Cambricon Technologies Corp. swung to a record profit in the first half, reflecting a wave of demand for Chinese chips after Beijing encouraged the use of homegrown technology in a post-DeepSeek AI boom.

On 13 June 2025, Israel carried out a string of precision assassinations inside Iran. Code-named Rising Lion, the attack used a blend of pre-planted explosives, fighter aircraft, and AI-enabled autonomous drones. The operation killed senior Revolutionary Guard commanders and civilian nuclear scientists in their private residences, triggering the 12-day Iran-Israel War. Despite geopolitical tensions already escalating for years, no formal state of war existed between the two countries at the time of the initial attacks.

This hybrid operation, combining military raids, sabotage, and targeted killings, reopened a legal debate that never truly closed after the US drone strikes on Anwar al-Awlaki (2011) and Qasem Soleimani (2020). What links those real deaths to the unstable dreamscapes of filmmaker David Lynch is not mere metaphor but form: a spotless façade, a voyeur’s remote gaze, and an evil presence shrunk to the face of a single “high-value” target. Today, AI-powered targeting systems, such as Israel’s Lavender and the Pentagon’s Replicator, promise to accelerate that form until the camera, the algorithm, and the trigger merge together.

David Lynch’s films convey a recurring image of something grotesque squirming beneath a manicured surface. AI-assisted targeted killing is the logical sequel to an aesthetic that mainstream media began rehearsing long before the first autonomous drone took flight. It is in this sense that Lynch’s art matters: it explains the pattern – the sleight-of-hand that hides systemic violence by aestheticizing it – and demonstrates that AI merely automates it, rather than radically altering it.

The Lynchian Split-Level House

Lynch loves a bright porch light. Blue Velvet (1986) opens on a red fire engine, white picket fences, and yellow tulips; seconds later, the camera dives into the grass to reveal beetles gnawing in the dark. In Lost Highway (1997), the picture-perfect modernist home is already a crime scene, filmed by an unseen intruder’s camcorder. In Twin Peaks (1990 – 1992), the image of an “idyllic” logging town cracks under the discovery of Laura Palmer’s plastic-wrapped corpse.

Three moves repeat in these works: 1. a reassuring veneer, 2. voyeuristic surveillance, and 3. personalized malevolence. David Lynch’s villains – Frank Booth, BOB, Mr. Eddy – feel monstrous precisely because the world around them insists on pretending that everything is normal, dragging the audience into complicity through the lens itself.

Lynch rehearsed this triad long before Blue Velvet’s tulips blossomed. In his debut film, Eraserhead (1977), the camera tracks Henry (Jack Nance) through an urban wasteland, scored by a continuous industrial drone. The soundscape, created with whirring ventilators, gas leaks, and detuned engines, turns the very air into a machinic witness. The apartment block’s humming radiators and flickering bulbs announce that decisions about life and death are already automated, already off-screen.

Henry’s rubbery, reptilian infant – an unwanted by-product of mechanized reproduction – pre-echoes civilian “collateral damage” that today’s AI targeting software dismisses as irrelevant. It is a grotesque stand-in for the nameless civilian victims that are ignored as statistical “noise”, just as David Lynch’s own industrial soundtrack drowns empathy in machine hum. Thus, the horror is not merely the baby; it is the disastrous banality with which the system keeps running while the protagonist dithers.

The collapse of moral agency becomes explicit in Mulholland Drive (2001) and Inland Empire (2006). Diane/Betty’s and Nikki/Sue’s fractured identities play out on studio sets where scripts overwrite memory, “take after take”, until the actor no longer knows who is directing whom. In the latter film, Lynch shoots those sets with harsh video grain, refusing cinematic polish so the viewer feels the algorithmic blur between rehearsal and execution.

If Blue Velvet gave us the voyeur’s peephole, these later films give us the feedback loop: the characters feed data back into the very narrative machinery that will determine their doom. AI targeting software works the same way – pulling fresh phone metadata after each strike, updating probability scores, and sending the operator a “refined” list to rubber-stamp 20 seconds later. In AI-targeted killing, the subject becomes an interchangeable data point, just as David Lynch’s characters discover that both they and their doppelgängers are authored by an unseen process. The question shifts from “Who pulled the trigger?” to “Who wrote the loop?”

That grammar has slipped almost unchanged into the political rhetoric and press framing of modern targeted killing.

From Drone to Algorithm: A 30-Year Cold Open

When the United States vaporized al-Awlaki in Yemen, government lawyers justified the action in a memo whose keyword was “imminent threat” – a term redefined so elastically that it required no specific attack plan, only a pattern of past behavior. Media coverage dwelt on the alleged threat, not the legal stretch, echoing the euphemism of “surgical strike” perfected during the Gulf War. Soleimani’s 2020 killing repeated the template, complete with satellite imagery and Situation Room photos that rendered violence antiseptic.

Israel’s June 2025 raid almost certainly relied on the same “machine-triaged, human-approved” tempo that Israeli planners first tested in Gaza. Analysts note that Operation Rising Lion likely utilized AI-enabled intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. That rhythm echoes Gaza’s 2024 playbook, where the Lavender system sifted roughly 37,000 phone profiles into a kill-priority queue. US officials, meanwhile, boast that the Replicator initiative will field “thousands of autonomous systems” across land, sea, air, and space within 24 months.

We are watching a genre shift: the killer is no longer a remote drone pilot. Instead, as an Israeli officer bluntly declared, “the machine does it coldly.”

Rarely Enforced International Law

International law is far less malleable than military PowerPoint presentations. Given that extraterritorial targeted killings lack due process and might turn on civilians who are not posing any direct threat, it is often difficult – if not impossible – to distinguish them from state terrorism. In fact, UN special rapporteurs have repeatedly called them a violation of the UN Charter and of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, except in the narrowest emergencies. They stress that the burden of proof rests with the state, not the dead.

Many similar assassinations of Iranian targets – carried out by the US or US-backed Israel – have been found to be prima facie unlawful, since the “self-defense” threshold is rarely met. Advancements in AI now complicate the situation, given their obvious application in facilitating targeted killings. The International Committee of the Red Cross already warns that “preserving human control” over lethal force requires a new treaty on autonomous weapons as soon as possible.

Yet the record of enforcement is bleak. Probably acting with political motives, the Israeli Supreme Court has ruled targeted killings to be a conditionally lawful tool of war, even if the targets are civilians, contrary to UN organs and most of international scholarly opinion. Moreover, Al-Awlaki’s heirs lost their due process suit in US court, and a 2013 ruling even shielded the Justice Department’s legal rationale behind Kafkaesque secrecy. These past developments have prepared the ground for today’s AI-mediated state executions: once moral agency is transferred to code, accountability is transferred to silence.

David Lynch shows us why the silence holds. In Blue Velvet, the teenager Jeffrey Beaumont discovers the severed ear that lures him beneath suburbia’s surface; he keeps staring because no adult will.

Mainstream coverage of targeted killings works similarly: The Washington Post’s rather celebratory coverage of Rising Lion described Mossad tradecraft in loving detail but spared a word-count of zero for Iranian civilian fear. Other venues led with the phrase “precision attack” and buried legal questions many paragraphs down. Scholars find that such euphemisms cue readers to interpret violence as management of risk, not infliction of harm.

In David Lynch’s cinema, the voyeuristic shot is an ethical test: will you flinch? Our newsfeeds fail that test by design; they glamorize the apparatus, anonymize the blood, and let the ear stay detached.

Algorithmic Scapegoats

David Lynch’s third move – the single, hyper-stylized villain – finds its bureaucratic mirror in AI kill lists. Lavender assigns a confidence score to each Gaza resident based on phone metadata; a 90 percent score flags a person for immediate strike, often inside their home. US intelligence pioneered the same logic in “signature strikes”, targeting unknown males whose pattern of behavior algorithmically matches a template.

Critics note that the ethical focus narrows to whether the pattern is “accurate”, not whether the concept of predictive execution is lawful. Thus, the discussion about “legality” revolves around the correctness of a behavioral algorithm, instead of the broader legitimacy of anticipatory and indiscriminate state-backed killing.

Lynch’s gallery of doubles – Fred/Pete in Lost Highway and Laura Palmer’s light-dark avatars in Twin Peaks – reminds us that evil, once personalized, is endlessly transferable. Modern AI kill lists imitate that logic: they strip a living person down to a metadata silhouette, then treat the silhouette as a fungible stand-in for “the enemy”. In fact, as former CIA/NSA chief Michael Hayden bluntly put it, “we kill people based on metadata”.

Like Lynch’s BOB, the algorithm is “evil” yet bodiless, a possession that travels. When shots miss – or when thousands do – they become anomalies instead of accusations.

A Lynchian Reading of Rising Lion

Viewed through David Lynch’s lens, Israel’s June strikes play as high-budget surrealism:

• Façade: official leaks emphasize stealth tech and “pinpoint” accuracy, mirroring Blue Velvet’s opening idyll.
• Gaze: AI triage plus drone video mirrors the closet peephole – perfect sight, zero exposure.
• Scapegoat: the deaths of Bagheri, Salami, and Tehranchi stand in for “Iran”, enabling the audience to forget the complex machinery that produced conflict.

The ledger of risk and empathy is as asymmetrical as Lynch’s rabbits: one world speaks, the other is spoken about.

Why This Matters

It seems that every technological leap normalizes the previous taboo. Critics worried in 2017 that “signature strikes” eroded the distinction between battlefield and everywhere else. Today, the ICRC insists that weapons equipped with AI-powered autonomy but lacking accountability pose a significant risk of humanitarian catastrophe. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s and Russia’s rush to field AI drones, celebrated as nimble innovation, shows how quickly war adapts when norms lag technology.

Policy debates often frame the solution as better code: bias testing, human-in-the-loop protocols, “ethical AI”. David Lynch would call that a fresh coat of paint. His films remind us that evil was never the tool; it was the desire to hide systemic violence behind an individual face. AI simply speeds the dolly-zoom.

Blue Velvet ends with a mechanical robin clutching a bug in its beak – a fake bird delivering a real moral. In our era, the robin is an algorithm; the bug is any human flagged by a confidence score. So long as targeted killing and its AI successors are sold as clean acts of “self-defense”, modern states will keep writing sequels to David Lynch’s nightmares.

Governments are already systematically abusing the traditional tools of targeted killings, trampling every concept of justice, and shrinking the human role in the decision-making chain through AI will only make matters worse. The path out is not finer AI code but a harsher light: name targeted killings for what many experts already do: arbitrary extrajudicial executions. Only then can we draft the treaty that reinstalls the human conscience where David Lynch always wanted it: front and center, staring into the dark grass until the beetles stop moving.

When the U.S. bombed three locations in Iran, my initial reaction was a mix of hope and sadness. Hope—because I wished it might lead to a reduction in weapons of mass destruction. Sadness—because of the likely loss of innocent civilian lives and the heightened danger now facing Americans abroad.

I shared these thoughts and feelings in my June 22 newsletter, along with how I planned to respond with my investments. Historically, wars haven’t had a significant long-term impact on the stock market. So if this latest conflict triggers a correction, I said I’d be buying the dip again – if there is one. I also believed that bonds would rally, so hold on to them.

After sending out the newsletter, I received three heated emails (out of ~60,000) from readers who called me misguided, naive, and completely wrong. I’m certainly no expert on Iran and don’t pretend to be. But I didn’t realize that simply sharing how I felt could make me so many things in other people’s eyes.

Never mind that the U.S. State Department issued a “Worldwide Caution” alert for American citizens soon after, warning of potential travel disruptions and demonstrations after the strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. Never mind that these “forever wars” have lasted for decades and taken thousands of lives.

To these angry readers, my feelings didn’t matter. My desire for peace was dismissed as foolish. If war is what they truly want, I wished them the best—especially if they or their children decide to enlist and act on those beliefs. After all, aligning our actions with our beliefs is part of living an honorable life.

Why The Desire For Peace

During middle school in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, the Persian Gulf War broke out. On August 2, 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait for its oil reserves, and the U.S. intervened to liberate Kuwait. Kuwait held about 10% of the world’s oil reserves, and Iraq’s invasion threatened global oil supplies as well as Saudi Arabia, America’s ally at the time.

Operation Desert Storm was a military success, lasting just 43 days, from January 17 to February 28, 1991. Unfortunately, due to aerial bombings, it is estimated that roughly 2,300–3,500 Iraqi civilians were killed. When the news spread, the Malaysian media and some of my friends began to sour on the U.S.

Malaysia, being a Muslim-majority country, had to balance its support for international law with concern for fellow Muslim nations, particularly Iraq. This created tensions in public sentiment and my parents worked for the U.S. embassy. My close friend, a Muslim who was three years older than me, began regularly mocking me, calling me “small brained American” and sometimes worse.

I was 13 years old during the Persian Gulf War and didn’t fully understand what was happening. All I knew was that my close friend suddenly turned against me.

Then we had a bomb threat at my school. We evacuated and didn’t return for several days. My relationship with my close friend was never the same again. I also no longer felt as free as I once did as an American living abroad. I just wanted peace.

More Experiences With War And Terror

In January 2001, I was at the top of the World Trade Center’s North Tower, at the Windows on the World restaurant for the week. Goldman Sachs was holding a Latin America conference, and I was there to help out as a second-year analyst. Then, tragically, the September 11 attacks happened—planes struck both towers, collapsing them and killing nearly 3,000 people.

The attacks were carried out by 19 al-Qaeda terrorists, a radical Islamist extremist group led by Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden opposed U.S. troops stationed in Saudi Arabia, home to Islam’s two holiest sites, after the Gulf War. Al-Qaeda also viewed American support for Israel—especially in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—as unjust and hostile to Muslims. Finally, the group believed U.S. political, military, and cultural influence was corrupting the Muslim world.

The event was traumatic for so many in the financial services world, as nearly everyone knew someone who was injured or killed, myself included. 10 years after the Gulf War, now as an adult, I was dealing with a tragedy close to home. I lived just several blocks away from the towers at 45 Wall Street.

An Even Closer Encounter With Death

Then on November 26, 2008, 10 terrorists from Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), a Pakistan-based Islamist militant group, stormed the Oberoi-Trident Hotel in Mumbai, held hostages, and killed 30 people, including several foreign nationals. The same thing happened at the Taj Mahal hotel.

The thing was, I had stayed at the Oberoi-Trident Hotel just two weeks earlier and had also been going to the Taj Mahal Hotel daily to see clients. Credit Suisse had just launched its India research operation, and I was there to meet the team.

What the hell? I immediately wondered whether death was catching up to me.

This latest experience, combined with the Global Financial Crisis, ultimately pushed me to launch Financial Samurai in July 2009. I needed to make sense of the chaos and find a way to escape the corporate grind for good. There had been too many flights, and far too many close calls for comfort.

“We don’t want war. But if you want war with the United States of America, there’s one thing I can promise you, so help me God: Someone else will raise your sons and daughters” is attributed to Medal of Honor recipient David Bellavia. pic.twitter.com/oXEjuyqYiM

— Zeien (@Zeiein) December 27, 2024

The Stakes Have Gone Up As A Parent

Before I had children, the only people I had to think about were myself and the sadness my parents and sister would feel if I died. I don’t want to die, nor do I want anyone I know to die—that’s why I desire peace.

Now that I’m a father, my number one mission is to ensure the safety and survival of my family. When the world edges closer to war, I feel less safe for all of us—especially since we are currently traveling. We must eventually get on a plane, and I often wonder if this flight might be my last.

Some people have asked why I carry life insurance when I could self-insure with my assets.

My answer is simple: having life insurance makes me feel like a responsible parent. It gives me peace of mind knowing that if I die, a tax-free death benefit will go to my wife and children, ensuring their lives go on uninterrupted financially. This means my wife won’t need to sell the house or the car, and our two kids won’t have to be pulled out of school.

The death of a spouse or parent is already deeply destabilizing. Adding financial instability on top of that is both punishing and unnecessary. Getting life insurance is an act of kindness for your loved ones.

Peace, War, Death, Love

Peace is more than just the absence of war—it is the foundation upon which families, friendships, and communities thrive. From my early experiences as a young American abroad to facing terrorism firsthand as an adult, I’ve come to understand that peace is both fragile and precious.

Peace is what allows us to live freely and love deeply without the constant shadow of fear. My hope is that by cherishing peace and preparing responsibly, we can protect what matters most: the safety and well-being of those we love.

Call me naive, misguided, or a fool for wanting peace—but that doesn’t make my feelings about war and death any less real. Maybe there won’t ever be another terrorist attack from the Middle East out of revenge. I doubt it. The forever war in the region continues, and we’re once again entangled in it.

Stay safe everyone!

Readers, what are your thoughts and experiences on death and war? Have you ever had a close encounter? Do you believe escalating bombings in Iran will lead to a peace agreement, or only deepen the conflict? And with rising geopolitical tensions, how are you planning to invest during this latest round of instability?

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Digital Turbine (APPS -14.61%) stock saw a round of substantial sell-offs Friday. The adtech specialist’s share price closed out the daily session down 14.6% amid a 0.3% decline for the S&P 500 index and a 0.6% decline for the Nasdaq Composite index.

Following an explosive post-earnings rally for the stock earlier this week, investors sold shares and moved to take profits. In addition to profit-taking action, Digital Turbine stock moved lower due to new restrictions on technology exports and fears that the conflict between Israel and Iran could continue to escalate.

Digital Turbine stock sees more sell-offs following explosive post-earnings rally

Digital Turbine stock had actually been up as much as 1.8% in today’s trading, but action on the stock turned bearish as investors reacted to risk factors and took profits on gains posted earlier in the week. The company’s share price skyrocketed in Tuesday’s trading after it posted better-than-expected quarterly results and forward guidance, but its share price has moved lower in subsequent trading.

In addition to profit-taking activities, Digital Turbine stock was pressured by geopolitical dynamics today. The Wall Street Journal published a report today stating that the Trump administration wants to further strengthen export restrictions and prevent companies including Samsung, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, and SK Hynix from shipping chipmaking technologies to their factories in China. Adding another bearish catalyst, investors moved out of stocks due to the possibility that military strikes between Israel and Iran will intensify and that the U.S. could enter the conflict on behalf of Israel.

What’s next for Digital Turbine?

For the current fiscal year, Digital Turbine is guiding for revenue between $515 million and $525 million — good for annual growth of roughly 6% at the midpoint of the target range. Meanwhile, non-GAAP (adjusted) earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) are projected to be between $85 million and $90 million — representing growth of 21% at the midpoint of the guidance range.

Digital Turbine’s performance outlook became significantly stronger following its quarterly release earlier this week, but there are factors that could cause continued volatility for the stock. The company does most of its business in China, and rising geopolitical tensions present substantial risk factors even though it’s not a hardware company.

Keith Noonan has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.