Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.'s Blog, page 183

Could AI Become Conscious?

Not long ago, a Google engineer created a stir in the world of artificial intelligence by claiming that its flagship chatbot was sentient. “If I didn’t know exactly what it was, which is this computer program we built recently, I’d think it was a 7-year-old, 8-year-old kid that happens to know physics,” said Blake Lemoine.

“I know a person when I talk to it,” Lemoine told the Washington Post. “It doesn’t matter whether they have a brain made of meat in their head. Or if they have a billion lines...

That Hideous Severance

The second season of Apple TV’s phenomenal hit Severance has held many surprises, but the biggest may be its growing similarities to a dystopianesque novel by C.S. Lewis. Will this season end more or less like that book? With less than a week to go before the season two finale, I’ll risk a guess. But first, a refresher.

Warning: Spoilers galore.

Background

Season one of the mind-bending psychological thriller/mystery/dystopian/alternate-reality drama opened in 2022 with a simple but compelling ...

Professor Dave’s Self-Own Explained

Neo-Darwinian evolution is the accepted explanation for the variety of life forms that populate the planet. Darwin made a case that natural selection ensured that beneficial traits that fostered the survival of organisms would be passed on to their offspring, and the science of genetics later explained exactly how those beneficial traits were passed on and how mutations could produce additional new beneficial traits that could also be passed on. Evolution in the broadest sense is “descent with m...

After Ukraine, Iran?

In Tehran, Iranians are anxiously wondering whether, once their economy is exhausted and they can no longer defend themselves, the Israelis and the United States will bomb them. Under these circumstances, should they or should they not negotiate with the enigmatic President Donald Trump?

On March 2, 2025, Iran’s Majlis (Parliament) voted no confidence in Economy and Finance Minister Abdolnaser Hemmati over his handling of the Western economic blockade and the resulting economic crisis. On the sa...

Europe Goes Full Totalitarian and Puts the Entire Western World at Risk

It’s happening again. Europe is once again going totalitarian and this time there’s a decidedly familiar communist stench. The outcome was predictable for many of us in the alternative media and the situation is only going to get worse in the next few years, but what does this mean for the rest of the world? With the European elites casting off their humanist masks and going outright Orwellian, what kind of chaos can we expect to unfold?

First and foremost I want to point out a key piece of iron...

Beyond the Law: What It Means To Weaponize the Government

“This is war.”—President Trump

President Trump’s declaration of war as a justification for using wartime powers to sidestep constitutional protections is indeed a war, but it is a war waged by the president against dissent, against due process, and against the very foundations of our constitutional republic.

This is what it means to weaponize the government.

When the government turns its power against its own people—through surveillance, retaliation, censorship, and intimidation—it ceases to ser...

Gangsters, Terrorists, and Deep State Judicial Tyranny

The primary purpose of the federal judiciary is to make sure that anything the federal government does is almost never, ever, ruled to be unconstitutional. This is Hamilton’s constitutional regime. A believer in unlimited government, Alexander Hamilton’s constitutional belief was that the constitution can and should be used as a rubber stamp on unlimited government — as long as the government is run by “well behaved” politicians like himself, he insisted. His political nemesis, Thomas Jefferson,...

Using Medicalization to Suppress the Exercise of First Amendment Rights

A repugnant tactic of authoritarianism is categorizing people’s desire for or exercise of freedom as illness that government should suppress. An example of this was the deeming of dissidents in the Soviet Union as mentally ill to justify their detention and punishment.

In America, there has long been resistance against an effort to similarly have the United States government medicalize the exercise of gun rights as a means to circumvent the constitutional protection of the right to bear arms con...

The Feds Have Been the Main Source of Racial Bigotry in Classrooms

“We will not stand idly by while this regime pulls the wool over the eyes of the American people,” proclaimed Sheria Smith, the president of American Federation of Government Employees unit representing more than a thousand federal Education Department employees fired by the Trump administration. The New York Times frets that the layoffs could devastate the agency that “tracks student achievement and enforces civil rights laws in schools.”

But ever since it was created by President Jimmy Carter,...

Inflating the Cost of Free Speech

“Freedom isn’t free” we have been told by the martially inclined. A good idea of what they meant was presented to the world before the saying ever caught on. 1972 was when the AP ran the Nick Ut photo  “Napalmed Girl”. It depicted 9-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc running down a rural Vietnamese road naked, molten and sobbing. Her village, where US ordnance had just detonated, incinerated in the background. The picture literalized “collateral damage” for anyone rationalizing in newsy abstractions.

In...