In 1998, after nineteen years of marriage, Alan Jackson moved out of the home he shared with his wife, Denise. They had been together since high school in Newnan, Georgia. They met at a Dairy Queen when he was seventeen and she was sixteen, married in December 1979, and weathered his early years as a struggling musician in Nashville. By the late 1990s, he was one of the biggest stars in country music. Instead of enjoying that success together, the relentless touring, career pressure, and personal mistakes pushed their marriage to the breaking point. For nearly four months, they lived apart. Divorce seemed likely. Everything they had built from nothing was on the verge of disappearing. Their separation played out while Jackson remained in the public eye, with three young daughters caught in the middle of a fractured home. Then they made a choice. Rather than signing divorce papers, Alan and Denise entered intensive counseling and fought to rebuild their trust from the ground up. He cut back his time on the road. They stayed together. Five years later, in 2003, Jackson sat down with his guitar and decided to put the entire truth of their journey into a single song. He did not write a polished fairy tale. He wrote “Remember When.” In just over four minutes, he traced their life from the beginning: two teenagers falling in love, the early financial struggles, the arrival of their three daughters, and the quiet ache of watching those children grow up and leave home. Most importantly, he did not hide the darkest chapter. Right in the middle of the song, he openly acknowledged the period when they broke each other’s hearts and stood on the edge of losing everything, before finding the grace to put the pieces back together. When Jackson played the finished recording for Denise for the first time, she broke down in tears. Released in late 2003 as the lead single from his Greatest Hits Volume II album, “Remember When” spent two weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot Country Singles & Tracks chart in early 2004. For the official music video, Denise agreed to appear alongside him, dancing quietly with her husband while real home videos and photographs from their youth flashed across the screen. More than twenty years later, the song remains a staple at weddings and anniversaries across the country. It endures not because it describes a perfect marriage, but because it was written by a man who nearly lost his wife—and lived to grow old with her. Choosing to fight for a marriage after nearly losing it all is the quiet truth that made “Remember When” timeless ♥️♥️

Why so many carnivores notice better joints Cartilage ages mainly through glycation. Collagen in joint cartilage has a half-life measured in decades (estimates up to ~100 years in some tissues). Once formed, the cross-links from advanced glycation end-products (AGEs) stick around. The result is stiffer, less resilient cartilage that doesn’t glide or absorb load the way it used to. Most of those AGEs form endogenously from circulating glucose and reactive dicarbonyls, not from the meat on your plate. Beef supplies a direct countermeasure: carnosine. This dipeptide is concentrated in muscle and acts as a sacrificial scavenger. It reacts with methylglyoxal and other carbonyls that would otherwise bind lysine and arginine residues on collagen, reducing new AGE cross-links and protein carbonylation. Human data show carnosine supplementation lowers circulating AGE markers and improves glucose handling in people with diabetes. Eating the actual muscle delivers the compound in its natural matrix along with the protein and fat that support stable blood sugar. On a carnivore diet two things happen at once. Endogenous glycation pressure drops because glucose stays lower and more stable, and you continuously supply carnosine that mops up the reactive intermediates that do form. That combination plausibly slows the progressive stiffening of cartilage that most people accept as normal aging. It is not magic or a cure for advanced structural damage, but it is a coherent explanation for the repeated reports of less pain, better mobility, and fewer “old joints” once people stop eating the foods that keep glucose elevated all day.

How about instead of a “good guy with a gun,” we have no guys with guns?

Mortgage lenders will lose far more during the developing mortgage crisis than they did during all of the GFC. From 2007–2010, realized losses on defaulted mortgages totaled about $450 billion. There is currently about $8.3 trillion in outstanding fixed-rate mortgages with an average rate of 4.6% and 25 years left to maturity. Given that current rates are 7.5%, the mark-to-market losses on those mortgages are already about $2 trillion. When rates rise to 8.5%, the loss will rise to $3 trillion! That means even without a single default, on paper mortgage lenders have already lost over four times more than they lost during the GFC. That loss will grow to nearly seven times as much when mortgage rates hit 8.5%. Worse, during the GFC, since mortgage rates plunged, lenders had mark-to-market gains on all the outstanding mortgages that did not default. Since only 10% of the mortgages defaulted, those unrealized gains totaled about $1.75 trillion. That provided a huge cushion that today's mortgage lenders no longer have. In fact, when mark-to-market gains were taken into account, mortgage lenders actually made $1.3 trillion during the GFC. The current situation is therefore orders of magnitude worse. The impending disaster was created by the Federal Reserve holding interest rates so low for so long, and the FHA and GSEs guaranteeing 30-year fixed-rate mortgages, which allowed borrowers to lock in such low rates for such long durations. That sowed the seeds for the perfect storm of financial destruction that is about to hit.

A barbaric idea, beneath our dignity as a country. Push back on this.