Author: nick

Independent testing of 51 toothpaste brands found 90% contained lead, 65% arsenic, 47% mercury and 35% cadmium. Heavy metals enter toothpaste through contaminated raw ingredients like hydroxyapatite, calcium carbonate and bentonite clay. Lead and cadmium disrupt cellular functions, causing kidney damage, osteoporosis, anemia and other health complications. Toothpaste manufacturers have refused to remove heavy metals and some have used legal threats against whistleblowers. Homemade toothpaste using coconut oil, baking soda and essential oils offers a safer alternative. The investigation: What was found and why it matters In May 2026, Lead Safe Mama, an advocacy organization focused on consumer safety, updated…

This is part of 1776 All-Stars, a series about Reason’s favorite American Founders. Read more here. Joanna Andreasson I do not know my favorite Founder’s name. I just know that in 1788 a Baltimore newspaper published a series of pseudonymous essays where he warned against standing armies, called for a bill of rights, and declared, paraphrasing Jonathan Swift, that “laws are cobwebs, catching only the flies and letting the wasps escape.” See-sawing between fears of an aristocratic legislature and a tyrannical executive, he argued that we’d be best off with the highly decentralized democracy found in certain Swiss cantons. “If I am…

Stumps and slash piles in an Oregon Coast Range clearcut. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair. The Trump administration and some Democrats support “managing” our national forests like tree farms, not forest ecosystems, by calling for ever more logging and burning in a futile attempt to prevent wildfires. But studies show logging tends to increase, not decrease, extreme fires through drying, less snow retention, and higher wind speeds. Dr. Jack Cohen is the retired chief scientist at Missoula’s Forest Service Fire Sciences Lab. He and other wildfire scientists have written numerous peer-reviewed studies that show we can’t fireproof forests — and that…

Image Wikipedia. There are many lessons to be learned from the lates made-for-Israel war on Iran. The first and most damning is that the war resolved the very crisis it created. Donald Trump celebrated the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and the lifting of the blockade against Iran. Two conditions that were fully in place before Benjamin Netanyahu dog walked Trump into this war. The agreement that concluded the war took us back to exactly where we stood before America spent $200 billion, and where Americans continue to pay Israeli surcharge tax at the pump and grocery stores. As…

When Maryam Rahimi opened SoLIT Café in downtown Montreal five years ago, she says she never imagined she would spend so much time dealing with the Office québécois de la langue française (OQLF), Quebec’s language watchdog that enforces Quebec laws requiring services are provided in French. Rahimi says years of complaints and inspections have forced her to change menus, signs, and receipts, and she claims inspectors even wanted her to find a French word for nachos, a request she found absurd. She says the repeated investigations feel like harassment and have cost her thousands of dollars, while the OQLF says it…

Journalists are increasingly under fire, figuratively and literally. Figuratively, the most recent victim under “fire” is award-winning broadcast veteran Scott Pelley. I was disappointed, but unsurprised, to see former Wisconsin Governor, Scott Walker, in the Washington Times this month supporting CBS’s firing of long-time journalist Scott Pelley. Pelley rose up the ranks of journalism the old-fashioned way, starting as a copyboy at age 15 in his 1970’s hometown Texas newspaper. Eventually he became CBS News’ nightly news anchor and then correspondent with America’s investigative journalism flagship series of over a half century, 60 Minutes. It was there that he became its most award-winning…

US ambassador to Mexico, Ronald Johnson. Photo: State Department. No one with the slightest respect for diplomacy would ever name Ronald Johnson ambassador to anyplace but Hell. Hiring him to be top diplomat is like hiring Jeffrey Epstein to be the recreation director at a girls high school. His appointment as ambassador to Mexico indicates a hard-line policy of force over diplomacy towards Claudia Sheinbaum and the Fourth Transformation. Johnson is a retired Colonel, a “former” CIA agent, a super-hawk, an expert in undercover psychological operations and asymmetric irregular warfare, and a seasoned ex-Green Beret with extensive tours of duty…

Maybe it’s my nostalgia expressing itself, but Disclosure Day didn’t have the same emotional core as ET or Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind. Spielberg tackled the issue from the head, not the heart. According to an oral history of Spielberg published by Vulture, both he and Harrison Ford rejected the idea of having aliens in Indiana Jones’s 4th movie. BoA Revival invites UFO historian Aaron Gulyas to rant about the sorry state of the field in 2026 (I bet Aaron didn’t like DD). The grand daddy of “sentient plasmoids.” The Eternal Void But With Jazz discusses Magic for the…

In recent years, critics on both sides of the aisle have taken aim at the longstanding policy of strategic ambiguity toward Taiwan. They argue that Washington should abandon ambiguity and embrace “strategic clarity,” explicitly pledging to fight China over Taiwan. Others, such as Hoover Institute Fellow Eyck Freymann, have offered more sophisticated sounding alternatives like “structured ambiguity,” attempting to codify precisely what America would and would not do in various contingencies, particularly involving gray zone activities. But abandoning a long-established policy that, whatever its faults, has prevented a major war between great powers for over half a century, in favor…

It is the late 1980s. The Berlin Wall is still intact, defined as the “Anti-Fascist Protection Wall“ by the East German authorities. This will soon change. In this photo, that concept of the Berlin Wall being a protective “anti-Fascist barrier“ seems visually to be valid. This site in West Berlin , on “Wilhelmstraße“, was the former torture center of the Gestapo, sealed off from East Berlin by the Wall facing West Berlin. The Nazi torture center, a symbol of evil that the East Germans thought they could keep out with a wall. But the context of an “Anti-Fascist Wall“ separating…