An article in Australia’s Shepparton News set me thinking. It began:
It’s good it’s hard for smokers
by BARCLAY WHITE AUGUST 05, 2017
This week life got a little bit harder for one of the most maligned groups in our society — and I say ‘good’.
Smokers in Victoria are now banned from lighting up at outdoor areas at cafes and restaurants where food is served.
What a nasty piece of work Barclay White is, that he should wish ill on so many of his fellow Australians! In the article he goes on to rain abuse on “entitled” smokers. He ends his piece:
I say the smoking bans do not go quite far enough.
If people want to spend a stupid amount of money on a bad habit, let them do it, but why should they be able to light up in public?
If I never smell another cigarette that will be just fine with me, and I’m sure that will be okay with the vast majority of us who don’t light up.
So he wants to malign some of his fellow Australians even more than they are already maligned. He wants life to be even harder for them.
I wondered who he was.
The photo in his profile showed a flaccid, pasty-faced man:
I looked at a few of his recent articles. The most recent one was about gay marriage. He seemed not to want to further malign another maligned social group. He didn’t say that they had a bad habit. He didn’t say that if he never saw another poofta again it would be fine with him.
Other articles by him were about murders and drugs. He didn’t seem to want to further malign the maligned social group of drug users. He didn’t say they had a bad habit.
There was an approving article about someone stopping drinking for Dry July. But also a not disapproving article about a winery.
He didn’t seem to malign anybody else at all. He reserved all his bile for smokers.
And he’s a coffee addict. I thought it was a joke, but he meant it.
My name is Barclay White and I am a coffee addict.
Each morning when I wake up I probably drive my housemates mad with the noise when I crank up my increasingly noisy, but oh so lovely, coffee machine.
The bizarre contraption cost me close to $500, but to me it is money very well spent.
When I get out of bed the first thing I do is grind some coffee beans, heat the coffee contraption up and get ready to pour myself a sweet cup of caffeinated magic, otherwise known as a flat white.
I don’t take drugs, I am not a heavy drinker, but when it comes to caffeine I will admit I am hopelessly and pathetically hooked…
…after my addiction had taken hold, I decided to try going cold turkey.
That meant no coffee shop coffee, no iced coffee, no instant and, to prevent myself from going to a caffeinated alternative, no cola, tea or chocolate.
I quickly learned what trying to quit a drug addiction was like as I went through full-blown withdrawal symptoms.
I had splitting headaches, could not concentrate and could not sleep. Basically I just felt like there was something missing for me to feel complete.
Caffeine might be legal, but kicking it is a challenge, just like kicking any drug
Perhaps that’s why he has such contempt for smokers: they’re addicts just like he is. And they stink the place out just like he does with his coffee.
I have given up any hope that I will ever kick the demon bean for good, but when I smell those ground beans in the morning, I feel like I have made the right choice.
Perhaps the contempt that antismokers have for smokers is just the contempt that they have for themselves.
Frank Davis 
Well, we’re all sugar addicts now you know. On telly last night, I head a presenter refer to sugar as a stimulant. I kid you not….
:o)
Well spotted Frank! The general outpouring of support for the latest ridiculous healthist smoking bans in Victoria, worst nanny state in Australia, the worst bully state, has been akin to government sanctioned vigilantism.
Bullies seem yet more empowered to confront total strangers smoking while ‘exiled to the outdoors’, although the neurotics who cover their faces and/or emit pretend strangled coughs on the mere sight of a tobacco product are more numerous.
Predictably, the anti freedom brainwashed virtue signalling politicians have again cloaked themselves in the sanctimonious garb of saviours while announcing such additional baseless persecution.
I have attempted to introduce some missing balance by commenting at those Australian news sites which have that option. My online publication success rate is NIL (after all, don’t be silly, or a Big Tobacco lobbyist – everyone KNOWS the merest whiff of dilute tobacco smoke, even outdoors, has immediate and permanent adverse health effects!!).
It’s regrettable but probable that this latest regulatory intrusion is yet more evidence that the disrespect for authority and claimed ‘larrikinism’ of Australians has been replaced by passive acquiescence to every meddling encroachment of omniscient government, whether federal, state or local.
“It’s regrettable but probable that this latest regulatory intrusion is yet more evidence that the disrespect for authority and claimed ‘larrikinism’ of Australians has been replaced by passive acquiescence to every meddling encroachment of omniscient government, whether federal, state or local.”
Sadly, I think you speak the truth.
Yes, as one who spent most of the ’70s living and working in the freewheeling, live-and-let-live Australia that pertained during those years, It was a great place to live, if somewhat culturally isolated. Every new trend seemed to arrive in Aus some 6 months later that it did everywhere else. It seems that some bright spark wanted Australia to be a ‘World Leader’ in something, and unfortunately decided that lifestyle control was to be the candidate.
I can only look on in horror at what has happened in the few short years since my tenure there. I wouldn’t have believed it possible that the ‘can-do’ attitude that epitomised Australia back then could have been so comprehensively erased..
I’d’ve thought the same of New York City, but lo!
Margo, I answered you @ yesterday
The passive attitude is contributed to by a misplaced belief that government is best placed to solve all problems. This ignores the Iron Law of govt and bureaucracy, namely that the heavy handed govt cure is almost invariably worse than the illness. Australians have forfeited personal responsibility in favour of the micromanaging paternalistic welfare state, bribing citizens to remain in office with public funds. Apparently over 122 benefits, payments and allowances are offered in Australia, and that’s just by the federal government. This in turn requires armies of public servants to administer and regulate welfare state payments, paying them back to some of the people who were initially highly taxed. Such churn is essentially inefficient. Recipients have rights, the right to OBEY! 😐
Profound and probably very true.
The Barclay White pic would make a nice dartboard Frank.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4755276/Restaurants-stop-serving-meals-people-smoke.html
“after my addiction had taken hold, I decided to try going cold turkey.
That meant no coffee shop coffee, no iced coffee, no instant and, to prevent myself from going to a caffeinated alternative, no cola, tea or chocolate.
I quickly learned what trying to quit a drug addiction was like as I went through full-blown withdrawal symptoms.
I had splitting headaches, could not concentrate and could not sleep. Basically I just felt like there was something missing for me to feel complete.
Caffeine might be legal, but kicking it is a challenge, just like kicking any drug”
Man’s an idiot, all he did was deprive himself of his customary dose of niacin..
I did a month on Decaff when my coffee intake was questioned, I still drank the same amount of coffee and suffered no ill effects.
Still, point him in the wrong direction and watch him go, as with his imaginary “addiction” to Caffeine.
“I had splitting headaches, could not concentrate and could not sleep”
I don’t doubt it.
Vitamin B3: Deficiency Symptoms
“A mild deficiency of vitamin B3 causes symptoms such as a coated tongue, mouth sores, low blood sugar, dizziness, and chronic headaches. Other possible symptoms of mild vitamin B3 deficiency are skin lesions, anemia, and diarrhea. ” Forgetfulness, insomnia, irritability, and nervousness are psychological symptoms of vitamin B3 deficiency.”
http://www.newsmax.com/FastFeatures/health01-Vitamin-B3-Deficiency/2011/02/23/id/387137/
Gosh this is easy, I may have missed my vocation.
Very interesting, I never knew that coffee was high in niacin. I have heard many coworkers moaning about the addictive nature of coffee and how they get blinding headaches when they try to “quit” it, and how that proves how terrible it is for you.
I was late for tobacco, Emily, so I was determined to be early for all the other things I enjoy if they come under attack.
Like nicotine, trigonelline in coffee is another pyridine alkaloid which degrades to niacin/nicotinic acid when burnt or roasted.
“Interestingly, coffee has been found to contain a significant amount of niacin – providing 10-40mg of niacin/100g of coffee and far exceeding the daily recommended dosage.”
https://www.coffeechemistry.com/chemistry/alkaloids/trigonelline-in-coffee
Basic Chemical Reactions Occurring in the Roasting Process
“The best cup characteristic are produced when the ratio of the degradation of trigonelline to the derivation of Nicotinic Acid remains linear. The control model of this reaction ratio is a time/temperature/energy relationship. The environment temperature (ET) establishes the pyrolysis region for the desired chemical reactions while the energy value (BTU) and system transfer efficiency (STE) determines the rate of reaction propagation and linearity of Nicotinic Acid derivation to degradation of trigonelline”
https://web.archive.org/web/20130706113129/http://www.sweetmarias.com:80/roast.carlstaub.html
Man’s an idiot, all he did was deprive himself of his customary dose of niacin..
I did a month on Decaff when my coffee intake was questioned, I still drank the same amount of coffee and suffered no ill effects
I can confirm your experience, Rose, and add that a cup of coffee before bed time does not interfere with my sleep. Mother nature and work started doing that quite a while ago but since I remedied the latter and allowed mother nature to calm down by herself, my sleep is fine, despite a cup of coffee/tea before I go upstairs.
Man’s an idiot
He looks very young and has been conditioned to accept any amount of idiot drizzle rained down on him. He can’t be overly bright, though. Bright people usually have a lot of questions, he hasn’t got any by the looks of it. He just has an opinion and perhaps banks on Deborah Arnott et al “helping him into a job with loads of cash” by doing the yuppie-style arse crawling?
There’s niacin in Marmite.
How much? Sorry, I avoid that stuff, tastes awful.
I very occasionally have an urge to eat a little bit of marmite very thinly spread on a piece of bread with a lot of butter. Dilution helps the flavour tremendously.
Sorry I’ve been out of touch, several days of forced abstinence from coffee & tobacco, and since B vitamins are water soluble, needed daily… maybe I’m behind;- I’ve certainly felt the deleterious symptoms… and even the Marmite jar is empty!
But I can quote from its label:
Niacin (per 5g serve) 2.5mg (25% RDI recommended daily intake)
And all the rest ( a few only B vitamins). Maybe I should scan the label.
But likely online.
You only want a thin smear, maybe 1/2 a teaspoon or at most a whole one, across well buttered toast, I think, else it’ll be too strong in taste…
Like soy sauce, (best Japanese) just a little is enough…
There is indeed.
Marmite: the latest superfood?
2012
“According to research in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, high doses of niacin (or vitamin B3), one of the main ingredients in Marmite, help boost the body’s defences against staphylococcus bacteria. In tests, concentrated niacin – which produces neutrophils, a white blood cell that fights bacteria – increased our immune system’s ability to kill different strains of the bugs by up to 1,000 times.”
“First produced in Burton-on-Trent in Staffordshire in 1902, Marmite contains concentrated brewer’s yeast, salt, spices and celery. Due to its high nutritional value, it was part of soldiers’ ration packs during the First World War, and in the Thirties, English scientist Lucy Wills found that the folic acid in Marmite could be used to treat anaemia. Its high vitamin B content also reportedly makes the spread an effective mosquito repellent.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/9504293/Marmite-the-latest-superfood.html
It was briefly banned in Denmark.
Denmark bans Marmite
2011
“Yeast extract spread falls foul of Danish law restricting products fortified with added vitamins, joining Horlicks, Ovaltine and Farley’s Rusks”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/may/24/denmark-bans-marmite
I love Marmite. I always keep some, to spread on bread or biscuits. I occasionally use it in cooking too.
At school many years ago us schoolboys used to buy a little jar of it, and dip our fingers in it, and lick off the Marmite. We could get through an entire jar in an afternoon.
If America gave the world tobacco, England gave it Marmite.
Ok, totally off topic here, but does anyone know anything about the SMOKERS CLUB site? I came across it by chance last week. The odd thing is, it’s a blog site, with 353 pages of posts, and all the posts are dated July 5 2017 apart from the last post, which is dated July 6 2017. I left a comment on the last post, which went into moderation and hasn’t appeared since.
It’s most peculiar, because having glanced at it, there are hundreds of interesting snippets of info contained therein, but it appears to be abandoned.
Yes, Nisa, very odd. I’ve never heard of it before but, as you say, there are hundreds of (mostly positive) reports about smoking bans (failed) and health scares (false). It looks as if someone has gone to a lot of trouble to collect them all together and has then loaded them all up onto that site in one go – perhaps to make them available to anyone who wants to refer to them, but either doesn’t know where to look or hasn’t the time to do so, and before they all get quietly deleted from their original places. It’s the kind of thing that some of the folks on here might be inclined to do (it has, in fact, all the hallmarks of the late lamented Harley!), but you’d have thought that if it was anyone who regularly visited this or any similar blogs, they’d have directed the rest of us to it! So it’s most likely someone else. Very curious indeed. I shall keep an eye on it for any further additions ….
Jax, Samantha Philippe ran the Club weekly newsletter and site for about fifteen years until she passed away several years ago from a brain aneurysm. About a year after she passed, the whole enormous resource of materials became inaccessible and we’ve never been able to access it in any way except through the Wayback Machine (archive.org) since then.
See my other posting on this just below for update!
I hadn’t come across the website before either. So I did a bit of digging on the wayback machine and discovered that it had been running in various guises since 2004. You are quite correct in seeing Harley’s influence on the site. Up until about 2014 they had forums of which Harley was a moderator. In fact I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it was Harley’s domain originally. The domain is currently registered with godaddy who have a reputation for registration obfuscation. However, the name of the domain owner seems typically Harley and one of his pseudonyms
I’m now in touch with the blogmeister (Thanks to YOU for alerting me to the new activity!) and am waiting to hear back from him on an email.
Will report what I learn!
:)
MJM
I believe you nailed it on the head, Frank: Barclay White is very insecure and self-loathing.
Like many people seem to do these days, White has projected his inadequacies onto the one habit he gets the most pleasure from: coffee. He has been conditioned to believe that pleasure is a weakness, a “vice.” He believes that by depriving himself of coffee and torturing himself he is somehow making himself a stronger and “better” person.
These types of people are prototypical virulent antismokers because smoking is a highly visible act of pleasure, and they are deeply jealous of others who continue to willingly partake in a pleasurable habits. They want everyone to be as miserable as they have chosen to be.
Add to that that smoking is a highly visible act of sociability and “inclusion”. That’s what really triggers them.
I also tried to make a comment but it remains in pending status after three days. Anyway, Mr. White appears to be a rampant narcissist that enjoys hating smokers and feels it’s his place to spread the persecution of smokers though sharing his vile obsession.
I agree. Barclay White is a textbook narcissist. Narcissism manifests as a defense mechanism of sorts to overcompensate for one’s self-consciousness and insecurities.
Narcissists’ Overconfidence May Hide Low Self-Esteem
There was an approving article about someone stopping drinking for Dry July.
Dry July? Another Stoptober???
Is this similar to CROOK’s money spin a couple or so years ago? People signed up for a month with no alcohol. But they didn’t need to do that, they just had to pay CRUK £20 if they wanted a night off…..
My name is Barclay White and I am a coffee addict.
Each morning when I wake up I probably drive my housemates mad with the noise when I crank up my increasingly noisy, but oh so lovely, coffee machine.
The bizarre contraption cost me close to $500, but to me it is money very well spent.
When I get out of bed the first thing I do is grind some coffee beans, heat the coffee contraption up and get ready to pour myself a sweet cup of caffeinated magic, otherwise known as a flat white.
I bet he wouldn’t notice if his coffee was swapped for decaf. What the hell is “flat white”? Sorry, but this guy reminds me of another German anti-smoker back in 2010. The anti-smoking brigade used him as their trumpet and he, for once, saw a career in politics. There was not much else he could do, he never got past the first 2 semesters of university. Never heard of him again, so I suppose he failed at that, too.
I don’t take drugs, I am not a heavy drinker, but when it comes to caffeine I will admit I am hopelessly and pathetically hooked…
…after my addiction had taken hold, I decided to try going cold turkey.
That meant no coffee shop coffee, no iced coffee, no instant and, to prevent myself from going to a caffeinated alternative, no cola, tea or chocolate.
I quickly learned what trying to quit a drug addiction was like as I went through full-blown withdrawal symptoms.
Sorry, but this guy is clueless. “Drug addiction” ……. “Withdrawal symptoms” …..
Perhaps he will discover he has a tv/internet/sports etc. addiction when he changes his routine?
People like that are the Tobacco Control fodder; they must be either megalomaniacs or full of complexes and have never learned to deal with “FAIL” in their (?pitiful little) lives.
I’ve often thought that photos of the arch anti-smokers– Stan Glantz, John Banzaf, former US Congressman Henry Waxman, former FDA head David Kessler, your Arnott and guys like the cool Mr White, along with a caption “Be like us. Don’t smoke” would be the best propaganda smokers could come up with.
Bring it on!
I just found this great and semi-prophetic quote from the 1995 book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by the late scientist, Carl Sagan:
I believe the sentences that precede and follow the quote in the image above are equally as powerful and important, so I have included them below:
Wow!
In other news, they are trying to impose an indoor smoking bans for bars and casinos in Baton Rouge again (third time with the past couple of years). The antismokers are plying there usual propaganda and bullying tactics. If you get a chance take a look: “Smoke-free EBR unveils new study ahead of council vote” https://www.businessreport.com/article/smoke-free-ebr-unveils-new-study-ahead-council-vote (EBR means East Baton Rouge, Louisiana).
NYC full city council votes tomorrow (we just learned, last minute) on a whole series of punch-the-smoker (and vaper!) bills. This is the upshot of the hearing that I posted about here in April. I c/p’d the whole list of bills over at Clash if you’re interested:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/111253694071/#_=_
Jesus! This is terrible. One is worse than the next. And how in the world are they planning on cutting the number of tobacco retailers in half?
Self-loathing in Victoria. What a boring guy.
slugbop007
I guess that he doesn’t know that there is nicotinic acid in coffee. Poor, dumb Aussie.
https://books.google.ca/books?id=oI6LtxfEKkwC&pg=PA129&lpg=PA129&dq=coffee+nicotinic+acid&source=bl&ots=CnXpHIPRnx&sig=q8JFdLF2ZDCSvrD_EsdQNYMWtaQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjl7fGFnsrVAhUK1oMKHc3kDaUQ6AEIUTAG#v=onepage&q=coffee%20nicotinic%20acid&f=false
slugbop007
Sad, isn’t it?
In these miserablist days people should take a lot more interest in the things they like so as not to be put off them for no good reason.
Instinct is a wonderful thing, but sadly not enough these days.