How much drinking of alcohol is safe?

Alcohol is the most widely used legal drug. Its use has been sanctioned by long-standing use and efforts to ban it have been largely unsuccessful, as the Prohibition movement found out during the years 1920-1933 when the production, importation, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages was completely banned in the US, after the 18th Amendment to the US constitution was easily passed in 1919. While private ownership and consumption of alcohol were not made illegal federally, some local jurisdiction did make those illegal too.

The legacy of prohibition is mixed.

The overall effects of Prohibition on society are disputed and hard to pin down. Some research indicates that alcohol consumption declined substantially due to Prohibition, while other research indicates that Prohibition did not reduce alcohol consumption in the long term. Americans who wanted to continue drinking alcohol found loopholes in Prohibition laws or used illegal methods to obtain alcohol, resulting in the emergence of black markets and crime syndicates dedicated to distributing alcohol. By contrast, rates of liver cirrhosis, alcoholic psychosis, and infant mortality declined during Prohibition. Because of the lack of uniform national statistics gathered about crime prior to 1930, it is difficult to draw conclusions about Prohibition’s effect on crime at the national level. Support for Prohibition diminished steadily throughout its duration, including among former supporters of Prohibition.

The 18th Amendment was repealed by the 21st Amendment passed in 1933, ending that experiment.

That drinking alcohol causes or exacerbates problems is clear, with men being the key drivers.
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The problem of finding ways to combat bad speech

At a time when we are flooded with vile rhetoric from all over, especially on social media, it becomes difficult to know how to respond. The easy availability of AI engines to create realistic but fake text, audio, and video content has enabled the scope of such hate speech to explode. There have been calls for the social media platforms to more closely monitor the content of their sites and prevent such abuses but since the sites want people to spend time there, they are reluctant to take more than the mildest of steps.

The platforms Meta and X/Twitter are the worst offenders but even relatively staid ones like Substack have been roiled by controversy.

In January 2022, the Center for Countering Digital Hate accused Substack of allowing content that could be dangerous to public health. The Center estimated that the company earned $2.5 million per year from the top five anti-vaccine authors alone. The three founders responded via blog post affirming their commitment to minimal censorship.

Substack faced further criticism in November 2023 for allowing its platform to be used by white nationalists, Nazis, and antisemites. In an open letter, more than 100 Substack creators threatened to leave the platform and implored Substack’s leadership to stop providing a platform for political views with which they disagree. In response, Substack CEO Hamish McKenzie said the company would continue to allow the publication of extremist views because attempting to censor them would make the problem worse. Creators like Casey Newton, Molly White, and Ryan Broderick left the platform as a result.

The argument of free speech absolutists who oppose any attempts to censor content is frequently stated as “The best response to bad speech is more speech”. In other words, the way to combat speech that one abhors is to speak up against it and, in the free marketplace of ideas, the better speech should ultimately win.
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Bruce Springsteen’s powerful new song Streets of Minneapolis

I wrote this song on Saturday, recorded it yesterday and released it to you today in response to the state terror being visited on the city of Minneapolis. It’s dedicated to the people of Minneapolis, our innocent immigrant neighbors and in memory of Alex Pretti and Renee Good.Stay free

[image or embed]

— Bruce Springsteen (@brucespringsteen.net) January 28, 2026 at 9:02 AM

You can also listen to it here.

Music has played an integral part in protest movements, galvanizing and energizing people as we saw most memorably during the civil rights and Vietnam turbulence. I hope this becomes a protest anthem that is blasted through speakers whenever Trump and his thugs including ICE appear in public, and that it inspires other artists to do the same.

Here are the lyrics.

Through the winter’s ice and cold
Down Nicollet Avenue
A city aflame fought fire and ice
‘Neath an occupier’s boots

King Trump’s private army from the DHS
Guns belted to their coats
Came to Minneapolis to enforce the law
Or so their story goes

Against smoke and rubber bullets
In the dawn’s early light
Citizens stood for justice
Their voices ringing through the night

And there were bloody footprints
Where mercy should have stood
And two dead left to die on snow-filled streets
Alex Pretti and Renee Good

chorus

Oh Minneapolis, I hear your voice
Singing through the bloody mist
We’ll take our stand for this land
And the stranger in our midst

Here in our home they killed and roamed
In the winter of ’26
We’ll remember the names of those who died
On the streets of Minneapolis

Trump’s federal thugs beat up on
His face and his chest
Then we heard the gunshots
And Alex Pretti lay in the snow, dead

Their claim was self defense, sir
Just don’t believe your eyes
It’s our blood and bones and these whistles and phones
Against Miller and Noem’s dirty lies

chorus

Oh Minneapolis, I hear your voice
Crying through the bloody mist
We’ll remember the names of those who died
On the streets of Minneapolis

Now they say they’re here to uphold the law
But they trample on our rights
If your skin is black or brown my friend
You can be questioned or deported on sight

In our chants of “ICE out now”
Our city’s heart and soul persists
Through broken glass and bloody tears
On the streets of Minneapolis

chorus

Oh Minneapolis, I hear your voice
Singing through the bloody mist
Here in our home they killed and roamed
In the winter of ’26

We’ll take our stand for this land
And the stranger in our midst
We’ll remember the names of those who died
On the streets of Minneapolis
We’ll remember the names of those who died
On the streets of Minneapolis

Trump is finding out that murdering white Americans is unpopular

The invaluable news source Drop Site has obtained video that clearly shows Alex Pretti being murdered by a CBP agent while being pinned to the ground by other agents.

On Saturday, U.S. federal agents killed Alex Jeffrey Pretti in Minneapolis, Minnesota, shooting him multiple times at point blank range while pinned down prone on the ground and surrounded by officers along Nicollet Avenue. The Saturday killing—committed by a Customs and Border Protection agent—is the third shooting by U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) and CBP in as many weeks, and comes just one day after tens of thousands of Minneapolis residents took to the streets in subzero temperatures to protest the federal raids in Minnesota.

Close-up video footage, obtained by Drop Site, shows one agent push a person to the ground and then deploy a chemical irritant twice on the 37-year-old Pretti, who had gone to help the person pushed. Around eight agents then swarm and wrestle him to the ground. One of the officers then visibly unholstered his gun and fired around four point-blank gunshots at Pretti, a Minnesota resident who was reportedly on the scene as an observer. There are ten gunshots heard in all—at least five of them were fired at Pretti from a distance, while the person holding the camera shouts, “What the fuck did you just do?”
…

The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees both CBP and ICE, alleged the man “approached US Border Patrol officers with a 9 mm semi-automatic handgun,” and released a photo of the purported firearm, which appears to be a Sig Sauer Emperor Scorpion. No video has surfaced showing Pretti approaching federal agents with a brandished gun.

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Why I blog

Today is the 21st anniversary of the beginning of my blogging. I originally started doing so on this day in 2005 on the platform that had been started by my university and then in 2012 was invited to join the FreethoughtBlogs collective and have been here ever since. When I started, blogging was new and it was considered to be slightly infra dig for academics to engage in it, a comedown from the forms in which they usually expressed their ideas, such as journal papers, magazine articles, and newspaper op-eds. In fact, a faculty colleague of mine in my university published his blog anonymously, out of embarrassment as to what his peers might think. But that feeling soon dissipated as the value of this form became apparent, enabling as it did the ability to very rapidly express one’s scholarly views on the news of the day. More and more faculty started blogging and some found their visibility increasing by leaps and bounds and being sought after by the media.

But as some have pointed out, blogging seems to be falling out of favor. This is partly because the audience has shifted to social media platforms that enable hot takes on the news to be disseminated even more quickly. However, those forms tend to require very short snippets mostly in the form of videos and hence are not really suitable for any thoughtful exposition on a topic, and thus not that appealing to academics.
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My talk on “The Death of Free Will”

[Note: Given the controversial nature of this topic and the subtlety of the arguments involved that might require multiple exchanges and clarifications, I am lifting the three comment limit for this post, though the rule against acting like a jerk remains and indeed will always remain.]

On January 10, 2026, I gave a talk at the local Skepticamp Conference on The Death of Free Will. I am attaching the link to the video below. It is about 25 minutes long, followed by another 20 minutes of Q/A.

Since you cannot see the slides that well, I am attaching a pdf of the slides so that you can follow along.

Enjoy!

Incompetence all the way down

As others have pointed out, one of the key differences between the first Trump administration and the current iteration is that in the first one, he was willing to appoint people who were acceptable to the Republican party establishment to key positions. Of course, he then got tired of those who were not totally supportive of his crackpot ideas and fired them or they left, but by and large he kept intact the senior-level professional cadres, the ones who have the institutional memories, are aware of the norms under which their institutions operate, and essentially keep the wheels of government rolling.

But after he lost the 2020 election, Trump began his paranoid delusions that the entire government was filled with people who opposed him and were the ones who brought him down, going so far as to postulate the existence of a ‘deep state’ that actually stole the election from him. He targeted in particular the department of justice, falsely claiming that Joe Biden had ‘weaponized’ the institution to target him and his supporters, by investigating him and prosecuting the members of the violent mob that attacked the Capital building on January 6th, 2021 at his instigation.

So this time around, Trump has forced out of office any career person whom he did not feel was sufficiently loyal to him to do his bidding and put in place stooges and sycophants even if they were not qualified and barely knew what their job entailed. While this happened everywhere, the department of justice has been the place where the incompetence has been revealed the most. While so much attention has been focused on the mess that Trump is creating at a high level, that can shield the fact of messes further down.
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This is the person they gave the Nobel Peace Prize to?

I do not follow very much the Nobel Peace Prize, seeing it as a highly over-rated award but some people still view it highly, most notably the idiot president of the US. So I did not know much about this year’s winner Maria Corina Machado other than that she was a right wing opposition leader in Venezuela. The mainstream media in the US did not go into many details of her life.

But then her sucking up to Trump was truly nauseating and I began to wonder exactly what her background was. Nuvpreet Kalra has taken a deep dive into Machado’s life and she seems to be much worse than I thought, in that rather than being a doughty fighter for the people of the opposition, she seems to be just another member of the oligarchy, using popular movements to serve the interests of the wealthy including her own.
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Trump forced to back down on Greenland threats

After boasting that he would compel Europe to give him Greenland or impose tariffs on them, even implying a willingness to use force if necessary,Trump caved. First Trump said that he would not use force, then said that he would not impose the tariffs because he had arrived at some kind of deal. That turns out be (no surprise) a lie.

Donald Trump has walked back his threat to impose sweeping US tariffs on eight European countries, claiming he had agreed “the framework of a future deal” on Greenland at the same time a Danish lawmaker called the deal “not real”.

Four days after vowing to introduce steep import duties on a string of US allies over their support for Greenland’s continued status as an autonomous Danish territory, the president backed down.
…

Aaja Chemnitz Larsen, a Greenlandic member of the Danish parliament, wrote on Facebook Wednesday night that, despite Trump’s claim of having struck an agreement over her homeland with Nato, the military alliance has no mandate to negotiate anything about Greenland. “Nothing about us, without us,” she wrote.

Amid rumors that a mineral deal might have been discussed by Trump and Rutte in Davos, Chemnitz Larsen called the idea that Nato should have anything to say about Greenland’s sovereignty or minerals “completely out of the question”.

Sascha Faxe, a member of Denmark’s parliament, said in an interview with Sky News on Wednesday evening, that the deal Trump claims to have struck with Nato over Greenland is “not real”.

“The thing is, there can’t be a deal without having Greenland as part of the negotiations, first of all,” Faxe said.

She went on to reference Chemnitz Larsen’s earlier comments, saying: “I have heard from the Greenlanders that I know – so we have a Greenlandic MP in Denmark – and she’s very clear that this is not a prerogative of Rutte and Nato; they can’t trade the underground in Greenland, or Greenlandic security without Greenlanders being part of it.

“And they are very clear: Greenland is not for sale, they are not up for negotiations,” Faxe added. “So it’s not real negotiations, it’s two men who have had a conversation,” she said. “It’s definitely not a deal.”

This shows that when the Europeans stand firm together, Trump becomes a paper tiger.

His climbdown on tariffs came hours after the European parliament suspended indefinitely the ratification of the US-EU tariff deal sealed last summer, in a move that showed politicians were, for the first time, willing to face Trump down.

When Trump says that he has a ‘framework’ or ‘concept’ of deal, it means that he has nothing and are words designed to hide a humiliating retreat. He is living up to the epithet given him of being ‘TACO’ where TACO stands for ‘Trump Always Chickens Out’.

The weak link for Europe seems to be NATO secretary general Mark Rutte who looks eager to appease Trump and acts like he can unilaterally negotiate on behalf of NATO. I suspect that the conversation that he had with Trump where Trump said that they had arrived at a deal was specifically designed to allow Trump to try and save face.