Anyone who has spent time around someone growing a whole new human knows this universal truth: their cravings are as mysterious as they are powerful. One minute everything is normal. The next minute there is an URGENT need for super-specific, slightly bizarre, borderline disturbing food combinations you have never witnessed in the wild. But again…when a body is creating another body from scratch…can we really question what fuel is required to do so?And if you think that weird pregnancy cravings only exist in movies, check out this story. media3.giphy.com A soon-to-be father recently went viral after placing what might be the most bewildering pizza order of the year. Maybe the decade. Possibly of all recorded history.The order: one large pizza with triple pepperoni, extra cheese, banana peppers, light jalapeños, half chicken, half mushrooms, half caramelized onions, half olives, and light sauce. Because no one likes a soggy everything pizza. If you’re wondering how many "halves" can fit on one pizza, you’re in good company. That was a major question in the comments. "But which halves go with which halves?????" one person exclaimed. Restaurant Warriors (Public) | Facebook www.facebook.com Another questioned: "Is it a whole half with chicken, mushrooms, caramelized onions, and olives? Or is it half with chicken, the other half with mushrooms, the half with the chicken with caramelized onions, and the other half with olives? I mean, that could go a million different ways…"But even more entertaining than the toppings was the message typed into the order notes:"Bro, yes, I know this looks insane," the husband admitted, trying his best to be polite. But then he explained, "I’m the dude who has a very pregnant wife." And truly no further explanation was required, but he continued. "I’m done questioning what she wants. I’m scared of her and honestly you should be, too." The sincerity in this is undeniable. He then ended his message rather heroically, saying: "I promise this is the order. Thank you and godspeed."One man’s plea is the internet’s laughterReactions to this husband’s request were as delightfully varied as his wife’s pizza order."Bro didn’t order pizza…he submitted a cry for help," one person quipped. Another joked, "Happy wife, keep your life."Others were onboard with this order, as well as the price."That pie sounds fire."Ew GIFfrom Olsen Twins GIFs "Ok but 17.99 for that? Honestly a steal."Another person called the request for light sauce "the ultimate plot twist," which prompted several to hypothesize that this might have been to avoid pregnancy heartburn. So maybe there’s a method to the madness! But overwhelmingly people united around one sentiment: this man is trying his best. "I know he’s your husband, but you gotta marry him again."Cheers to this fella and his wife, and godspeed indeed.

Sometimes love, whether it's platonic or romantic, cannot be heard—only experienced. Such is the case for Thomas, a non-verbal 20-year-old young man, and his dear friend Sofia, who is 23.In a beautiful clip posted by t4autism on behalf of Thomas AKA Cubby, we see these two souls reunite at a bowling alley after having not seen one another for two weeks. Sofia and Thomas sit next to each other—one knee touching. They lean in, still keeping a dash of personal space. Their eyes gaze into one another's in a way that no words could truly capture. They each briefly smile when she looks up at his baseball cap. She gently touches it and then pushes it off. She smiles, and his gaze never wavers. See on Instagram The camera briefly turns around to Thomas's proud mother, who simply gives the "I know, right?" look. The chyron reads, "After two weeks without seeing each other. Nonverbal. Profound Autism," while the song "A Thousand Years" by Christina Perri underscores the moment. Hashtags on the post include: "Happy, love, autism, parents, joy, mom, papa, girl, boy, adulting, T4Autism" and perhaps best of all…"telepathy."At nearly half a million likes, over 20,000 people took the time to comment on this video alone, many from people who claim to be neurodivergent themselves. One commenter writes, "This is literally the most beautiful thing I witnessed all year. She looks like a Disney princess, he's handsome. Her presence is soothing his overstimulation." Another notes, "They're not nonverbal, we just can't hear them."This Instagrammer was downright poetic: "She spoke two million and 42 words her own way. He listened to and heard each one." See on Instagram Upworthy had the honor of speaking with Thomas's mother, Shannon Lowe. She shared that Thomas was diagnosed with profound autism at the age of two. "Our journey has been a roller coaster of highs and lows," she said. "As a family, we've worked hard to find a tribe that truly understands our dynamic."Of Thomas and Sofia, she notes, they "share a beautiful bond and great affection for one another."She also opens up about what profound autism is and the impact it can have on families: "I wish the world understood that profound autism is a very different level of autism. It requires one-on-one care and often comes with self-injury behaviors. Unfortunately, we do not have many champions for this particular diagnosis. We lack legislation, resources, and support. Here in Fort Worth, we currently have a 17-year waitlist, and most of these families are led by single mothers—because only 18% of fathers stay, which adds even more trauma to an already stressful situation."But she doesn't give up. She uses her social media platforms, including her YouTube channel T4Autism, to educate, vent, and exemplify that love knows no bounds. She even wrote a children's book entitled "Profound Love: Profound Autism," which she describes as an "invitation to see beyond diagnosis, beyond silence, and into the extraordinary ways love reveals itself—wordless, boundless, and profoundly real." Mother talks about constant pivots made for autistic child. www.youtube.com, T4Autism On the book's Amazon page, the description reads in part: "Though Thomas does not speak, he expresses joy, affection, and connection in ways that transcend language. His leaps of excitement, radiant smiles, and warm presence remind everyone around him of the purest form of love.As Thomas, his family, and their three beloved dogs navigate daily life, their world expands when they meet Sasha and Sofia—two extraordinary young people also living with profound autism. Through shared walks, laughter, and simple moments, an unexpected and beautiful bond blossoms between Thomas and Sofia. Step by step, hand in hand, they discover a connection deeper than words—a love that speaks through smiles, gestures, and presence."

"Weird Al" Yankovic: Grammy-winning parody-song master, multi-platinum singer-accordionist, genuinely nice dude. For decades, devoted fans have marveled at his warmth and approachability—rare qualities for an artist and celebrity of his stature. And now hundreds of them have gathered to swap stories in a particularly heartwarming Instagram comment section. Their meeting spot is a post by Katelyn Sue, who runs the social media account 1980s.nostalgia. Starting in September 2025, the influencer posted a series of photos and videos showing an emotional pre-concert meet-and-greet with one of her lifelong inspirations. The clips are beautiful, showing the pair chatting casually, sharing a tender hug, and Yankovic signing some merch. "'Never meet your heroes' doesn’t apply to this man," she wrote. See on Instagram "I started listening to Weird Al when I was 8," Katelyn Sue tells Upworthy. "There’s a joke with my generation that we have to go through the obligatory Michael Jackson phase in second grade because so many of us did. In the midst of my Michael Jackson phase, I would watch his videos over and over on my mom and dad’s computer in their room. One day while I was watching Michael Jackson videos, my dad showed me [Yankovic’s] 'Eat It' video…and then 'Fat.' I think being in the wheelchair and also just being a really quirky kid, I was hyper aware that I was different from other kids my age. Not many eight-year-olds then shared the same quirky interests that I did, and I think I felt like kind of a loner. Not only did I think the videos and songs were hilarious, it was comforting as the weird kid to watch his videos and feel like I wasn’t alone in being different and that it was okay. He definitely was one of the first people to make me feel like being weird isn’t bad."How "Weird Al" helped one diehard fan persevere through a dark time Katelyn Sue started her public social-media accounts at age 14, frequently posting about her love of the '80s and childhood heroes Yankovic and Paul "Pee-wee Herman" Reubens. But at first, she wound up getting "severely bullied" for it. "I was called 'a freak,' 'mentally ill,' all kinds of things," she says. "I shut that part of myself completely out." At age 20, her mental health reached a breaking point, and in an attempt to escape her "dark thoughts," she clicked on her YouTube app and randomly found Yankovic’s video for childhood favorite "Like a Surgeon." "Long story short," she says, "that video is the reason I came back to myself. I wanted to meet him in 2022 when he was in my area, but it was too fresh. I decided to buy the tickets this tour and tell him what he had gotten me through."Katelyn Sue was so "starstruck" during the meet-and-greet that she could barely remember everything she wanted to say. But she did manage to remark "You’re my childhood hero" and "Can I give you a hug?" She also requested that he doodle his own image so she could get it tattooed. "I almost chickened out, but I finally decided to tell him that he’s the reason I was able to start being my authentic self again and how much his music had gotten me through," she adds. "It was truly the most magical thing I’ve ever experienced." See on Instagram The video of their meeting went viral—Katelyn Sue says it’s been "seen by" John Mayer, David and Patricia Arquette, and Cheri Oteri—and that reaction has been overwhelming in a good way. "There are an insane number of comments talking about their interactions with him and how it made their day, even if it was a short interaction," she says. Indeed, you can’t scroll for more than two seconds without spotting another sweet reply—from ordinary fans, celebrities, even former Yankovic collaborators. "He is really this guy," wrote actor Steven Weber. "Genuinely decent. Everything you’d want him to be." Stand-up comedian Matt Braunger chimed in, "I met him backstage when I opened for Aziz Ansari in like 2007(?) and he sends me a bday card every year (amongst other cool things he’s done as a friend). An absolute prince of a performer and person ❤️"Here are some other wonderful comments: "I’ve met Al several times and even have his autograph tattooed where he signed my arm. He is exactly what you’d hope he’d be like!""Awww ? I got to work with @alfredyankovic when he performed in the Nightmare Before Xmas live with Danny Elfman and Paul Reubens and can confirm that he was totally kind, warm and gracious the whole time. He even made a video greeting for the son of my boyfriend (at the time) who was a huge fan. He was gushing about it for ages! He’s a lovely human being ☺️""I've met weird Al several times. He is the kindest most giving person I've ever met. When you're talking to him he actually pays attention to you and doesn't just scribble his name and then have you walk away""Weird Al was a semi regular for a bit at a coffee shop i worked at. This is genuinely how he is. He always took pictures, always looked people in the eye and took time to actually speak with them.""He’s a delightful man!""Waited 3 hours to *possibly* meet him and he wanted to meet EVERYONE in line. He was so nice.""My kid got to interview him in 2016 (he was nine at the time.) Then, at the concert he (son, not Weird Al,) had a diabetic episode and got sick. We were leaving and security insisted we meet him before going. He let us go ahead of everybody else waiting to meet, and treated my son with total respect and warmth. 10/10 celebrity meeting. Could have hoped for more."I actually met him for an interview after we filmed his live performance. So exceptionally sweet. He looked at me with a smile and said: 'Oh yeah, I saw you with the camera!'""I met Al back in 2011 and of the 100’s and 100’s of celebs I met or interacted with living out in California, he was by far one of the most genuine and memorable. Truly a person who seems so grateful to be appreciated by his fans. He made a very personal moment out of our meeting and it solidified why I’ve been a life long fan"For Katelyn Sue, the story didn’t even end with that emotional meet-and-greet—she was able to meet Yankovic again in October at the GalaxyCon event. "[H]e told me he had seen the post, and that definitely made me extremely emotional," she says. "I had hoped he saw it for no other reason than I wanted him to see the comments talking about how much he has helped people through and how many people he truly inspires to just be their weird selves." See on Instagram

Branching out of psychedelia. The post The band Roger Waters and Eddie Van Halen both called the best first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

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Fertility rates have been rapidly declining all over the globe.  If this trend continues, the global population will fall dramatically in the years ahead even if we do not experience major wars, worldwide pandemics, nightmarish famines and historic natural disasters.  Of course this is exactly what many among the global elite have been seeking to achieve for a very long time.  They kept warning us that “the population bomb” was an existential threat to humanity, and they have been working very hard to bring down birth rates. Sadly, their efforts have succeeded to a very large degree.  In more than 50 percent of the nations on the entire planet, the total fertility rate is now below replacement level… The TFR is expressed as a single figure to reflect the number of children per birthing person in a specific population, most commonly a country. When assessing for population growth or decline, experts use a “replacement” or “maintenance” TFR of 2.1. This indicates that each person is “replaced” by someone else, so there’s no population growth or decline, barring other factors like migration. Since the 1950s, however, global TFRs have been decreasing drastically. Research suggests that more than 50% of countries worldwide are below the 2.1 maintenance TFR, and by the year 2100, experts predict that 93% of countries will be below this rate. This is extremely alarming, but most people don’t even know that it is happening. Here in the United States, the fertility rate fell to a brand new record low last year… The fertility rate in the U.S. dropped to an all-time low in 2024 with fewer than 1.6 children being born per woman, federal data released Thursday shows. The U.S. was once among only a few developed countries with a rate that ensured each generation had enough children to replace itself — about 2.1 kids per woman. But it has been sliding in America for close to two decades as more women are waiting longer to have children or never taking that step at all. We are not even coming close to replacing ourselves. This has all sorts of grave implications for the future of federal programs such as Social Security. In much of Europe, things are even worse… Native fertility across the entire Western world has collapsed below replacement and shows no sign of recovery. Italy sits at 1.24 children per woman, Spain 1.23, Germany 1.36, Poland 1.26, Canada 1.33, Australia 1.58. The only reason why western populations are still growing is because of immigration. Without immigration, the number of people living in most western nations would be declining precipitously. The same thing is true in China.  Even though the one-child policy ended nearly a decade ago, the fertility rate in China has continued to plummet. In fact, at this point it has fallen all the way to one… In the last few years, despite the end of the one-child policy in 2016 and the government encouraging larger families, fertility rates have dropped to one. So why is this happening? Without a doubt, decades of propaganda have successfully convinced women all over the planet to have fewer children. It will not be easy to undo that conditioning. In addition, the global elite have poisoned our air, our water, our soil and our food, and we are constantly being blasted with dangerous levels of electromagnetic radiation. As a result, male sperm counts have declined precipitously since the 1970s… A 2017 meta-analysis, for example, based on data from North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, found that sperm count had declined by 52 percent between 1973 and 2011. A follow-up in 2022 by some of the same authors showed a similar reduction across an even wider range of countries. One of the ways that we are being poisoned is through the use of phthalates. The elite knew more than 40 years ago that ingesting phthalates can severely damage the reproductive system… Earl Gray was astonished by what he found when he cut into the laboratory rats. Some had testicles that were malformed, filled with fluid, missing or in the wrong place. Others had shriveled tubes blocking the flow of sperm, while still more were missing glands that help produce semen. For months, Gray and his team had been feeding rats corn oil laced with phthalates, a class of chemical widely used to make plastics soft and pliable. Working for the Environmental Protection Agency in the early 1980s, Gray was evaluating how toxic substances damage the reproductive system and tested dibutyl phthalate after reading some early papers suggesting it posed a risk to human health. Sitting on a screened porch on a humid summer day more than 40 years later, Gray recalled the study and the grisly birth defects. “It was in enough animals, so we knew it wasn’t random malformations,” said Gray, 80, who retired after nearly 50 years with the agency. Even though the danger was very clear, the widespread use of phthalates continued. It is being estimated that the damage to human health from phthalates in the United States is now costing us more than 66 billion dollars a year… The costs to society are huge. A 2024 NYU-led study that catalogued health effects from phthalates exposure in the United States — including contributions to diabetes levels and infertility — estimated that dealing with phthalate-related diseases cost $66.7 billion in a single year. That is triple the economic impact of health impacts from “forever chemicals,” another class of chemicals widely implicated in disease. Treating all cancer, by comparison, costs the U.S. $209 billion annually, according to one estimate by the government-run National Cancer Institute. This is a crime against humanity. And yet to this day phthalates continue to be used in food manufacturing facilities all across America… “You have hoses that are loaded with phthalates, you have plastic tanks that stuff is stored in, you have pumps that are plastic — that’s where you get a lot of phthalates,” said Tom Neltner, a longtime chemical campaigner and chemical engineer who worked in food manufacturing. The American Chemistry Council said FDA has approved using certain phthalates in food-contact applications like tubing, conveyor belts and vinyl gloves, concluding that dietary exposures do not exceed safe levels. “The leadership in FDA, both political and the senior career leadership, for decades in the food safety space, didn’t think chemicals merited much attention,” said Jim Jones, who was brought in as a deputy commissioner to overhaul food safety at the agency in 2023 after a career at EPA. By allowing them to do this to us, we are literally committing societal suicide. But most people that will read this article will forget all about it by next week. Of course they are poisoning and killing us in dozens of other ways as well. What will it take for the general population to finally wake up? They are destroying humanity and everything around us, and someday they will be held accountable. But for now, most of the population just continues to pretend that everything is just fine. Meanwhile, the agenda of the global elite continues to march forward, and they are absolutely thrilled that birth rates continue to fall all over the globe. Michael’s new book entitled “10 Prophetic Events That Are Coming Next” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com. About the Author: Michael Snyder’s new book entitled “10 Prophetic Events That Are Coming Next” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com. He has also written nine other books that are available on Amazon.com including “Chaos”, “End Times”, “7 Year Apocalypse”, “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America”, “The Beginning Of The End”, and “Living A Life That Really Matters”.  When you purchase any of Michael’s books you help to support the work that he is doing.  You can also get his articles by email as soon as he publishes them by subscribing to his Substack newsletter.  Michael has published thousands of articles on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News, and he always freely and happily allows others to republish those articles on their own websites.  These are such troubled times, and people need hope.  John 3:16 tells us about the hope that God has given us through Jesus Christ: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”  If you have not already done so, we strongly urge you to invite Jesus Christ to be your Lord and Savior today. The post This Is One Of The Primary Tools That The Elite Are Using To Force Fertility Rates Down All Over The Globe appeared first on End Of The American Dream.