 2015. 69 (9): 1013–1022. 10.1366/14-07760
• Richard A. Crocombe1 , Brooke W. Kammrath2,3 , Pauline E. Leary4 , Thomas J. Tague5 , and William D. P. Costa, LEGO Blocks as “Standard” Samples for Evaluation of Fluorescence Avoidance and Mitigation in Raman Spectroscopy, Applied Spectroscopy 2024, Vol. 78(3) 340–348
• Chen Y, Dai J, Zhou X, Liu Y, Zhang W, et al. Raman Spectroscopy Analysis of the Biochemical Characteristics of Molecules Associated with the Malignant Transformation of Gastric Mucosa. PLoS ONE 9(4), (2014): e93906. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0093906