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Good morning, C&C, it’s Saturday! We’re packing up the hotel room and will return to HQ tomorrow, so Monday’s roundup will be back to normal quality levels. That said, it’s still a terrific roundup for your Weekend Edition: C&C scores predictive win as Deputy Chief of Staff signals consideration of radical immigration policy shift; Trump defies gloomy expert predictions as US-China trade negotiations proceed; Administration scores early victory with preliminary UK trade deal; Trump team telegraphs astonishing, world-shaking tariff policy completely missed by corporate media; another prominent official arrest as New Jersey Mayor feels the J6 pain after making an...

A phenomenon that Elon Musk has called 'the greatest risk to the future of civilization' just got worse, according to a new study. Musk - who has 14 children with four women - has for years warned about population collapse caused by baby bust in America and the West. The consensus was that countries needed a fertility rate of 2.1 children per one woman to continue growing - a concern given that the US's is at 1.62. But now researchers say that fertility target may be too low. A new study found populations may need a fertility rate of 2.7...

Global Market Insights estimates the surrogacy market will grow from $14 billion in 2022 to $129 billion by 2032. One of the forms of surrogacy is known as gestational surrogacy, which is when a woman carries a baby that she's not genetically related to for another person. Atrium Health CMC’s Women’s Institute Medical Director and Director of Fertility Preservation Dr. Michelle Matthews said in the past 20 years gestational surrogacy is used more often for family building. “Women are waiting until they’re older to have children, so as we wait until we get older, we can have more gynecologic conditions...

According to a recent report from Flo Health and the University of Virginia, perimenopause is sneaking up on women earlier than ever — sometimes a decade before menopause officially crashes the party. Men with lower testosterone looking at women getting hot flashes at 30: Researchers found that in a sample of 4,432 American women, more than half of the women in the 30-35 age bracket (!!) had "moderate to severe menopause symptoms using the validated Menopause Rating Scale (MRS)." 'We had a significant number of women who are typically thought to be too young for perimenopause tell us that they...

Hundreds of women were kept as slaves on a human egg farm in Georgia where they were fed hormones and treated like cattle. Their horrifying ordeal has been revealed by three Thai women who were freed from the clutches of the 'egg mafia' on January 30 after being exploited for half a year, tabloid Bild reports. The woman said they were held captive on a 'human farm' in the eastern European country of Georgia by a criminal organisation led by Chinese criminals, who sold their eggs on the black market. They were lured in by a job offer on Facebook,...

The ineffectiveness of pro-natal programs suggests raising the next generation isn’t a main priority of 21st-century adults.Hungary’s fertility rate dropped to a record low in 2024 despite its best efforts to reverse the birth dearth through economic incentives. Those advocating for similar policies in the United States could learn from Hungary’s unsuccessful pro-natal programs, which have a track record of negligible results everywhere they have been implemented.Nordic countries have the most generous family policies in the world, yet fewer children are born there almost every year. Even in socially conservative Poland, where the “Family 500+” program is widely popular, the...

Global Baby BustWhy aren’t people having babies?Cutting across language, geography, and culture, one societal trend is beginning to loom larger than any other: falling birth rates.Millie Giles10/13/24 8:00AMFor a large part of the last century, after a post-war baby boom saw 76 million births over just 18 years in the US alone, fears of overpopulation were rife.In 1968, Stanford entomologist Paul Ehrlich published the landmark book “The Population Bomb,” which posited that overcrowding was not only the cause of many of the era’s issues, but would eventually lead to dystopian outcomes of famine, pollution, ecological disaster, and possibly even societal...

Great analysis by Samo Burja about declining global fertility rates. Brainstorming some ideas that are compatible with Christianity: (note many of these are not compatible with the US Constitution) 1. Don’t let people vote when they reach 70 years old 2. Any welfare state that is available ceases to be available to seniors 3. Allow marriages without parental permission at the age of 16 (essentially 16 would become the legal age of adulthood) 4. Only allow people with dependent children the right to vote 5. massive tax reductions for those with a large number of children 6. make abortion illegal...

Selena Gomez "can't carry" children due to medical reasons. The Wizards of Waverly Place actress, 32, recently said she was planning to adopt a baby before she met her music producer boyfriend Benny Blanco, 36, who she has been dating since 2023. She has now revealed she has had to "grieve" her inability to naturally become a mother. She told Vanity Fair: "I haven't ever said this, but I unfortunately can't carry my own children. "I have a lot of medical issues that would put my life and the baby's in jeopardy. That was something I had to grieve for...

For the first time, humans aren’t producing enough babies to sustain the populationFor anyone tempted to try to predict humanity’s future, Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book The Population Bomb is a cautionary tale. Feeding on the then popular Malthusian belief that the world was doomed by high lbirth rates, Ehrlich predicted: “In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death.” He came up with drastic solutions, including adding chemicals to drinking water to sterilize the population.Ehrlich, like many others, got it wrong. What he needed to worry about was declining birth rates and population collapse. Nearly sixty...

‘In many ways, my life is what I always dreamed it would be, except for one glaring difference: I am not a mother. I wish I was.’A math Ph.D. in The Wall Street Journal agonizingly sketched out every high-IQ woman’s life dilemma last weekend: Do you sacrifice motherhood to chase a world-class career? She did, and it broke her heart.“In many ways, my life is what I always dreamed it would be, except for one glaring difference: I am not a mother. I wish I was. My childlessness is something I grieve every day,” Eugenia Cheng writes.Cheng presents herself as...

Don’t you want a president who is going to ensure the food your children eat isn’t filled with chemicals that are going to give them cancer and chronic disease?

Many females are born with all the immature egg follicles they’ll ever have — about 1 to 2 million. Only about 400,000 of those eggs remain at the start of menstruation, which occurs around age 12. With each period, several hundred eggs are lost. Only the healthiest follicles will become mature eggs. The body breaks down and absorbs the rest. Males, on the other hand, continue to create new sperm for most of their adult lives.......... Today, the average age of giving birth for the first time is 26.6 years oldTrusted Source. That age has been steadily increasingTrusted Source in...

We’ve done several podcasts on America’s declining fertility rate, and why South Korea has the lowest birthrate in the world. But we’ve never done an episode on the subject quite like this one. Today we go deep on the psychology of having children and not having children and the cultural revolution behind the decline in birthrates in America and the rest of the world. The way we think about dating, marriage, kids, and family is changing radically in a very short period of time. And we are just beginning to reckon with the causes and consequences of that shift. In...

Young girls are starting their first periods earlier than they have in previous decades—a shift associated with adverse health outcomes later in life.A new study published on May 29 in JAMA Network Open revealed that the median age at menarche has remained relatively stable at around 12 years, and the proportion of girls starting menstruation before age 11 has significantly increased over time.Menarche, or the first menstrual period, marks the beginning of the monthly hormonal cycle and reproductive lifespan. Additionally, it signifies the end of female puberty.Researchers with the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Apple Women’s Health Study...

A troubling trend observed in America over the past decade grew significantly worse in 2023. The CDC just announced that the birth rate in America fell to just 1.62 births per woman. That's the lowest reproduction rate recorded in the United States since the government began tracking this data early in the 20th century. It also represents a two percent decline from the already-low rate recorded in 2022, meaning the rate fell by more than half in a single year. In other words, even if every single woman in the country were in a potentially reproductive relationship with a man,...

Some commentators object to the way in which fertility clinics make pornography available to men as an aid to masturbation when those men produce sperm for evaluation, storage or IVF. These objections typically rely on claims that pornography is generally harmful to women, unnecessary and dissociates sexual acts from conception. In light of these objections, certain commentators want fertility clinics to divest themselves of pornography… …Both the porn industry and sperm retrieval are predicated on metaphorical surrogacy. In both cases, a substitute takes the place of a human body and thereby severs the ancient link between orgasm in intercourse and...

Four out of five Americans are being exposed to a little-known chemical found in popular oat-based foods — including Cheerios and Quaker Oats — that is linked to reduced fertility, altered fetal growth, and delayed puberty. The Environmental Working Group published a study in the Journal of Exposure Science & Environmental Epidemiology on Thursday that found a staggering 80% of Americans tested positive for a harmful pesticide called chlormequat. The “highly toxic agricultural chemical” is federally allowed to be used on oats and other grains imported to the US, according to the EWG. When applied to oat and grain crops,...

Let me suggest 5 major drivers: 1. Meritocratic civil service exams encouraged heavy investment in education. China institutionalised this first, but the system then spread across East Asia. Education became seen as the pathway for social mobility. 2. Education fever has spawned an arms race of intensive parenting. 3. Within China, fertility fell earliest in the more individualist northeast, where there is less onus on lineage. 4. Economic development has spawned cultural liberalisation, weakening pressure to bear multiple sons. 5. Given heavy expectations of parenting and cultural liberalisation, one child is increasingly seen as enough. To understand all these interactions,...

As per the Tweet below, China’s fertility rate is currently 0.88 children per woman. This is LOWER than South Korea AND UKRAINE!! Big if true! In 1960, more than 30m Chinese babies were born annually. In 2023 only 7.8m were born annually.