Alan Watts

Alan Watts by South Park creators

Alan Wilson Watts (6 January 1915 – 16 November 1973) was a British-born philosopher, writer, and speaker, best known as an interpreter and populariser of Eastern philosophy for a Western audience. Born in Chislehurst, he moved to the United States in 1938 and began Zen training in New York. Pursuing a career, he attended Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, where he received a master's degree in theology. Watts became an Episcopal priest then left the ministry in 1950 and moved to California, where he joined the faculty of the American Academy of Asian Studies.

Watts gained a large following in the San Francisco Bay Area while working as a volunteer programmer at KPFA, a Pacifica Radio station in Berkeley. Watts wrote more than 25 books and articles on subjects important to Eastern and Western religion, introducing the then-burgeoning youth culture to The Way of Zen (1957), one of the first bestselling books on Buddhism. In Psychotherapy East and West (1961), Watts proposed that Buddhism could be thought of as a form of psychotherapy and not a religion. He also explored human consciousness, in the essay "The New Alchemy" (1958), and in the book The Joyous Cosmology (1962).

Towards the end of his life, he divided his time between a houseboat in Sausalito and a cabin on Mount Tamalpais. His legacy has been kept alive by his son, Mark Watts, and many of his recorded talks and lectures are available on the Internet. According to the critic Erik Davis, his "writings and recorded talks still shimmer with a profound and galvanizing lucidity."

In 1936, Watts's first book was published, The Spirit of Zen. In The Way of Zen^[12] he disparaged The Spirit of Zen as a "popularisation of Suzuki's earlier works, and besides being very unscholarly it is in many respects out of date and misleading."

In 1938 he and his bride left England to live in America. He had married Eleanor Everett, whose mother Ruth Fuller Everett was involved with a traditional Zen Buddhist circle in New York. A few years later, Ruth Fuller married the Zen master (or "roshi"), Sokei-an Sasaki, and this Japanese gentleman served as a sort of model and mentor to Watts, though he chose not to enter into a formal Zen training relationship with Sasaki. During these years, according to his later writings, Watts had another mystical experience while on a walk with his wife.

Watts's fascination with the Zen (or Chan) tradition—beginning during the 1930s—developed because that tradition embodied the spiritual, interwoven with the practical, as exemplified in the subtitle of his Spirit of Zen: A Way of Life, Work, and Art in the Far East. "Work," "life," and "art" were not demoted due to a spiritual focus. In his writing, he referred to it as "the great Ch'an (or Zen) synthesis of Taoism, Confucianism and Buddhism after A.D. 700 in China."

Watts left formal Zen training in New York because the method of the teacher did not suit him. He was not ordained as a Zen monk, but he felt a need to find a professional outlet for his philosophical inclinations. He entered Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, an Episcopal (Anglican) school in Evanston, Illinois, where he studied Christian scriptures, theology, and church history. He attempted to work out a blend of contemporary Christian worship, mystical Christianity, and Asian philosophy. Watts was awarded a master's degree in theology in response to his thesis, which he published as a popular edition under the title Behold the Spirit: A Study in the Necessity of Mystical Religion. The pattern was set, in that Watts did not hide his dislike for religious outlooks that he decided were dour, guilt-ridden, or militantly proselytizing—no matter if they were found within Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, or Buddhism.

All seemed to go reasonably well in his next role, as Episcopal priest (beginning in 1945, aged 30), until an extramarital affair resulted in his young wife having their marriage annulled. It also resulted in Watts leaving the ministry by 1950. He spent the New Year getting to know Joseph Campbell and Campbell's wife, Jean Erdman; as well as John Cage the notable composer.

In early 1951, Watts moved to California, where he joined the faculty of the American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco. Here he taught alongside Saburō Hasegawa, Frederic Spiegelberg, Haridas Chaudhuri, lama Tokwan Tada, and various visiting experts and professors. Hasegawa, in particular, served as a teacher to Watts in the areas of Japanese customs, arts, primitivism, and perceptions of nature. Besides teaching, Watts served for several years as the Academy's administrator. One notable student of his was Eugene Rose, who later went on to become a noted hieromonk and theologian in the Eastern Orthodox Church in America.

Watts also studied written Chinese and practiced Chinese brush calligraphy with Hasegawa as well as with some of the Chinese students who enrolled at the academy. While Watts was noted for an interest in Zen Buddhism, his reading and discussions delved into Vedanta, "the new physics", cybernetics, semantics, process philosophy, natural history, and the anthropology of sexuality.

After heading up the Academy for a few years, Watts left the faculty for a freelance career in the mid-1950s. In 1953, he began what became a long-running weekly radio program at Pacifica Radio station KPFA in Berkeley, which continued until his death in 1973. Like other volunteer programmers at the listener-sponsored station, Watts was not paid for his broadcasts; they did, however, gain him a large following in the San Francisco Bay Area. These programs were later carried by additional Pacifica stations, and were re-broadcast many times over in the decades following his death. The original tapes are currently held by the Pacifica Radio Archives, based at KPFK in Los Angeles, and at the Electronic University archive founded by his son, Mark Watts (alanwatts.org).

In 1957 when 42, Watts published one of his best known books, The Way of Zen, which focused on philosophical explication and history. Besides drawing on the lifestyle and philosophical background of Zen, in India and China, Watts introduced ideas drawn from general semantics (directly from the writings of Alfred Korzybski and also from Norbert Wiener's early work on cybernetics, which had recently been published). Watts offered analogies from cybernetic principles possibly applicable to the Zen life. The book sold well, eventually becoming a modern classic, and helped widen his lecture circuit.

In 1958, Watts toured parts of Europe with his father, meeting the renowned psychiatrist Carl Jung and the German psychotherapist Karlfried Graf Dürckheim.^[14]

Upon returning to the United States, Watts recorded two seasons of a television series (1959–1960) for KQED public television in San Francisco, "Eastern Wisdom and Modern Life."

In the 1960s, Watts began to experiment with psychedelics, initially with mescaline given to him by Dr. Oscar Janiger. He tried LSD several times with various research teams led by Drs. Keith Ditman, Sterling Bunnell, and Michael Agron. He also tried marijuana and concluded that it was a useful and interesting psychoactive drug that gave the impression of time slowing down. Watts's books of the '60s reveal the influence of these chemical adventures on his outlook. He later said about psychedelic drug use, "If you get the message, hang up the phone."^[16]

For a time, Watts came to prefer writing in the language of modern science and psychology (Psychotherapy East and West is a good example), finding a parallel between mystical experiences and the theories of the material universe proposed by 20th-century physicists. He later equated mystical experience with ecological awareness, and typically emphasized whichever approach seemed best suited to the audience he was addressing.

Watts's explorations and teaching brought him into contact with many noted intellectuals, artists, and American teachers in the human potential movement. His friendship with poet Gary Snyder nurtured his sympathies with the budding environmental movement, to which Watts gave philosophical support. He also encountered Robert Anton Wilson, who credited Watts with being one of his "Light[s] along the Way" in the opening appreciation of Cosmic Trigger.

Though never affiliated for long with any one academic institution, he did have a fellowship for several years at Harvard University. He also lectured to many college and university students. His lectures and books gave him far-reaching influence on the American intelligentsia of the 1950s–1970s, but he was often seen as an outsider in academia. When questioned sharply by students during his talk at University of California Santa Cruz in 1970, Watts responded that he was not an academic philosopher but rather "a philosophical entertainer".

Watts has been criticized by Buddhists such as Philip Kapleau and D. T. Suzuki for allegedly misinterpreting several key Zen Buddhist concepts. In particular, he drew criticism from those who believe that zazen can only be achieved by a strict and specific means of sitting, as opposed to a cultivated state of mind available at any moment in any situation. Typical of these is Kapleau's claim that Watts dismissed zazen on the basis of only half a koan.^[17] In regard to the aforementioned koan, Robert Baker Aitken reports that Suzuki told him, "I regret to say that Mr. Watts did not understand that story."^[18] In his talks, Watts addressed the issue of defining zazen practice when he said, "A cat sits until it is tired of sitting, then gets up, stretches, and walks away."

He also had his supporters in the Zen community, including Shunryu Suzuki, the founder of the San Francisco Zen Center. As David Chadwick recounted in his biography of Suzuki, Crooked Cucumber: the Life and Zen Teaching of Shunryu Suzuki, when a student of Suzuki's disparaged Watts by saying "we used to think he was profound until we found the real thing", Suzuki "fumed with a sudden intensity", saying, "You completely miss the point about Alan Watts! You should notice what he has done. He is a great bodhisattva."

Watts sometimes alluded to a group of neighbors in Druid Heights (near Mill Valley, California) who had endeavored to combine architecture, gardening, and carpentry skills to make a beautiful and comfortable life for themselves. These neighbors accomplished this by relying on their own talents and using their own hands, as they lived in what has been called "shared bohemian poverty".^[20] Druid Heights was founded by the writer Elsa Gidlow,^[21] and Watts dedicated his book The Joyous Cosmology to the people of this neighborhood.^[22]

Regarding his intentions, Watts attempted to lessen the alienation that accompanies the experience of being human that he felt plagued the modern Westerner, and (like his fellow British expatriate and friend, Aldous Huxley) to lessen the ill will that was an unintentional by-product of alienation from the natural world. He felt such teaching could improve the world, at least to a degree. He also articulated the possibilities for greater incorporation of aesthetics (for example: better architecture, more art, more fine cuisine) in American life. In his autobiography he wrote, "… cultural renewal comes about when highly differentiated cultures mix".^[23]

In his last novel Island (1962), Aldous Huxley mentions the religious practice of maithuna as being something like what Roman Catholics call "coitus reservatus". A few years before, Alan Watts had discussed the theme in his own book Nature, Man and Woman. There, he discusses the possibility of the practice being known to early Christians and of it being kept secretly by the Church.

In his writings of the 1950s, he conveyed his admiration for the practicality in the historical achievements of Chán (Zen) in the Far East, for it had fostered farmers, architects, builders, folk physicians, artists, and administrators among the monks who had lived in the monasteries of its lineages.

In his mature work, he presents himself as "Zennist" in spirit as he wrote in his last book, Tao: The Watercourse Way. Child rearing, the arts, cuisine, education, law and freedom, architecture, sexuality, and the uses and abuses of technology were all of great interest to him.

Though known for his Zen teachings, he was equally if not more influenced by ancient Hindu scriptures, especially Vedanta, and spoke extensively about the nature of the divine Reality Man that Man misses, how the contradiction of opposites is the method of life and the means of cosmic and human evolution, how our fundamental Ignorance is rooted in the exclusive nature of mind and ego, how to come in touch with the Field of Consciousness and Light, and other cosmic principles. These are discussed in great detail in dozens of hours of audio that are in part captured in the 'Out of Your Mind' series.

On the personal level, Watts sought to resolve his feelings of alienation from the institutions of marriage and the values of American society, as revealed in his classic comments on love relationships in "Divine Madness" and on perception of the organism-environment in "The Philosophy of Nature".

In looking at social issues he was quite concerned with the necessity for international peace, for tolerance and understanding among disparate cultures. He also came to feel acutely conscious of a growing ecological predicament; as one instance, in the early 1960s he wrote: "Can any melting or burning imaginable get rid of these ever-rising mountains of ruin—especially when the things we make and build are beginning to look more and more like rubbish even before they are thrown away?"^[24] These concerns were later expressed in a television pilot made for NET filmed at his mountain retreat in 1971 in which he noted that the single track of conscious attention was wholly inadequate for interactions with a multi-tracked world.

He disliked much in the conventional idea of "progress". He hoped for change, but he preferred amiable, semi-isolated rural social enclaves, and also believed in tolerance for social misfits and eccentric artists. Watts decried the suburbanization of the countryside and the way of life that went with it.
In one campus lecture tour, which Watts titled "The End to the Put-Down of Man", Watts presented positive images for both nature and humanity, spoke in favor of the various stages of human development (including the teenage years), reproached excessive cynicism and rivalry, and extolled intelligent creativity, good architecture and food.

Watts felt that absolute morality had nothing to do with the fundamental realization of one's deep spiritual identity. He advocated social rather than personal ethics. In his writings, Watts was increasingly concerned with ethics applied to relations between humanity and the natural environment and between governments and citizens. He wrote out of an appreciation of a racially and culturally diverse social landscape.

He often said that he wished to act as a bridge between the ancient and the modern, between East and West, and between culture and nature.

Watts led some tours for Westerners to the Buddhist temples of Japan. He also studied some movements from the traditional Chinese martial art T'ai chi ch'uan, with an Asian colleague, Al Chung-liang Huang.

In several of his later publications, especially Beyond Theology and The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, Watts put forward a worldview, drawing on Hinduism, Chinese philosophy, panentheism, and modern science, in which he maintains that the whole universe consists of a cosmic self playing hide-and-seek (Lila), hiding from itself (Maya) by becoming all the living and non-living things in the universe, forgetting what it really is; the upshot being that we are all IT in disguise. In this worldview, Watts asserts that our conception of ourselves as an "ego in a bag of skin" is a myth; the entities we call the separate "things" are merely processes of the whole.

Watts's books frequently include discussions reflecting his keen interest in patterns that occur in nature and which are repeated in various ways and at a wide range of scales – including the patterns to be discerned in the history of civilizations

¿Por qué las brujas vuelan en escoba?

¿Por qué las brujas vuelan en escoba? Ciertamente es una pregunta que nos hemos hecho alguna vez al pensar en las clásicas brujas de toda la vida. ¿De dónde viene la leyenda o el mito que les atribuye la capacidad de volar encima de escobas? Y, ¿por qué escobas precisamente?

LA POBREZA EN LA EDAD MEDIA Y RENACIMIENTO

Tenemos que remontarnos a la Europa de la Edad Media y del Renacimiento para averiguar de dónde viene el origen de este mito. En aquella época el pan se hacía normalmente con centeno, aunque era más oscuro y amargo, era más barato que el trigo. Y el centeno, como cualquier otra planta cereal, puede albergar hongos. Estos hongos pueden tener varias etapas de infección dependiendo de la dosis. Si la dosis es alta, puede ser letal. Si la dosis es más pequeña, puede causar alucinaciones.

Estos hongos (que producen la enfermedad del ergotismo) fueron calificados como “fuego del infierno“, donde el cornezuelo es lo que contamina el centeno.

Al ser habitual comer pan con hongos, partimos de la base de un alucinógeno “natural” pero muy poderoso, que provocaba que en el siglo XVII fuese muy normal encontrar a personas en la calle bailando sin ton ni son, diciendo cosas sin sentido e incluso expulsando espuma blanca por la boca, hasta que caían rendidos de agotamiento. Todos estos síntomas, que antiguamente se atribuían a la brujería, no eran sino los efectos secundarios del pan con hongos.

Estos primeros alucinógenos no industriales servirían para los químicos de finales del siglo XIX y principios del XX para comprender los efectos psicodélicos del LSD mientras estudiaban el cornezuelo de centeno. Pero volvamos al Renacimiento.

No fueron pocas las personas que se dedicaron a la investigación de los efectos alucinógenos del cornezuelo de centeno, experimentando también con otras plantas tóxicas como la belladona, la mandrágora o el estramonio.

En el siglo XVI, el médico de la corte española Andrés de Laguna afirmó haber tomado una olla llena de un cierto ungüento verde compuesto de hierbas como la cicuta, el beleño o flor de la muerte o la mandrágora, que se encontraba en la casa de una pareja acusada de brujería.

Pero, por ahora solo tenemos la conexión entre las brujas y las mezclas de plantas alucinógenas.

¿DÓNDE ENCAJAN LAS ESCOBAS EN ESTA ECUACIÓN?

Para lograr estas deseadas alucinaciones no se podía tomar o ingerir el alucinógeno directamente, pues causaba vómitos, diarreas, náuseas e incluso irritación de la piel. Tenían que encontrar un método más sutil de ingestión para evitar estos efectos secundarios. Para ello, tras una serie de pruebas, dieron con que la absorción a través de la piel era la forma más adecuada de tomar esta droga; las áreas más receptivas del cuerpo eran las axilas y las membranas mucosas de los genitales.

Así que ni cortos ni perezosos comienzan la elaboración de ungüentos o pomadas cargadas de estas drogas y su forma de distribución fue la mar de original. Las brujas comienzan a untar las pomadas alucinógenas en el mango de la escoba para luego ponerlo en contacto con sus partes íntimas (recordemos que la ropa interior como la conocemos actualmente no comenzó a usarse hasta el siglo XIX y el modelo de dos piezas femenino hasta el siglo XX). Este rozamiento directo aumentaba el efecto alucinógeno y por eso se decía que la mente volaba.
brujas2

Las brujas usaban las escobas para “volar”

De esta búsqueda de las visiones viene la imagen de una bruja montada encima de una escoba, porque aquí el término “volar” tiene más que ver con el efecto de las drogas y la sensación embriagadora de sentirse ligero, de no sentir el propio cuerpo, que con la literalidad de la palabra.

Pero, ¿esto explica realmente la conexión con las brujas que vuelan en escobas?

Por supuesto, aunque existen más conexiones. Las escobas también tienen que ver con los ritos paganos. La escoba era utilizada como una herramienta que equilibraba ambas energías del ser humano: las energías masculinas (el mango o palo fálico) y las femeninas (las cerdas o fibras de la escoba). Y no en vano, también era utilizada simbólicamente en las ceremonias de matrimonio.

Leer más: ¿Por qué las brujas vuelan en escoba? | LaFlecha http://laflecha.net/por-que-las-brujas-vuelan-en-escoba/#mql6YlPCEQ1jah8X

The spectrum of love

Published on Sep 12, 2012

Been looking for the full lecture for ages, it was also called " The Summer Of Love - The Psychedelic Experience " and that is the file name it had when I got it,however Alan himself at the beginning calls the lecture "The spectrum of love" so that's why I gave it the title. for those of you that patiently waited here is the full thing - enjoy.

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wine good for you?

Is a glass or two of wine a day good for you?  You would think this would be an easy question to answer, but it's not, and that's because of this:
How many glasses of wine are in a bottle?
If you answered 4-5, continue reading.  Because guess what?  Apparently the answer is eight. No, I'm not kidding. Yes, they are serious.  Unplug your monitor and ram it into your skull as hard as you can.

"Doctors don't know.  They pretend to know.  Because they have a rectal thermometer in their pocket.  As if it were an appeal to a higher authority."-- Lewis Black 

It comes down to this: medicine doesn't have all the answers, but in presenting their recommendations it sounds like they do.  And we get confused.
"Two drinks a day."  What's a drink?  Are the health benefits/risks of whisky and wine identical?  Then why lump them together?  And if the answer is, "well, we don't know enough yet" then why are you making recommendations with the authority of medical certainty?
The reason wine's benefits/risks seem confusing is that no one emphasizes the size of a "drink."
A "drink" is often defined as 10g alcohol-- that's 1/8 of a bottle of wine. 
Many reference guides, in an attempt to make things simple to understand (if you're drunk, maybe) use 10g/drink as a standard. There are 750ml in a bottle of wine. If the bottle is 13% alcohol by volume, then there is 98ml alcohol per bottle. Alcohol's specific gravity is .79, so there are 77g alcohol in a bottle.   That means that there are 7-8 "drinks" in a bottle of wine, which, if I may editorialize, is so preposterous as to hardly merit comment.
Similarly, for 5% beer, there is 0.05 x355ml x 0.79= so 14g per 12 oz can.  Is a beer a drink and a half?
Alcohol content varies greatly among wines and beers:
Also, each wine has a different alcohol content-- 12.5% is the typical French ideal, and most wines are built (i.e. alcohol osmotically removed) to stay under 14% because the tariff increases above that.   There is a leeway of 1.5% in the listing, so 12.5% could be 11% or 14%.  That's a 2 "drink"/bottle difference.
In the past few years, and especially with California wines, Syrahs, Zinfandels, places with hot climates, the trend has been towards using higher Brix (sugar content) grapes.  (Riper means more sugar, which means more alcohol.)  About 55% of the sugar ferments to alcohol, and the common 25 Brix grapes convert to a 13.75% wine.  Plus you lose some water in the wine making process, so it may be even higher than that (15%).

To complicate things further, each policy group advocates different safe drinking levels that are nearly incomprehensible to the layman, unless you convert them to some common measure (here, I convert to grams):  The U.S. government says no more than 2 drinks per day-- but that's 14g each.  France says no more than 5  per day-- but it's 12g each.  Britain says 3-4 "units"-- at 8g each!  Do the British know this?  A British study (in Scots) found that people generally pour out two, not one, unit per drink.  It's no wonder people are confused.
A better conversion is this: there is 77g alcohol in a 13% bottle of wine.  That's equivalent to  almost a six pack.  Go.
Blood Alcohol Content: as accurate as a New York Times poll, but you can still go to jail.
Converting to grams as a reference for drinking is useful because it allows you to predict your BAC.  Here is how everyone tells you to calculate it:  If you drink 40g alcohol and weigh 70kg, your BAC will be .05% (40g/70000g).  Or, if you weigh 70kg, every 14g beer will raise your BAC by .02%  Or, every 1/4 bottle of wine raises the level .035%.  Isn't math fun?  I have seen countless "reference tables" using this method.
But the units of BAC are g alcohol/100ml water.  You're not all warer, are you?  You're about... 60% water?  So that 40g alcohol in really in 70kg x .6= 42kg water.  40g alcohol/42000ml water= .09%.  Congrats.  You're drunk.  Sort of.
In practice, those reference tables telling you your estimated BAC already incorporate the Widmark constant-- the percentage body water. It can range from 40-85% water.  The more water you have, the lower will be your BAC.  Women have less water, so their conversion runs lower (40-50%).  Muscle= more water; fat=less water. The problem, obviously, is while BAC calculations use a standard-- for example, my .6, above-- individuals can vary greatly.  Hence, lawyers.
But wait: Breathalyzers. It's measuring the alcohol content of your breath, not blood.  What's the ratio of alcohol in breath to blood?  2400:1?  2100:1?  Generally, breathayzers are calibrated to underread your alcohol level, by about 10%.  So even though most humans run 2400:1, it is calibrated at 2100:1.  But don't try to argue "individual variability" of a breathalyzer in court: 2100:1 is part of the statute, and thus your reading is your sentence.   But remember, liquid to gas transitions are described by Henry's coefficient: heating a substance (e.g. alcohol) puts more in the air (breath); cooling the air (breath) makes the substance stay in liquid (blood).  So before you blow into the machine, hyperventilate and roll in the snow.
The point here is that you-- and guidelines-- cannot predict your BAC based on how many "drinks" you had, because there are so many confounding variables.
Note that BAC doesn't tell you how drunk you are-- tolerance might mean you're an effective Lisp programmer at .1%, or you're beer goggling at .02%. At a given weight, higher percentage body fat= more drunk. Also, food delays absorption. Finally, some people metabolize alcohol faster than others; the old rule "a drink an hour" is based on the assumption that you metabolize 10g alcohol per hour (or your BAC falls by .01%/hr)-- but in you it may be 20g/hr (e.g. a daily drinker), or 5g/hr (e.g. young woman rarely drinks, on Tylenol) etc.

But legal driving limit is usually .08%.  And 50% of the time, .4% is death, so there's that.
Health Benefits of Wine?  Or No? 
So since the term "drink" is uselessly vague, in reviewing the literature on wine and beer's effects, I'll do my best to convert to grams of alcohol.  Just remember that a bottle of wine is 77g, and 12oz 5% beer is 14g.
Cholesterol, triglycerides, coronary artery disease: about half a bottle of wine, but at least 20g/d, raises HDL,;decreases TG, CRP, fibrinogen, and decreases risk of CAD.
Generally, moderate alcohol consumption (say, 30-40g/d) is associated with decreases in mortality.  This is hypothesized to be related to a) its HDL raising effect; b) its reduction of pro-inflammatory proteins CRP and fibrinogen (i.e. it's anti-inflammatory.)
One of the studies, in Nature,  that popularized "moderate consumption" was this: 40g/d (from beer) for men, 30g/d for women, reduced inflammatory markers C-reactive peptide (35%) and fibrinogen (12%),  increased HDL (10%), with no change in TG or liver enzymes.  after 3 weeks of drinking.   The study called this "four glasses" but a better way of understanding it is three beer cans or  half a bottle of wine.  Also: BAC 1 hour after drinks was 10mmol/l.  Yes, mmol.  Sigh.  46g/mol: BAL .046%
A prospective study confirmed the "well-known" relationship between alcohol consumption and HDL, which rose from 40 to 50 with >30g/d alcohol.
A German study of 7000+ people found HDL rose, and fibrinogen decreased,  for women who drank 10-20g/d and men >30g/d.
A Danish study found an interesting relationship: women who drank at least once per week had lower risk of CAD than abstainers; but drinking more often did not promote the effect.  But for men, daily drinking (more than less frequent drinking) was associated with the lowest risk.

Oxidative Stress: doesn't ethanol cause lipid peroxidation (free radicals?) Answer:  you're not drinking ethanol, you're drinking wine--which probably increases antioxidant capacity. 
This is how you get plaques: free radicals in your diet (e.g. cooked fat) promote LDL oxidation, which goes on to promote arterial plaque formation.  Free radical scavengers, such as Vitamin E, would lessen this effect-- but are consequently reduced.  Importantly, the LDL from a meal is more susceptible to oxidation than normally circulating (fasting) LDL.
Alcohol promotes oxidation in test tubes.  So why wouldn't it do so in people?  For example, a careful study controlled for many confounding variables that are associated with high or low alcohol intake-- such as smoking, vitamins, exercise, etc-- and found that the more alcohol consumed, the higher the oxidized LDL, with no change in HDL.  Where did the protective effect go?  One possibility jumps to mind: median consumption was 6g/d; and the above studies found the relationship with the higher "doses."  And you need to be a regular drinker: 96 hours after a single dose of wine there was no effect on LDL. Surely I've made this up?  No: 300ml red wine (better than 300ml white wine) inhibited oxidation (e.g. LDL oxidation).  The likely explanation is that even though alcohol can cause oxidative stress, wine-- and it's constituents (polyphenols, resveratrol, etc) may overwhelm this effect.  But you have to drink enough (>300ml) so that it overwhelms alcohol's effects (but not so much your wife leaves you.)
Additionally, wine's beneficial effects in preventing oxidative stress may be enhanced when you have more oxidative stress to begin with.  Take the easy case of eating a fatty meal.  The LDLs that result from this meal are  more likely to be oxidized than the normal  fasting LDLs  in circulation.  Drinking 400ml of wine with a meal made these post-meal LDLs more resistant to oxidation than even the existing LDL, and maintained the Vitamin E levels.  And in case you're a rat, in rats who were force fed a high cholesterol diet, wine reduced the cholesterol levels and improved antioxidant parameters. 
Not just meal related oxidative stress: 1/3 bottle of red wine a day for two months in people who just had angioplasty substantially increased antioxidant reactivity and decreased oxidative damage.  There is a logic to this: the lower your CRP, the better is your natural antioxidant capacity, and wine lowers CRP proportionally more if it is already high.  A glass of wine (or one espresso- how do you like that!)  was equivalent to an orange or 200g spinach in antioxidant capacity.

Homocysteine (which causes coronary plaques)?   Maybe it goes up a little, but that might not matter, especially if you're drinking wine.
42 men got to drink half a bottle of WHITE wine a day for a month: lower oxidation products (and coincident increase in free radical scavengers and HDL), but also increased homocysteine. 
A prospective study found that after 6 weeks of 30g/day of wine/beer/spirits, homocysteine levels were higher than in controls.  Folate levels were also lower (except in beer-- because beer has about 30ug folate/beer and0.1ug vitamin B6/beer.)  Folate and B12 are cofactors in the conversion (methylation) of homocysteine which is then broken down (sulphyrated) with vitamin B6 as a cofactor; so low folate/B12= high homocysteine.  Similarly, in chronic alcoholics homocysteine was much higher-- but less so with beer.
And again, but with 40g/d drinking wine and spirits for three weeks, homocysteine went up 9%.  Beer had no effect.  But B6 went up with all drinks (more with beer).  Not only does B6 facilitate homocysteine degradation, it is also an independent inverse risk factor for cardiovascular disease.
But perhaps amounts are relevant: in another prospective study, 1/2 bottle/d of red wine for two weeks had no effect on homocysteine, while doing the expected increase of HDL and antioxidant capacity.
A study using pig coronary arteries found that while homcysteine impaired endothelial cell relaxation, red wine negated this adverse effect. 
It appears that homocysteine goes up, but that doesn't translate to any increased cardiovascular risk because of some beneficial effects of the wine, which may include B6, antioxidants, increased HDL and increased antioxidant capacity.
Blood Pressure?  Answer: No serious effect below a bottle of wine a day. 
German study (above) finds <80g/d associated with <2 mmHg increase; >80g/d associated with  4-6mm Hg increases.  American Idol makes mine go up more.

Much of the negative data on blood pressure is perplexingly inaccurate. By "perpelxingly" I mean that the errors could not have simply been oversights, could they?  People are lumped together, as are quantities and types of alcohol, giving misleading results.  For example, in an article entitled, "Alcohol is Bad For Blood Pressure"-- seriously, that's the title of the scientific article-- the authors state:

Since then, large-scale prospective studies from Japan (6) and the US(7) have indicated that the risk of hypertension increases twofold with alcohol intake of 30–50 g/day or more. 

Hmm.  "Increases twofold."  I'm not sure what article they read, but reference 7 pretty clearly says the opposite:

Our principal finding was the association between the consumption of low to moderate amounts of ethanol (up to 3 drinks per day) and either the incidence of hypertension or increase in blood pressure levels in blacks. In white men, there was no evidence of an increase in systolic or diastolic blood pressure over time at this level of consumption. Similarly, for most beverages, a low to moderate intake of alcohol was not associated with a higher incidence of hypertension in white men and with an increased incidence in black men.

And later:

the observation that low amounts of alcohol intake may not increase blood pressure in most race-gender strata could lead to a more tolerant view of the consumption of alcohol in small amounts...

Black men who drank heavily had double the incidence of hypertension (defined as a jump to > 140/90): 15% vs. to 30% in drinkers.  But I should add that the risk was relevant only in black men who drank beer or spirits; only 8 out of 250+ drank any wine at all.
Thus, blood pressure is minimally affected by wine, and even beer or spirits, if other variables are controlled.  There is a negative effect of beer and spirits in blacks that needs to be explored, as does the effect of wine in blacks.

Pancreatitic disease: How many drinks before you're in trouble? Answer: >30% of your daily calories from alcohol if you poor nutrition; or  >1 bottle wine/day for 25 years, especially if you eat like a pig.   Smoking=death.  (But you knew that.)
You'd be amazed at how hard this simple question was to answer.
As an aside, almost every study done in 2005-2007 on alcohol and pancreatic disease was done in Japan or China.  I'm sure there's a reason for this, but for the life of me I can't tell you what it is.  And if someone is able to explain to me how the Japanese and Chinese physiologies are generalizable to everyone, I'd like to hear it; but that's what happens.
The main problem with the studies is that risks of pancreatitis are associated with an arbitrary cut off that does not reflect the actual toxicity of alcohol.  For example, a study found that >2 drinks/d, compared to <2 drinks/d, was significantly associated with pancreatic necrosis.  So we're all going to die? The problem is that this association was either/or, not calibrated to amount.  For example, what if those who had the necrosis all drank more than 10drinks/d?  It would still be true that the risk was higher at >2 drinks/d.  So why 2/d as the cutoff? "The cutoff of two drinks per day was selected based on animal studies which have shown that the equivalent consumption of two drinks per day in rats results in measurable change in pancreatic histology and physiology(13)."  So, of course, I looked up (13): in rats who received 12%, and worse with 36% of their calories from alcohol increased pancreatic protein hypersecretion, starting the road to pancreatitis.  If you eat 2000 calories a day, then this would be equivalent to a little more than 1 bottle of wine/d.
A Japanese study found that the traditional rates of pancreatitis among alcoholics-- 2-5%-- may be low: they find that  9-17% of people who drank >150g alcohol/d developed alcoholic pancreatitis.  The alcoholic pancreatitis patients began drinking at a younger age (18), drank for 20 years) and drank 180g/d alcohol.  Additionally, they cite other studies where meat and lipid may be co-factors.
An interesting study found the risk of acute pancreatitis may be increased in the first day of withdrawal of drinking; these drinkers had drank an average of 700g/week (400-900g), and 3600/two months.  Alcohol suppresses inflammation, so this may be a rebound inflammatory response.
A Chinese study found that smoking, high meat and heavy drinking was associated with pancreatic cancer.  Heavy drinking was ">20 cup-years;" basically, 11g/d for 20 years, or 22 g/d for 10 years, etc.  The article did not address the hihger rates od ALDH2*2 allele of aldehyde dehydrogenase in the Chinese, which slows the metabolism of aldehyde (and allows it to build up-- see below.)
Another Japanese study (come on) found risk increased 10 fold for >100g/d, and >30 years of drinking.
Alcohol alone is not a risk factor for pancreatic ductal adenocarcimona, which is most closely associated with smoking.  Alcohol may indice pancreatitis and diabetes, which are themselves risk factors.  Also, acetaldehyde, an intermediary metabolite of alcohol which is ordinarily quickly metabolized to acetic acid, is procarcinogenic;  heavy drinkers with cancer, vs. alcoholics without cancer, had higher salivary aldehyde levels due to fast metabolism of alcohol to aldehyde. (I SPECULATE that binge drinking, and frequent exposure to acetaldehyde (read: hangovers) is more dangerous than low but daily drinking.)
Finally, you should know that many studies describing the risks of alcohol are not able to control well for smoking, which is a major risk factor.  Consider that 60% of chronic pancreatitis cases are smokers; but 80% of alcoholic chronic pancreatitis cases are smokers. And high BMI is a risk.
Diet and alcohol: in animal models of alcohol induced pancreatic disease, & calories due to alcohol is the measure.  For example, one mouse model uses 24%, and the mice had BAL 100mM (.46%). Most animal modesl use about 30%.  One study disputed the high protein/high fat risk of pancreatitis by finding that humans with pancreatic or liver disease took 50% of their calories as alcohol, and the worst cases had the highest percentage intake. A study in Mexico found high overall caloric intake (4110 vs. 2250 in healthy controls)  was the risk factor, but dividing the average daily alcohol (124g=868 cal) by calories (4110) gives you 21% calories from alcohol.
The type of alcohol here is not described. Was it red wine?  Vodka?  Beer?  You decide.

So there are two prongs: high caloric intake, especially from fats and protein, and consequent high BMI, along with alcohol (>100g/d, conservatively;) or poor nutritional intake with higher proportion of alcohol calories (>30%).  With both, smoking is a profound risk factor, especially for cancer.
Stop smoking.

Resveratrol:
Resveratrol (a type of estrogen (DES)) is a polyphenol contained in wine (and fruits, grapes, etc.,)  that is itself anti-inflammatory and antithrombogenic (it's a COX1-- COX2?-- inhibitor), as well as possibly being neuroprotective. It probably is an anti-flu drug. It can possibly prolong life span through SIRT1 (which is how calorie restriction prolongs life.)    Resveratrol is one possible explanation for why the French can eat fried butter sandwiches with a bottle of wine and still tell their grandkids about it.
There is no accepted dose.  A bottle of red contains about 1mg, unless you're drinking muscadine wine (Florida grapes, some ports, etc.) It appears to have no toxicities.
I bring it up here only to tell you that as much as I think resveratrol is super and all, it oxidizes very quickly after the bottle is opened.  So drink fast.
Calories:
There are 7 calories/gram alcohol.  So each bottle of wine has about 550 calories.  Each light beer is 110 calories.  There are about 50 calories in a shot of whisky.
Summary And Conclusions: 
Disclaimer: I'm not recommending anything to anyone, I'm not your doctor, results may vary, substantial penalty for early withdrawal (HA!).  Don't drink if you have GI disease.  Or if you drive.  Or if you're on medications.  Or if you're an idiot.  Especially if you're an idiot.
But it appears to me that 30-40g (1/3- 1/2 bottle) of wine alcohol a day is fine.  Enjoy it.  (Unfortunately, I'm a whisky guy.)  It seems to work best if you drink it with food.  Everyone else should just mellow the hell out.  This unprioritized rigidity, this obsession, with "health" and "prevention" is idiotic and counterproductive.  Today I cooked my family bacon and eggs.  BACON.  Take that, AMA's beliefs.
Some caveats:  most of the association studies, above, do their best to control for confounding factors, but sometimes this is impossible.  As a basic generalization, the person who drinks 1/2 bottle wine with dinner is likely to have a very different life than one who drinks 4 beers/day after work, notwithstanding the obvious confounding variable of alcohol with/without food.  So it may be impossible to say that wine, itself, is what is beneficial.
Despite this-- and why this is relevant to a psychiatry blog-- the error is to assume that one is "the type of person who drinks wine, and so would have lower risks" vs. "the type of person who drinks beers, and so would have higher risks."   It may be more accurate to consider that if one chooses to become the person who drinks wine with dinner instead of beer after work, a variety of other factors may also change.  As a simple example: beer at a bar is conducive to smoking, wine at home isn't.  Beer after work every day may be sabotaging your family life; a choice to switch to wine at dinner may improve things at home.  &c., &c.
This is important.  It is the thesis of this blog: nothing matters more than your will.  Even if wine and beer are themselves of no consequence to one's health, the lifestyle that follows with the conscious choice to drink either one is of consequence.  Every choice you make influences your identity, and not the other way around; the sooner you accept this, the sooner you can become the person you want to be. You get to pick who you are.  Go pick. 

(State laws prevent me from receiving donations of wine (or whisky.)  My drink is Balvenie 15 year.  It's about $65. Just saying.)

420 (cannabis culture)

420, 4:20, or 4/20 (pronounced four-twenty) is a code-term used primarily in North America that refers to the consumption of cannabis and by extension, as a way to identify oneself with cannabis subculture or simply cannabis itself. Observances based on the number 420 include smoking cannabis around the time 4:20 p.m. (with some sources also indicating 4:20 a.m.^[1][2]), on any given day, as well as smoking cannabis on the date April 20 (4/20 in American form).^[3]

A widely discussed story says that a group of teenagers in San Rafael, California,^[4][5] calling themselves the Waldos,^[6] because, "their chosen hang-out spot was a wall outside the school",^[7] used the term in connection with a fall 1971 plan to search for an abandoned cannabis crop that they had learned about.^[6][8] The Waldos designated the Louis Pasteur statue on the grounds of San Rafael High School as their meeting place, and 4:20 p.m. as their meeting time.^[7] The Waldos referred to this plan with the phrase "4:20 Louis". Multiple failed attempts to find the crop eventually shortened their phrase to simply "4:20", which ultimately evolved into a codeword that the teens used to mean pot-smoking in general.^[8] Mike Edison says that Steve Hager of High Times was responsible for taking the story about the Waldos to "mind-boggling, cult like extremes" and "suppressing" all other stories about the origin of the term.^[9]
Hager wrote "Stoner Smart or Stoner Stupid?" in which he called for 4:20 p.m. to be the socially accepted hour of the day to consume cannabis.^[10] He attributes the early spread of the phrase to Grateful Dead followers, who were also linked to the city of San Rafael.^[10]

April 20 has become a counterculture holiday in North America, where people gather to celebrate and consume cannabis.^[2][3] Some events have a political nature to them, advocating for the legalization of cannabis. North American observances have been held in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park near the Haight-Ashbury district,^[11] the University of Colorado's Boulder campus,^[5][12][13] Ottawa, Ontario, at Parliament Hill and Major's Hill Park,^[14][15] Montréal, Québec at Mount Royal monument,^[16][17] Edmonton, Alberta at the Alberta Legislature Building,^[18] as well as Vancouver, British Columbia at the Vancouver Art Gallery.^[19] The growing size of the unofficial event at UC Santa Cruz caused the Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs to send an e-mail to parents in 2009 stating: "The growth in scale of this activity has become a concern for both the university and surrounding community."^[20]
Events have also occurred in Auckland, New Zealand at the Daktory.^{[21][unreliable source?]} and Dunedin, New Zealand, at University of Otago.^{[22][23][24][25][26][27]}