The remarkable thing about the paintings of Rudolph Wacker may be how unremarkably good they are (“New Objectivity”).
Sitting with friends the other day, I noticed every single person was saying their favorite painting of a set on the wall was by Wacker.
Winter Landscape, 1934. Rudolf Wacker
I mean, it’s like he had a way of capturing a scene in such an authentic way as to beg the question of why it’s even a scene. It’s a literal depiction of nothing in particular, a pleasing still life “magic of the everyday” that draws you in to wonder why.
During the rise of National Socialism in the 1930s, Rudolf Wacker created encrypted still lifes, which, in a subtle manner, allow us to relate to the abysses and threats of the time.
The Nazis certainly didn’t appreciate his perspective, as they tortured Wacker to death in 1939.
MIT has materialized what the CIA has wanted since early in the Cold War: deniable, unattributable, precision lethality.
…tiny flying robots could be deployed to aid in the search for survivors trapped beneath the rubble after a devastating earthquake. Like real insects, these robots could flit through tight spaces larger robots can’t reach, while simultaneously dodging stationary obstacles and pieces of falling rubble. So far, aerial microrobots have only been able to fly slowly along smooth trajectories, far from the swift, agile flight of real insects — until now. MIT researchers have demonstrated aerial microrobots that can fly with speed and agility that is comparable to their biological counterparts.
Insect sized robots at MIT, offering autonomous targeted micro lethality. Reminiscent of 2018 Micro Air Vehicle Lab (MAVLab) bird-sized versions. Source: MIT
The “humanitarian” framing is the… beard. All the “cameras and sensors” they mention as “future work” is sheer euphemism. A payload at this scale doesn’t need to be explosive; a guided needle, a directed toxin, a micro-charge at close range even inside of critical infrastructure.
The evolution from surveillance drone to armed drone to precision kinetic strike happened over roughly two decades. In terms of recent Lebanon and Caribbean strikes, we’re talking about people who market the R9X Hellfire (“Ninja”) blades as precision reducing collateral damage — amputation and destruction as humanitarian language.
Same rhetorical pattern here.
The argument that smaller and more precise is more ethical has been the justification for every escalation in targeted killing capability starting even before “Tarzon” (TAllboy, Range and aZimuth ONly) bombs or shoulder-fired mini-nuclear “Davy Crockett” rockets were claimed to be how America should win the Korean War cleanly.
The American racial encoding of this “frontier” weapon named after a genocidal folk hero (M28/M29 Davy Crockett) entered service in May 1961. It was promoted as a “surgical” strike, in photos like this one, where a white soldier poses as a “big dick” who needs soldiers of color to load and unload him. The Crockett rocket fired an “atomic watermelon” with 20 tons radioactive TNT equivalent up to 3 miles away.
This new technology announcement compresses the “precision” death timeline even more significantly because:
Scale advantage: A paperclip-weight robot is essentially undetectable. No radar signature. Visual acquisition nearly impossible.
Penetration capability: Explicitly designed to go where “traditional quadcopters can’t” — through rubble, gaps, screens, gates, grills, broken windows
Autonomous targeting: The saccade movement they’re celebrating mimics how insects localize and identify — that’s targeting behavior, not just navigation
And look at the funding: Office of Naval Research, Air Force Office of Scientific Research. The search-and-rescue framing is a dual-use press release. The money trail tells you the most likely uses and customers.
The CIA failed in the 1970s to get their Insectothopter (let alone robotic birds of Project Aquiline) operational, for precisely the reason this MIT team solved: crosswind instability.
The Insectothopter. Source: CIA Archives
The 1970s robotic dragonfly design couldn’t handle more than a light breeze, an important context for everything MIT just demonstrated:
Wind disturbances of >1 m/s handled
Aggressive maneuvers with <5cm trajectory deviation
Autonomous control (AI) architecture that compresses decision-making to distributed and real-time
Sarah Bergbreiter explicitly notes in the news release by MIT that while the controller still runs externally, they’ve demonstrated onboard execution.
“This work is especially impressive because these robots still perform precise flips and fast turns despite the large uncertainties that come from relatively large fabrication tolerances in small-scale manufacturing, wind gusts of more than 1 meter per second, and even its power tether wrapping around the robot as it performs repeated flips,” says Sarah Bergbreiter, a professor of mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, who was not involved with this work. “Although the controller currently runs on an external computer rather than onboard the robot, the authors demonstrate that similar, but less precise, control policies may be feasible even with the more limited computation available on an insect-scale robot. This is exciting because it points toward future insect-scale robots with agility approaching that of their biological counterparts,” she adds.
That’s the tell.
External computation means tethered, lab-bound demonstrations with oversight. Onboard computation means operational without oversight. She’s essentially confirming a roadmap to fly around and find out.
Search-and-rescue framing isn’t just cover for academic institutions appropriating funds, it’s how the Lincoln Laboratory gets graduate students to create weapons without moral injury or considering what happened when MIT’s death machines, known as Operation Igloo White, illegally destroyed Cambodia (Operation Menu).
Scene from “Bugging the Battlefield” by National Archives and Records Administration, 1969Cambodia Genocide Map: US Bombing Points 1965-73, Source: Yale
There seems to be a very specific reason Elon Musk was getting so angry about tariffs. Korea has been targeted by him as a dumping ground for deadly Tesla software because Korea doesn’t regulate US-made defects.
…Tesla now faces fewer regulatory hurdles than Hyundai, which must comply with Korea’s stricter rules — an uneven playing field…. Industry watchers say Tesla…can enter Korea under US safety standards and can add new Level 2 features via over-the-air updates without prior review by Korean regulators. By contrast, Hyundai and Kia must follow Korea’s stricter safety framework, which imposes more detailed requirements on electronic control units and functional-safety validation — giving them far less flexibility than Tesla to leverage lower regulatory thresholds or push Level 2 as aggressively.
November 28: Pardon for the man convicted of facilitating 400 tons of cocaine because he was “treated unfairly”. Hernández had supported the “freedom city” special “lebensraum” economic zone backed by right wing extremist billionaires Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen.
Hernández allegedly uttered the phrase that would come to define the prosecution’s case: “We’re going to shove the drugs right up the noses of the gringos.” This statement, corroborated by witnesses who saw Hernández accept bribes in exchange for military protection of the lab, dismantled his defense that he was a loyal U.S. ally. It portrayed a leader who harbored deep cynicism toward the United States, viewing the superpower not as a partner, but as a market to be exploited and a political patron to be manipulated.
December 2: Defend the murder of shipwreck survivors (war crime), saying he “would have made the same call” because… drugs allegedly in their boat.
December 6: Another unfair extrajudicial bombing kills four more people at sea, increasing the dead to 87.
The throughline isn’t drug interdiction because it’s the assertion of unchecked executive power. The Defense Secretary statement that Trump can take military action “as he sees fit” is the operative principle.
The drugs are a dog whistle for the poor and non-white, merely set dressing for a modern day “Birth of a Nation” performance endorsed by the White House.
Screen capture from 1915 “Birth of a Nation”, which President Wilson used to restart the KKK as “America First” and incite racist violence.
What’s particularly revealing is the accountability structure. The man pardoned was defined by a “cocaine superhighway” involving the military, state protection, cartel bribes, even a connection to El Chapo, to explicitly harm Americans. Trump grants clemency anyway.
Meanwhile, workers on boats (who may or may not actually be traffickers, what’s the evidentiary standard here?) get killed, including obvious war crimes by murdering survivors. These aren’t judicial proceedings. These aren’t even the theatrical military tribunals of the War on Terror. It’s “suspected cargo on a boat”, then deadly strike, then another strike to kill survivors. What makes any boat “suspected”? Who reviews that designation? What happens when they’re wrong?
An Admiral who “sunk the boat and eliminated the threat” is a lie. People clinging to wreckage after their boat was destroyed aren’t a “threat.” That’s the language of illegal execution, not interdiction.
Nearly 100 people killed on over 20 vessels, with zero proof any of them carried drugs. The evidentiary standard is so low, it’s nonexistent. Talk about unfair treatment.
..the two survivors were waving overhead before the second strike killed them. One of the sources said the action could be interpreted as the survivors either calling for help or trying to wave off another strike.
The drug superhighway guy trial at least had witnesses, evidence, a jury. The facts are plain to see that he was the primary reason drugs flowed into America. The people killed at sea get none of that, and might not even have any drugs.
The asymmetry between who gets pardoned and who gets killed maps precisely onto class and power. This smells a lot like Palantir, which has been assassinating innocent misidentified people around the world for over a decade with zero accountability.
If you doubt Palantir, you’re probably right.
The legal questions Hegseth is dodging are significant. Killing survivors of an initial strike isn’t interdiction; it’s something else entirely. And the “I wasn’t in the room but would have made the same call” framing manages to simultaneously disclaim and claim responsibility while endorsing war crimes.
Honduran president of drug pipeline into America with El Chapo connections? Trump orders freedom.
Poor Latin American workers at sea? AGM-114 Hellfire missiles on their heads, even as they plead and cry for help.
Rich and connected versus poor and anonymous. The drug war of Nixon and Reagan always operated this way, designed to incarcerate and murder poor non-whites, but this week Trump has made it unusually overt and undeniable.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
