Hollywood can erase Achilles, redefine manhood, and make the hero apologize. It still cannot escape Homer’s warning: Civilization dies when men reject sacred duties. Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” opened to more than $120 million at the domestic box office. Millions will see it, and for many, Nolan’s version will become the only “Odyssey” they know. The fight over this film is therefore a fight over who gets to explain Western civilization to the next generation.

Christopher Nolan may change Homer’s story, but he cannot change the truth beneath it. Hollywood can rewrite the hero. It cannot rewrite the law above him.

Hollywood wants Homer’s name. It wants his monsters, battles, kings, ships, blood, and glory. It simply does not want Homer’s moral world.

The clearest example comes in the land of the dead. In Homer’s telling, Odysseus meets Achilles, the greatest champion of the Greeks. Nolan removes Achilles and substitutes Sinon, a figure absent from Homer’s poem and known chiefly from Virgil’s later “Aeneid.” The film recasts Sinon as an innocent sacrifice and moral conscience, and Odysseus calls him the greatest soldier he ever knew.

“Elliot” Page plays Sinon. This is not an argument about Page’s dignity or talent. Every person bears the image of God. It is an argument about symbolism. Movies communicate through casting as surely as through dialogue. One of Western civilization’s defining male warriors disappears. A newly elevated character replaces him, becomes the moral center, and receives the story’s highest praise for soldierly greatness.

Whatever Nolan intended, the cultural message is hard to miss: The old hero must be displaced, the old understanding of manhood rewritten, and the victorious Western warrior made to apologize for winning.

Homer never presents Odysseus as flawless. He is proud, deceptive, and reckless. His cunning saves lives; his arrogance costs them. Those flaws do not erase his heroism. They make him human. The Western tradition has always understood that a great man can also be a gravely flawed man. The Old Testament’s King David proves the point.

Modern culture increasingly treats male imperfection as proof that male greatness itself is suspect. Nolan therefore turns Odysseus into another Robert Oppenheimer: a brilliant man psychologically crushed by what his brilliance accomplished. The Trojan horse becomes less a triumph of courage and cunning than an original sin haunting its inventor. Victory becomes guilt. Authority becomes a burden. Odysseus returns home only to surrender the throne to Telemachus and leave Ithaca with Penelope. A king becomes an exile.

That is a moral inversion of Homer.

RELATED: Odysseus sails west with nowhere left to go

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Homer did not need to weaken men to honor women. Penelope is already one of the strongest women in Western literature. For 20 years, she protects her household, preserves her son’s inheritance, resists the suitors, and outwits the men trying to seize her husband’s kingdom.

When Odysseus returns, Penelope tests him by ordering their marriage bed moved. He knows it cannot be moved because he built it around the living trunk of an olive tree. Homer gives us a courageous husband and an intelligent wife. Their strengths differ, but their dignity does not.

Modern ideology often imagines equality only as interchangeability, as though men and women must become the same or one must dominate the other. Homer offers something richer. Masculine courage does not diminish women. Feminine fidelity does not diminish men. Odysseus and Penelope are great together because their distinct strengths serve the same home.

Why, then, do the secular elite keep returning to the Western classics only to dismantle them?

Because the classics teach that we are not self-created. We inherit a family, a history, a nation, a body, and obligations that precede our desires. That lesson is intolerable to an ideology built on radical autonomy.

A young man who admires Odysseus may conclude that courage, loyalty, fatherhood, and duty are good. A young woman who admires Penelope may discover that faithfulness, wisdom, and defending a household are forms of strength. A child who learns that even kings answer to the divine may ask whether presidents, professors, and politicians answer to an authority above themselves.

That is why the hero must apologize, the father must abdicate, the home must become a prison, and the divine must become a psychological projection. The secular elite do not merely dislike Western civilization. They need Westerners to lose confidence in it.

Yet Nolan’s film accidentally preserves one of Homer’s central truths. Characters repeatedly invoke “Zeus’ law,” which Nolan presents as a version of the Golden Rule. The Greeks called it xenia: the sacred duties binding host and guest. Hospitality demanded generosity from the host and restraint from the guest.

Penelope’s suitors are therefore more than rude houseguests. They are enemies of civilization. They occupy Odysseus’ home, consume his wealth, pursue his wife, and plot to murder his son. They exploit an inheritance they did not build while rejecting every duty that inheritance imposes.

RELATED: Elon Musk wants ‘historically accurate’ ‘Odyssey’ movie — and may put his money where his mouth is

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Our universities, museums, entertainment companies, foundations, and public institutions were built through generations of sacrifice, learning, faith, and trust. Today’s cultural elite inherited them and now use them to teach that Western civilization is uniquely wicked, Christianity oppressive, fathers tyrants, heroes frauds, and the family an instrument of domination. They are Homer’s suitors with graduate degrees. They feast inside the house while condemning the people who built it.

What Nolan calls Zeus’ law points toward a higher law. Christians do not worship Zeus. Homer’s gods are false and morally compromised. Yet even the Greeks understood a truth our enlightened age often forgets: Civilization depends on a moral law higher than human appetite.

Christ reveals that law perfectly: “Whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them.” Paul goes farther: “In humility count others more significant than yourselves.

Christianity gives sacred obligation its true foundation. We honor the stranger because he bears God’s image. We honor marriage, family, country, and neighbor because every human relationship answers ultimately to God.

Without God, the Golden Rule becomes a fragile suggestion. Why should the powerful restrain themselves? Why sacrifice for future generations? Why preserve an inheritance instead of consuming it? A civilization cannot live forever on moral habits inherited from a religion it has abandoned.

America needs families who read the Bible, schools that teach the classics without apologizing for them, and churches that form courageous Christians rather than timid spectators.

Christopher Nolan may change Homer’s story, but he cannot change the truth beneath it. A man still needs a home worth returning to. A family still needs protection. A civilization still needs heroes. A nation still needs a God above itself.

Hollywood can rewrite the hero. It cannot rewrite the law above him.

​Achilles, Christopher nolan, Heroism, Hollywood, Homer, Manhood, Odyssey, Opinion & analysis, Western civilization, Glory, God, Morality, Movies, Faith 

Why does buying a home feel more out of reach than ever? According to Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck, the answer isn’t corporate greed, mysterious market manipulation, or some hidden conspiracy theory. It’s basic economics and government policy.

Citing new research from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and data from the National Association of Home Builders, Beck argues that America’s housing affordability crisis stems from a collision of rising demand and artificially constrained supply.

“Thirty percent of the increase in U.S. home prices from ’21 to ’24 along with 20% of the rise in rent prices comes from just bringing in seven, 10, 15 million people and just adding them in,” Glenn explains.

“Today, our home, the typical American house, runs closer to five times what a family earns in a year,” he adds.

Back in March, economists at the Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas ran the numbers on what seven million illegal border crossings under the Biden administration did to the local housing market.

In Dallas, it put “roughly 30% of the total run-up in home prices and about 20% of the run-up in rents.”

“Every 1% increase in unauthorized workers relative to the local workforce pushed the home price up 2.2%. And rents up 1.4%. So you want to know why we’re having a hard time buying houses?” he asks, answering, “It’s because our local governments along with the federal and state government are completely out of control with regulation, and our federal government just opened up the borders.”

“Now, why isn’t that being explained to the American people?” he asks.

“It’s not the builders. It’s not the people selling the houses. It’s the government that is the problem,” he says.

And while the Biden administration spent four years adding millions of people to the demand side, local and federal governments made it “slower and more expensive to add anything to the supply side.”

“There’s no mystery here. There’s no shadowy cartel. There’s no Jew behind the corner. It’s a bathtub with the tap wide open and a towel that is stuffed in the drain,” Glenn explains.

“Which means the fix should be just as simple. And there are three fixes,” he says.

“One, don’t add people to the country faster than you can add roofs to it. … Two, make it legal to build a cheap house. … Three, stop borrowing money you didn’t have because the deficit sets the interest rate and the interest rate sets the mortgage,” he continues.

“I don’t know why we don’t do this.”

Want more from Glenn Beck?

To enjoy more of Glenn’s masterful storytelling, thought-provoking analysis, and uncanny ability to make sense of the chaos, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Affordable housing, Glenn beck, Immigration, Federal reserve, Joe biden, Blazetv show 

Substack has identified a real problem. It may have chosen the worst possible solution.

On July 21, Substack co‑founder Chris Best announced a new feature called “scan for AI text.” Readers can run posts, Notes, comments, and replies longer than 100 words through an AI detector made by Pangram. The resulting report estimates how much of the text was written by a human and how much was generated or assisted by artificial intelligence.

An unexplained algorithmic score is not proof of authorship.

Best calls the problem “Claudefishing”: Passing off machine‑generated writing as the product of a human mind. He argues that readers deserve to know whether they are engaging with a person or, in his words, something “written by no one.”

That concern is legitimate. Anyone who spends much time online can recognize the rise of AI slop: The smooth, bloated, strangely lifeless prose that says very little in far too many words. It’s taking over LinkedIn, search results, marketing blogs, and, increasingly, journalism.

But Substack’s solution risks creating another problem: a culture in which every writer is treated as a potential fraud and every reader is encouraged to become an investigator.

Pangram is good, but still not good enough

Pangram is not one of the primitive AI detectors that declares that Dickens used ChatGPT. It may be the most capable product in its category.

The system is a machine‑learning classifier trained on both human‑written and AI‑generated documents. It breaks text into tokens, converts them into numerical representations, and looks for patterns its model associates with human or machine authorship.

Pangram says it repeatedly searches large collections of human writing for passages its model gets wrong, adds those difficult examples to its training data, and retrains the detector.

Its current model, Pangram 3.3, also uses an architecture called EditLens, which attempts to estimate not merely whether AI was involved but how extensively a human text may have been edited by AI.

Pangram claims an overall accuracy above 99% and a false‑positive rate of one in 10,000 human documents. Independent research has generally found it far more accurate than competing detectors. One University of Chicago study found almost no false positives among roughly 3,000 medium‑ and long‑form samples.

That sounds reassuring until Pangram is applied to individual human beings.

A detector can be excellent at identifying broad trends across millions of documents and still be inappropriate as a lie detector for a particular writer. At sufficient scale, even a one‑in‑10,000 error rate produces innocent people who must somehow prove that they wrote their own words.

Pangram CEO Max Spero has said the detector should “never be the ending arbiter.” But he has also acknowledged that the model’s internal reasoning is largely uninterpretable. It can provide a score, but it cannot necessarily explain which meaningful piece of evidence caused it to reach its verdict, according to the Atlantic.

That is a serious problem when the verdict carries the implicit accusation that an author is a liar.

Substack’s own moral authority was falsely flagged

The irony is hard to miss.

In his announcement, Best invokes writer Freddie deBoer to explain why undisclosed AI writing is a betrayal of the reader. Best quotes from a June essay by deBoer arguing that the value of art lies partly in knowing there is a human consciousness behind it.

But just two days before Best announced the Pangram integration, deBoer published a detailed account of Pangram failing to recognize his own human writing.

RELATED: Is Google’s next Android feature always-on eavesdropping?

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Someone had accused deBoer of using AI after Pangram classified a roughly 300‑word section of one of his essays as entirely AI‑written. DeBoer knew that was false.

When he submitted the full 5,000‑word essay, however, Pangram declared it entirely human. When he divided the supposedly artificial passage into smaller pieces, those pieces were also classified as human.

The same words became human or artificial depending on how much surrounding text deBoer submitted.

So the writer Substack chose as its moral authority on the importance of human authorship had just become a case study in the inability of Substack’s chosen detector to identify human authorship reliably in an individual case.

Best apparently agrees with deBoer that readers should not be deceived about whether a human being stands behind a piece of writing. But Pangram had placed deBoer in exactly the opposite position: A human writer was forced to defend himself against a machine suggesting that no human stood behind his words.

That contradiction should have given Substack pause. Instead, it gave every reader access to the machine.

Technology journalist Taylor Lorenz was also accused of using AI after Pangram flagged her work. Spero later investigated and concluded that the detector had made a mistake. Lorenz was fortunate enough to have an edit history supporting her account.

How many ordinary writers maintain a forensic record of every keystroke?

Meanwhile, determined AI users can still fool detectors. Researchers have shown that paraphrasing systems and even text generated by certain base models can appear human to Pangram and other commercial products.

The detector may therefore place the greatest burden on honest writers, while sophisticated slop merchants adapt their methods and move on.

A human writer trapped by a machine

I’ve already seen what detector paranoia does to people.

A local author I know spent months rewriting her book because she could not persuade an AI detector to score it below roughly 30% AI‑generated.

She is an older woman who has written numerous books. She is not immersed in technology and had no secret scheme to automate her writing. Yet the detector’s judgment became more credible to her than her own knowledge of how the book had been created.

So she rewrote it. Then she rewrote it again.

She changed genuine human sentences because a machine found them insufficiently human. Months of work were swallowed by an attempt to satisfy an algorithm that could neither know her nor explain itself to her.

I don’t know whether Pangram would have produced the same result, but that’s beside the point. The tragedy is that we have taught writers to regard an unexplained percentage produced by a machine as a moral verdict.

Substack is now placing that dynamic directly inside a platform supposedly built around the relationship between writers and readers.

The detector becomes the editor

Substack has included some safeguards.

The scan is not automatically displayed on every post. A reader must request it. Writers can add a “how I make this” statement explaining their process, report an apparent error, or disable detection on their work.

But Substack’s support documentation says that disabling it causes readers to see an “AI detection unavailable” notice.

That may be technically neutral, but anyone familiar with online pile‑ons knows how it will be interpreted: What is this writer hiding?

And what happens after a false result begins circulating?

RELATED: Private companies are tracking your location without notice or a warrant — and it’s all perfectly legal

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Substack’s published procedure offers a feedback form and the ability to remove a scan. It does not offer anything resembling due process.

Pangram can correct its model later, but it cannot pull back screenshots, repair a damaged reputation, or stop a suspicious reader from repeating the accusation elsewhere.

The company may investigate complaints in good faith. Its engineers may be responsible people doing impressive work. But the writer is still being judged by a proprietary system whose reasoning neither the writer nor the reader can inspect.

There is also a deeper irony here. Substack is installing an artificial intelligence system to judge whether human beings are writing like artificial intelligence.

Suppose a writer scans a draft and Pangram says it is 30% AI‑assisted. The writer changes the offending passages until the score falls to zero.

Has he made the writing more human? Or has he allowed an AI system to edit his work through negative reinforcement?

The detector may not have supplied any words, but it has shaped the final text. The writer is no longer composing solely for readers. He is writing to please the machine that certifies his humanity.

By Substack’s own standards, does that count as AI‑assisted content?

The incentives are already changing. Independent scholar and entrepreneur Justin Murphy recently announced that he is co-founding a startup designed to help people protect themselves from AI detectors. At first glance, that sounds troubling. On second thought, it may be inevitable.

Once platforms begin judging writers with AI, someone will build AI to defeat those judges. Then the detectors will improve. Then the evasion tools will improve. We will have created an arms race in which one artificial intelligence writes, another disguises the writing, and a third attempts to expose it. Meanwhile, the actual question readers care about — whether the work contains original, thoughtful, compelling ideas — gets pushed farther into the background.

Judge the work

Personally, I don’t care much whether a writer used AI somewhere in the process.

There is nothing to be gained by staring suspiciously at every sentence and wondering whether a chatbot touched it. That road ends in paranoia, accusations, and writers deliberately making their prose worse because polished writing has become evidence of guilt.

I care whether the author has an original and compelling idea. I care whether it is presented coherently and clearly. I care whether the writer has done the work necessary to understand the subject and whether he is willing to stand behind what he publishes.

I also hate AI slop. Its laziness offends me.

But slop is not objectionable because it was made by a machine. It is objectionable because it is derivative, padded, evasive, and boring.

Humans produced plenty of slop before ChatGPT. Artificial intelligence has merely made it cheaper and faster. Arguably, most AI slop is better than the sort of slop produced by cut-rate third-world blog writers.

Editors should reject bad work. Readers should unsubscribe from writers who waste their time. Publications may reasonably require writers to disclose how they use AI. Serious accusations may sometimes justify examining drafts, notes, sources, and document histories.

But an unexplained algorithmic score is not proof of authorship.

Substack says it wants to preserve trust between writers and readers. Trust, however, cannot be manufactured by inviting readers to run secret authenticity tests on every post.

A platform built around direct relationships should not insert a machine informant between the writer and the reader.

​Artificial intelligence 

What do Gracie Jiu-Jitsu and a viral body-camera video from the University of Central Florida have in common? More than most people might think.

Last weekend, I attended an instructor-certification program at Gracie University in Torrance, California. It was my third time completing the training since I began studying Gracie Jiu-Jitsu six years ago. Rener and Ryron Gracie have developed a remarkable system that adapts essential techniques for real-world confrontations while prioritizing everyone’s safety.

The objective of every arrest should be simple: The officer goes home safely, the suspect enters custody alive and without unnecessary injury, and bystanders remain safe.

They also helped develop SafeWrap, a restraint system created after medical professionals asked for a safer way to control violent patients. Hospitals sometimes needed five or six nurses to restrain one belligerent person, exposing staff and patients to serious injury.

That problem came to mind while I watched the UCF video. The encounter has become another argument about pronouns, mental health, and whether the officer used the right words. Those questions may deserve discussion. But the video also reveals a more practical failure: It took officers far too long to place one resisting person in handcuffs.

The officer began with verbal commands. When those failed, he warned that he would use pepper spray. Backup arrived. The student continued resisting. Officers threatened a Taser and eventually deployed it, yet the struggle continued before they finally secured the handcuffs.

Whatever one thinks about the politics surrounding the incident, a prolonged physical struggle endangers everyone involved.

Every additional second increases the chance of serious injury. Officers suffer damaged shoulders, backs, and hands. Suspects can strike their heads, break bones, or experience medical emergencies. Bystanders can become involved. A routine arrest can turn into a tragedy when officers lack a reliable method for establishing control without escalating through increasingly severe force.

This is where Gracie training deserves serious attention.

I am a professor, not a police officer or medical professional. But I have trained in Gracie Combatives and SafeWrap, and the underlying principle is straightforward: Use position, leverage, and technique to control a dangerous person quickly while minimizing injury.

RELATED: ‘Just say the right pronoun!’ How one cop-cam video exemplifies the absurdity of ‘hands-off’ policing

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Police departments should study Gracie Survival Tactics. The program adapts the same philosophy behind SafeWrap for law enforcement, teaching officers to establish positional control, restrain resisting subjects, and transition safely to handcuffing.

Gracie Jiu-Jitsu teaches a smaller or weaker person to overcome a larger opponent through skill rather than brute force. Applied properly, those techniques help officers manage dangerous encounters involving suspects, bystanders, and fellow officers.

The goal is not to win a fight. It is to end the fight safely and move the suspect into the justice system.

Good control tactics can reduce the need for repeated strikes, prolonged wrestling, and repeated use of intermediate weapons. They also make officers less likely to escalate out of fear or frustration because they have techniques that work under pressure.

Pain compliance often fails when a person is intoxicated, mentally ill, or in extreme emotional distress. Pepper spray does not affect everyone equally. Tasers do not always produce immediate compliance. The UCF student was tased and still resisted.

RELATED: ‘Back the blue’ cannot mean blind obedience

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When those tools fail, officers need a dependable way to control the person. Simply forcing a suspect prone and placing a knee on the back is neither reliable nor always medically safe. A subject can still posture onto his hands and knees, and prolonged pressure can create additional risks.

Safe restraint training offers a better option. Departments around the country have trained with Rener Gracie, and law enforcement professionals have provided favorable testimonials. The Los Angeles Police Department has also discussed the program’s effectiveness here.

America spends enormous sums on police technology while devoting comparatively little time to ensuring that every officer has competent grappling and restraint skills. We would never expect firefighters to rely on better hoses while neglecting rescue training. Policing deserves the same practical standard.

The objective of every arrest should be simple: The officer goes home safely, the suspect enters custody alive and without unnecessary injury, and bystanders remain safe.

Viral arrest videos will always invite political arguments. But anyone who wants fewer injuries, lawsuits, and controversial uses of force should support one practical reform: Train officers to control resisting suspects safely, efficiently, and humanely before the encounter spirals into something worse.

I train at Gracie Glendale in Phoenix and value every trip to Gracie University in Torrance. Medical and law enforcement professionals should consider SafeWrap and Gracie Survival Tactics. Citizens who want policing to be both effective and humane should ask their local departments whether officers receive this kind of training.

​Opinion & analysis, University of central florida, Law and order, Jiu jitsu, Arrest, Mental illness, Police