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!["Tell us this isn't true." "They had a live being out [near Area 51]." "There were human experiments that went on." 👽🛸 Roswell: A Non-Human Craft or a Darker Secret? 🤫😶 (Transcript is shorter than clip. I don't have room to type more in this post so I'll just wait for replies.) ~ Lex Fridman: "In your book on 'Area 51,' you propose an explanation that I think some people have criticized, at the very end. That this might have been a disinformation campaign from, I guess, Stalin, that the Roswell incident was a remotely-piloted plane with a quote 'grotesque, child-sized aviator.' Just looking back at all that now, years later, what's the probability that it's true? What's the probability it's not?" Annie Jacobsen: (AJ): "So, you know, I've never revealed who that source is." Lex: "Yes." AJ: "You know that? Want me to tell you?" Lex: "Okay, who was the source?" AJ: "So, before I say anything on that, let me speak to the question that you asked, right? So, you asked me, 'What's the probability that that is still standing as an idea, 12, 13, 14 years later,' right? So, I continued to work with that source for years, afterwards. We talked about this. Look, I mean, his whole family knew it was him. And I knew his family because I was an integral part of, you know, I was at his house, met all his kids, grandkids." Lex: "And we should say, the source is the main expert advisor behind the story that it was. Maybe you can explain what the story is that your report in the book, that it was a disinformation campaign created by Stalin to cause mass hysteria in the United States. The very kind that we've been speaking about with the CIA and so on." AJ: "Yes! Predicated on the narrative of the 'War of the Worlds,' right? And the 'War of the Worlds,' when it was a radio program in the United States, made people go crazy. 'Oh, my God, we're being invaded by aliens!' Well, the government was always interested in the story and Joseph Stalin was, too. We know that from declassified documents, right? "And so, the source told me that the reason for this program, and that the real Roswell crash remains, were in fact, it was a black-propaganda hoax infiltrated, you know, or rather, predicated at this idea that you were gonna overwhelm America's early-warning, air-defense system, cause mayhem and maybe be able to attack the United States. That was the plan. And Stalin was also messing with the United States, messing with Truman, who sort of, you know, turned his back on him, right? At Potsdam. "And so, this idea, and the reason that the source is important... And unlike, you know, a lot of people, 'I saw this, I saw that, I learned that.' Was, according to the source, once it was determined that this was a hoax and that Stalin was able to get a craft over the United States, and it crashed. And it had, you know, people inside of it, they were people that were sort of deformed and meant...surgically altered to look like aliens. "The United States government decided that it needed to know what on earth that was all about, and if it was possible for us to have the same program. This, according to this source, right? And so, it sounds preposterous, and if it was just someone saying, 'I...,' you might say, 'Well, it's ridiculous, get them onto another subject.' But, the difference was, is this source, who was very well placed, and friends with all of the other 75 people, you know, told me this as a confession, right? A real, tearful confession, because what he said is he was involved in the American program to do the same thing. And people died, because there were human experiments that went on." "And I write about this in the last 12 pages of 'Area 51.' It was an explosive, you know, revelation, and I felt very confident in writing this because the source wanted it written. Why? Because he said, 'I'm dedicated to my country. I know about being committed to national security, and this kind of thing must never happen. And if you give people too much power, they will take advantage of it.' And he wanted it on the record. "And his wife of 60 years did not know until after the book published. Nor did His children, okay? So, after the book published, I was called to his house and sat there with his family. And they said, 'Tell us this isn't true.' And he said, 'It is true,' right? (We need a tape of this confession or...for his family to confirm they heard this from him.) AJ: "Now that source is Al O'Donnell, who is the nuclear-weapons engineer who armed, wired and fired 186 nuclear weapons, okay? So if you wanna talk about someone..." Lex: "Woooooow." AJ: "You're the first person I've told that on the record, but it's kind of about time." Lex: "Woooooow. Well, you received a lot of criticism over this story, and it confused me why, because it's...given the context of everything you've described with the CIA and other intelligence agencies, it is reasonable that such action would be taken. AJ: "And, the source is extraordinarily credible, right? If you wanted to take the position, 'Well, that person isn't very reliable,' then you have to ask yourself, 'Why did they have Top-Secret clearances that are higher than any in the United States whatsoever?' Because he was responsible for arming nuclear bombs. He was called the trigger man. "And by the way, he told me that I could tell the world who he was. There's a lot of details that are really dark, involving that program. And when is it appropriate, right? Well, it feels appropriate now. First of all, because you and I have been talking for several hours. So this is what is truly a long-form conversation and it's the outcome of, you know, a very long time of my reporting, and also being judicious about what, you know, closing the loop on that, right? Because I do think it's important for people to know that sources have revelations." Lex: "And, like you said, the programs, both on the Soviet side, and the American side, conflicting, I think's the term we used previously? Ethically, morally, on all fronts. People have done some horrible things in the name of security. In your book, 'Surprise, Kill Vanish,' you write about the CIA." ~~~ Jeremy Kenyon Lockyer Corbell: "So, today, I want to focus on a really important story that you once told me, that has never been told all the way [from the] beginning, to all the way to the end. And I just think it's just so cool we get to do this today. So, the question I want to ask is: After you got hooked on the UFO thing, with Bob Lazar, and you as a journalist said, 'I'm gonna start getting sources.' Like, 12 people coming at you, people shut down by the government. You can tell that. But you finally, finally got to a credible individual who had direct, firsthand knowledge about UFOs, exploitation, reverse engineering, and beings. And, oh my God, I want the world to hear this story. Tell us the story." George Knapp: "I've shared some of it in very broad strokes over the years- little bits and pieces of it - without ever actually referencing, in my statements, the guy the source. But this will be the first time I've told it in totality. "And it takes me back to when I first started in this. It's 1989 KLAS-TV, we put together, we spent eight months working on this project called 'UFOs: The Best Evidence.' Nine-part series. It airs on television, it's the biggest thing that's ever been produced for local TV, to this date, and still. "And, along the way, as I'm trying to find...telling the story about Bob Lazar, and his allegations about what was out there at S-4, near Area 51 - recovered discs, alien technology being reverse engineered - I'm looking for people who would support that. And I found about two dozen people, witnesses who had worked out there, who had seen bits and pieces, who could corroborate parts of what Bob had said about these kinds of craft being out there in the Nevada desert. But there wasn't anybody big picture who knew as much as Lazar claimed to have known, so I was still looking for them. "In 1990, I started working on a follow-up series to Best Evidence, looking for new witnesses. And I got a hint from an elected official that I had known, I'd covered him in Nevada politics. He says, 'You know, you should talk to my dad one of these days.' 'Your dad?' 'Yeah.' And he told me what the dad's name was and what he had done, what job he had had. And I said, 'Ah.' So I started stalking the guy. I just started showing up at events where I knew he would be. One of those events was a reunion for employees of EG&G." Corbell (JC): "So I'm assuming that this source was working within EG&G in some capacity, which is, by the way, who Bob [Lazar] said, hired him to go out to Site-4, S-4 at Area 51. So you're like, 'Okay, I can now find out if this is bullshit, or if there's an element of truth to it.' Do I have that right?" Knapp (GK): "Pretty much correct, yeah. So, I'm looking for someone whose credentials are impeccable. Unlike Bob, whose credentials were questioned, and people still attack him on where he went to school and where he worked, and was he at Los Alamos? This guy is documentable. There's a paper trail of where he worked, what he did. There's no question that he was in a position to know. He was the first general manager of EG&G in Nevada. His name was Al O'Donnell, and he has a prominent family. "When I heard that EG&G was having a reunion, I went there. We took a camera [and I figured], 'This is a great chance to get him on camera before I start asking him the questions I really want to ask.'" JC: "And when you say he is a general manager, like, does that give him certain roles and responsibilities that would give him insight? Like, he's not a secretary, so what does that mean?" GK: "He's the boss. He was the boss of the Nevada office. And I'll tell you a little bit about EG&G. So, it was a company that was created in Boston, right around the end of World War Two. Al O'Donnell had been in the Navy, serving during the war. He got out of the Navy while the war was still underway and went to work for a company called Raytheon, which became this massive, gigantic defense contractor that's still around today, still in Nevada in fact." JC: Yeah, they've got a big connection to the UFO topic, right? But, when you say Boston, like, where in Boston was it created?" GK: "Well, MIT is where the company was born. Edgerton, Germeshausen and Grier were the three guys, the EG&G in that. They were at MIT. Scientists, engineers, they created this company there. And Al O'Donnell, who had been working for Raytheon, working on the Manhattan Project. He didn't know he was working on the Manhattan Project, but they were building these devices, complex triggers, that allowed them to detonate nuclear weapons. He learned later what he was doing was part of the Manhattan Project. "He goes to MIT, starts working with EG&G. Their company in those days had, I think, 15 employees, Al said. So it was a very small startup. But it suddenly exploded because the American atomic program exploded in those years. In 1950, Harry Truman decides that we need a permanent, nuclear testing site somewhere in the continental U.S., so they looked at a bunch of places, and they settled on Nevada. "Prior to that, Al O'Donnell had been sent out to the Pacific. They had five of these massive, atomic bomb tests out in the Pacific, and they decided to move it into a continental U.S. location and Nevada's Test Site - it was called the Nevada Test Site in those days - was chosen. Al O'Donnell leads the exodus from Boston, out to Nevada. They start hiring engineers and scientists, physicists and other security, spies." JC: "What are they working on at this time when they make that move?" GK: "Atomic bombs. They're building, testing atomic bombs. EG&G was a really precise organization that was created in order to detonate, measure and photograph atomic weapons. If you look in the history of photography, you'll see some of these amazing photos that they took of, you know, water drops dropping in water and...they're pretty famous shots because of these cameras that they developed. And it was perfect for use and testing atomic weapons and documenting what the process was. "So, EG&G comes out to Las Vegas, they are the managers of the Nevada Test Site. They, subsequently, years later, become the managers of Area 51 when it opens in 1955. So Al O'Donnell is the top guy. He oversees the nuclear testing program out there, manages it for EG&G, works with the Atomic Energy Commission. He has a Top-Secret security clearance and he can go anywhere and see anything. There's, basically, no restrictions, nothing that is outside of his ability to find out and see." JC: "So, this is an impeccable resume. This is somebody who was in position to know, and would know if someone like Bob Lazar was telling the truth or not telling the truth. I find it, personally, humorous that EG&G was, its genesis, its seed, came from MIT, right?" GK: "So, late 1990 or early 1991, I'd have to look up the dates. But somewhere in there is this event, this EG&G reunion. I go there, we got a camera, I interview Al O'Donnell, introduce myself, and say, 'Hey, I'm really interested in this, can we continue this conversation?' So he invites me to his home. He says, 'Come on over, we'll arrange to come over on a Saturday or something. We'll sit down, I'll go through my scrapbooks and show you some documents and memorabilia and photos from that era.' I was like, 'Great.' "So I go to his house and meet this wife. And we sit down, he opens up these big scrapbooks, and he starts showing me all the stuff that he had done. Photos that had been taken out in the proximity of these gigantic nuclear tests. They had great stories about the camaraderie that developed among the engineers and scientists. And he's going through all this stuff and showing me all this. And I love it, I loved every bit of it. I've never had a bad day at the Nevada Test Site, by the way. Every time I've gone out there to do a story, it's just a terrific way to spend some time." JC: "Secrets should be kept, secrets are kept, and you are a proponent of keeping secrets when it's that kind of thing." GK: "Sure, absolutely. And I respected the boundaries that they set up for us in doing these kinds of stories. So I did go out to the Nevada Test Site a lot over the next 40 years or so and put together a lot of different stories. And they knew of my interest in that area that's just outside what the Nevada Test Site, a place called Area 51. In 1955, Area 51 was, basically, created and EG&G got the contract to manage Area 51, and had kept it for the next 30, 35 years. So, whatever went on out there, they had an inside knowledge of what was going on." JC: "So, you meet this guy, Al O'Donnell, for the first time when he's at this public thing. You probably say something like, 'Your son told me to talk to you,' or something. Whatever. It ends up, he invites you to his home, and you're going through scrapbooks, and he's showing you all this atomic testing stuff that he was involved in. GK: "Yeah, and I'm telling him, 'Boy, this is really interesting. That's fascinating. I'd love to do a story on it.' And after we're there for maybe two hours, he closes this one big scrapbook and he goes, 'You're not here to talk about this, are ya?' I said, 'Well, not exactly.' He says, 'I know what you're here to talk about. I know what you want to ask about.' And right about that point, his wife walks in and she says, 'Don't start telling them that stuff! Don't even tell him!' And he kind of joked about it.' JC: "What were you there to talk about?" GK: "UFOs, UFOs. Area 51, Bob Lazar, crashed saucers, reverse engineering, to see if he had any knowledge of that, because I'd been led to believe that he did. So he closes that book and he says, 'We'll have we'll get together another time and we'll talk about it in private.' And over the course of the next two years or so, he and I would meet at coffee shops and talk about it. And I would ask him questions, and really, it was like pulling teeth. He wanted to tell me stuff but he made me work at it." (AJ says his family was there for the confession. Knapp has over two years of meetings with him. A bit confusing.) GK: "And the condition was, I couldn't take any notes. I couldn't record it, I couldn't take any notes. So each time I'd meet with him, I'd rush back to my car and start scribbling notes on pieces of paper so I'd remember everything that he said. And the story that he told me, that evolved over those couple of years was pretty fantastic. "He said that they did have a flying saucer that had been recovered from New Mexico. I think he indicated that it had been taken from New Mexico to Wright Patterson Air Force Base, which is... He never said Roswell, but I think it was the Roswell incident is what he [was] talking about. And it confirmed some of the details about what we know, likely, happened with the Roswell craft." JC: "When he's telling you, 'We have recovered a craft,' did he say it like, this is secret, don't tell anybody?" GK: "Yeah, it was just for my knowledge, my background and information. It wasn't a story I could do then. We were negotiating about how, or when, or if I could ever use that information or make it public. He told me the details about this craft. He said that it had been stored at Indian Springs. Indian Springs is an Air Force Base that's been there for a long time. It's now called Creech. Indian Springs existed before Area 51 was made. "But he says it was there, they kept it there. It might have been in an underground facility, I'm not quite sure. But then when Area 51, after it opened in 1955, they moved it to an adjacent facility. He didn't say it was S-4, he didn't say it was Papoose, but I think that's what he's talking about. Papoose Lake is where Bob Lazar said he worked, and where they had built nine hangars underground, disguised to look like the desert, and where they had other recovered craft. "He says they worked on this recovered craft, reverse engineering, trying to figure out how it worked, who built it. Whether or not they could duplicate the technology because, apparently, they thought this was pretty advanced, and they'd like to be able to build more of 'em. "And he says it was a very closed program, very small. It was only, I think, five of them that were aware of it, at least in the early stages, that were working on this project. And it was very hush hush, and they didn't share it with anybody else in the company, or anybody else in the area, or the military. They just kept it to themselves. "So, after we're having these meetings - and I go back and write down all these notes and stuff, details about what he had shared with me - we have another meeting at a coffee shop, and I said, 'Well gosh, you know, aren't you worried that it would get out, that the word would get out?' "And he says to me, 'We were worried It would get out?' That's right. 'I mean, what...it? What do you mean, it?' It. Meaning a live being, they had a live being out there. I go, 'You had a live being, an alien as well?' [O'Donnell said], 'Tell you the truth, we didn't know what it was.' I said, 'You know, maybe it came from millions of miles away, out in space, and you're keeping it in a cage near Area 51?' He said, 'To tell you the truth, we couldn't communicate with it in the beginning. We didn't know what it was, we didn't know where it was from, and we didn't know what to do with it.'" JC: "When Al O'Donnell says to you, 'We had a live alien, a being,' obviously from another world, what was your feeling?" GK: "Well, I was overwhelmed, because it was, in effect, confirmation of things that I had come to believe, because of the reporting we'd already done. And then the evidence of cover ups and lies that had been told to the public. Here's this guy in a high position, with a high security clearance, telling me that it was true. That they really did have a craft and they had a being. "My second feeling was, one of overwhelming sadness for the being, whatever it was, you know, that was kept out there. I asked him, you know, what had happened to it, what became of it? He says, 'I don't know. I don't know whatever happened to it.' But it was out there for a while, alive, and eventually they figured out a way to communicate with it. "And so I asked him, 'Well, what did it look like?' And he made me guess, as he did with all these questions. He made me guess. He said, 'Well, it kinda looks like a certain political candidate.' I said, 'Well, who? A political candidate? Who?' And at the time, Ross Perot was running for president. He said, 'It looks like Ross Perot. A little skinny guy with a big ears and tiny head.' Not a classic Gray-looking alien, but a very odd-looking creature with really big ears, that looked like Ross Perot. And I laughed. "And so we had these conversations for a while, and I was blown away by the information that he shared. I took all these notes. I was hoping that someday, I might be able to get the information out. And I asked him, 'Look, you're getting up there in age. If I can't record something with you, could you record a statement to the effect of telling me the story on camera, and then when you pass on, I can have the tape?' And he said, 'Yeah,' he would do it." JC: "You know, look, I've heard a lot of wild stories that I can't verify. A guy's telling you something, and you get a sense as a journalist, when you go down a road with somebody, and you take your time and you vet it... Did you feel...I mean, is there any world where he's trying to f*ck with ya? Or is there a world where he's trying to, you know, dissuade...kind of put crazy information into your brain? Like, how did you feel when he was telling you this? Was he like, straight with you?" GK: "Yeah, he was very straightforward. And again, this was not information he was giving up, willingly. I mean, I had to really dig and coax and arm twist to get him to cough things up. And it was very slow-going over about a two-year period, maybe a little bit longer. And I know that this...you always have to be wary of people with different agendas and people that just make stuff up. I didn't get that sense from him because of his standing in the community. He had shared this story with members of his own family." JC: "And that's why they came to you, is because they kind of [gave] you a tip. And these members of his family, they're serious people, too." GK: "Yeah. One of his sons is an FBI agent, or was, he's passed on now. One was an elected official in Nevada. That was the one that gave me the tip." JC: So, I just want to nail this [down] so I understand. You were approached because he had shared this with his family, privately, and then you had to kind of coax to get through to him about the story?" GK: "Right." JC: "I think that's important because look, these things don't happen, like, people [don't] just come to us and say, you know, crazy stuff, and we're like, 'Hh, yeah, cool. Sounds good.' Like, the dynamic of that, socially, as a journalist, like getting in there, taking time. You know, we have to verify if what he said is true, and there are some major bombs coming about that. But it's like, that process is so important. "So here you are, you're sitting with him, he tells you now, they have a live alien. And you felt sad because you're an animal-rights activist, you love animals. I know with your cats at home and you've done horse stories and all the stories about like, the inhumane stuff to animals. So it made you personally sad, makes me sad, too now thinking about it." GK: Yeah. Well, we had these series of meetings, and then the last time we met, after he'd agreed to go ahead and record a tape - and give it to me after making an arrangement so I got it after he passed on - he said that he had been told to not talk to me anymore. He said he had been given a warning [and] it was not a good idea for him to talk to me any more about anything. Not just that topic, but anything." JC: "Well, who knows that you're talking? Who would warn him?" GK: "I don't know. I don't know. But you recall, back in those days, there was surveillance. We had our phones tapped at KLAS-TV. There were guys following us around. Me, Bob Lazar, Gene Huff, maybe Robert Bigelow." JC: "People were also coming to your news station, OSI. And they would come in and try to like, get to you and then they'd show you their card...and take it back. And you know your phones are tapped. So it's like, because of this story, all of a sudden you're on high alert. So, anybody could have called him, been watching you, had meetings with the guy. So what you're saying is one day he just said, 'I can't...I'm not allowed to talk to you any more.'" GK: "Yeah, I've been told not to talk to you anymore. I've been told not to."](https://image.24vids.com/tw-2079616298435400152/amplify_video_thumb/2079612656366112768/img/mxq1uM4Cp0iG8pyw.jpg)
![The most epic 13 minute AI rant I've heard in 2026 PS: My parent's heard this when I was playing it in the car and thought Jason ✨👾SaaStr.Ai✨ Lemkin went OFF like Stephen A Smith does on first take PPS: Full transcript below [17:00] Harry Stebbings: I I just wanted to ask Jason, if the people that we want are fundamentally different, the developers that we used to hire, we don't because AI writes the code for us. The marketers we don't want, the sales people we don't want—who who do we want genuinely? Like what is the attractive profile? Because your Anthropic’s and your OpenAIs are hiring, so so what are the people that we want in the companies of the future? [17:18] Jason Lemkin: Look, I know it sounds trite, but but the answer is simple. It's just the expression each year changes. We want folks that are genuinely AI fluent. It's pretty simple. Now you know, maybe last year we called them prompt engineers, right? That used to be a job. I don't know if you remember that actually used to be the hottest job on planet earth. Now no one needs a prompt engineer because it's pretty easy to prompt all these tools. That job died. Okay. Um and now we need go-to-market engineers. Um I think that job's going to die. We need—everyone needs so many forward deployed engineers. Like you can't hire enough forward deployed engineers. But uh you know um but Palantir just announced in whatever their their big their big event—they've gotten their deployment times down over 90% with forward deployed engineers. So that may become—so the this wave of disruption for the titles and the specificity, it's also exhaustingly accelerating. But it's really simple. You meet anyone for any role—sales, marketing, engineering, product, QA—they're they're either they're either they can't keep all of the ways they use AI to accelerate their job from spewing out of their mouth, or they're staring at you. It's there's nowhere in the middle. Like, and the person that comes in and says—it's it's it sounds Captain Obvious—but like, you know, you just had the whatever from Lovable, the the marketing head that was super popular on the show, right? She's just spewing AI-native insights into Lovable, right? It's not that complicated. You hire her, Elena, or whatever it is. You just hire her. It doesn't matter whether she's still in college or a junior or a senior or a middler, a left or right. And honestly, if you interview people, I would say of all even of the best startups I've invested in, maybe 30% of the management team meets this standard at best. 30%. Maybe less. And of the interviews I do in general, it's single-digit percents. It's just and in in that sense, it's the same as ever. Like you either lower the bar in hiring or you hire someone that's actually great. And someone that's actually great is so far ahead of you in how to apply to to employ the efficiencies of AI in their role, your jaw falls on the table. The difference is we used to need warm bodies. That's what's changing. We used to need warm bodies to answer the call, to do QA, to do code review, to to get the blue pixel to go from the upper left to the lower right. You laugh, but you need you literally needed to brute force this with humans. With AI, every day that goes by, the AI—you do not need brute force human beings on your team. And that's another reason they're shrinking. Why are all these new companies so efficient? They're just not brute forcing things with humans. They're just not. They're choosing not to. And so these team—all the brute forcers out there—everyone talks about how bloated teams got in 2021. I don't agree with that. I think they got as big as they needed to be when growth was high and you needed humans to do everything. All you look at these teams that that doubled—well if growth continued at 60% like the rate in early 2021 for 5 years or can help me do the math and every single thing a software company did required a human. You were understaffed by your 2021 headcount. You'd be sitting here in 2026. You every office in SoMa would be triple packed and you there wouldn't be enough humans to staff your company. It's just the world changed. [20:33] Harry Stebbings: Jason, you live on the bleeding edge. I think me and Rory see that and I think the world sees that when they hear you every week in terms of how you run SaaS. For all of the CEOs and execs who listen to the show, what would you advise them in terms of determining whether someone is AI fluent when they meet them for jobs, for talent? [20:51] Jason Lemkin: Here's I realized I was just asked this. I just did a review with a super fast startup growing just crossing 100 million and I was asked this question. And one of my favorite executives, I thought his answer was pretty dated and because he gave me an answer that was about 6 months old. The answer 6 months old is: "I look for folks in my team, I look for you know at what tools they play with." Okay, that was a great answer in like summer of 2025. Okay, I tried Lovable last week. Okay, the answer in 2026 is: "What commercial AI tool have you brought into your organization this month?" That's the test. Anyone that is on the bleeding edge that you would want to hire—now there are so many great products in the market. Okay, there is no excuse in any role to have not brought one tool a month into your organization. Okay, there—now there's going to be better and better tools and better and better products as the year goes on. What's the one you did? And you will see folks with their deer in the headlights to this question. What what sales tool? What marketing tool? What product tool? What engineering tool? What did you bring in? Why did you pick it? How does it working? Because if you're at remotely at the cutting edge, you're all over this. You're looking for the next agentic tools that will radically improve how you do business. This is—you think everyone thinks SaaS is at the bleeding edge, right? You know, you know, all we do is we're just looking for the tools and trying them. Okay? Okay, we're one year ahead of everybody else because we did the simplest thing in the world. Like we tried the tools early and we trained them. We trained them for a month. Okay, I'll give you—want hear a horrible example from this week? Super hot AI company valued at 6 billion. Okay, I'm not going to name it. Um, this week yesterday told us we had to quadruple what we spent on their product. Okay, their agent told us, right? And why did this happen? Okay. Well, at this $6 billion company, no one had trained the agent on its pricing properly. No one had tested it. They said, "Well, well, we've been in beta." And we said, "Well, when did the beta launch? A year ago." Okay, these are people asleep at at the wheel. You want somebody who the instant this comes up, they exactly know what the issue is. And "Hey, when I was at Lovable Replit, we trained the agent. This is how we did it. I brought in this tool. I brought in this tool that that Rory invested in last week. It solved all these issues." That's what you want to hear. And if they haven't brought in a tool in the last 30 days, at least deeply evaluated it. I don't really care whether they bought it, but gone so far down the funnel they can tell you—pick whatever tool: Fixie, Regie, GC, AIGC—I don't care how you went through it, you looked at it, you can tell me the eight ways it would improve the productivity of your business and three you didn't. Just don't hire that person because they're going to run your company to the ground. This is the job today. The job today is not to screw around on ChatGPT and to be a prompt engineer. The job today is to bring the best AI and agentic products into your organization and leverage all the hard work that the engineers have done building those products. That's your job. You don't have to screw around. You don't have to be a prompt engineer anymore. You have to be an agent deployment expert. A—this is the new job we're making up today. An Agentic Deployment Expert. That's your job from C-level to junior. Agentic Deployment Expert. Don't hire anybody else. You're going to regret it. They're going to stare at the camera. He's good. Stare at the camera. He's honorable. We could probably just I could slip away, get a coffee, and come back. No. And I I sound exasperated, Rory. And I—but the reason I am is I can just see I can see my best companies doing it. And I can see some companies I've invested in not doing it. And I want to cry. I just want to cry when they have no ADs on their team. I just—like you're flushing your years of your life down the toilet by not approaching your how you're building this company this way. [24:33] Rory: Yes. And at the risk of being positive, it's worth pointing out two things he didn't say. Well, something implicit why he said—Jason didn't do the only hire, you know, he didn't commit the um employment law, I think it's a civil penalty of saying only employ people below X who get the new new thing because he implicitly said anyone can do it provided you're willing to learn. And I think that's the big aha that's one of the positive statements to make here right? Look and I think it applies—I'm always wary of being "Hey, coming across, hey this this is the things that you all have to do." I think it applies to everyone including investors right? I mean I will say I have found that unless you're willing to invest the time learning these tools you actually shouldn't be investing in them. One of my partners Andy had this expression: "You know, if you decide you want to stop learning new things you probably should retire within 6 to 12 months and never write another check again." Maybe that's down to 3 to 6 months at this stage, right? And I think, you know, it's— [25:27] Harry Stebbings: Yeah, I actually I actually had a meeting with mine and Jason's biggest investor the other day and I—pretend he's not here—I said I think he's the most equipped investor for this generation of investing because I don't think anyone quite sits at the bleeding edge like he does on the investor side. [25:42] Harry Stebbings: Why in terms of using the equip stuff? Yeah. Yeah. In terms of using the stuff, understanding understanding bottlenecks, constraints. For sure. [25:51] Jason Lemkin: But can I just add one point? We can just cuz it's so important if it helps people. Okay, we are—and thank you Harry. We're going through these phases. Okay, and when AI started to blow up for real for us, uh call it early 2024, right? Maybe late '23, I wasn't equipped. It was too technical. I wasn't going to go in and figure out—I wasn't smart enough to figure out how to deal with a massively hallucinating LLM API and turn that and turn that into something magical. Kudos to investors and others that that got it in early '23, '22. I mean I remember I—I guess it was maybe SaaStr Annual '23. I was with David Sacks and I did a Q&A and I said, "How you thinking about AI at Craft?" He's like, "Well we're all in. We want 80% of '23 of investments to be AI." I'm like, "Great but like show me the show me the great ones in market." He's like, "They're all prototypes. We're all they're all they're all proof of concepts but we're all in anyway." That's where you kind of had to be in '23 if you weren't investing at like the LLM level. Okay, I wasn't smart enough. Then we went through this weird-ass prompt engineer era where like you you could torture these products to do something good, right? But you had to torture them. You had to like craft these crazy things that made no sense. Now we are in the era where mere ordinarily smart generalists can make these tools do magical things. And literally I go to these meetings and people be like, "I don't know how to like this is so scary. I don't know how to do this." And we show them our backends. Do you know how to do a workflow generator? Do you know how to do a a decision tree? Like we've been building these since software in the '90s. Okay, if you—I can show you all of our agents. The how they work is novel. They do have to be trained. You can't be lazy and have these agents work. But honestly, the the UI, the UX, the way we interact with them, it's just software. And so my point is: Pick yourself off the ground. This is your time now. If you felt lost in AI era, if you felt like you're behind, you don't understand what all these people are saying on X and Twitter and their Claude and and their and talking about all the 4.6 point Nano point and it's over—like you just it's not your world. This is your time. This is your time for the generalist that knows how to use software tools really really well. And I—this is my last point but it's so important. If ever in your recent life—and this is why you could be all you need to be is young at heart to Rory's point—if in the last three to five years you have successfully deployed a piece of enterprise software of any sort you yourself, not some agency you hired, but if you have deployed it, you can deploy any agentic tool. Any. And you can become the hero in your company and you can become the hero in your functional area. But I watch folks—I'm literally helping a company now that they're adding hundreds of sales folks this year with a new pre-IPO COO—he's not hasn't brought in a single tool, totally scared of it. Okay, it's not that hard. Did you use SalesLoft? Did you use Outreach? Did you use HubSpot? Do you know these tools? If you can deploy these tools, you can deploy a world-changing AI agent. And so this is the time for people like the folks that that were shut out of the AI revolution right now. The generalist folks that are not that know how to deploy software that don't even know how to build software. Like vibe coding for me was folks who knew how to build software, but you didn't have to be an engineer. Now, you just need to know how to deploy software to win with AI agents. That's all you need to know. So many people have these skills and they're petrified of AI. "How did you do that? How did you deploy an AI BDR?" Well, we bought a piece of software, we figured out how it worked for a day, we set it up in an afternoon, and then and then we did spend 30 months training it, which you didn't do with this old software because in the old days, we just had to manually upload all the data, right? And there was no training. The the only non-intuitive part is training these things. And it's it's it's just work. So that's why when I see folks on the management team not doing this, there's no excuse. You do not need to be technical to win with AI agents in Q2 of '26. You do not need to be even 1% technical. Not at all. So it's your time. Or you're going to get laid off. Or you're going to get laid off because you're not going to matter.](https://image.24vids.com/tw-2036795243681423518/amplify_video_thumb/2036794127560613888/img/52_cdbzzL6_foTSI.jpg)
![COMMONS HOUSING SELECT COMMITTEE: STATEMENT FROM FREE LEASEHOLDERS 3/3/26 Today, we told Parliament the truth. About the cynical games Conservative and Labour governments have been playing with your homes, money and lives. It was awkward. We had to motor through to cover as many points as humanely possible in a short time. Sorry if we didn’t cover yours. We are the insurgents against a very closed and broken political system. We will go away when they finally free the people from the property servitude of leasehold. Until then, we will keep challenging the official line and holding power to account, however uncomfortable that may be. Parliament has been talking about abolishing leasehold, a legacy of serfdom, since the 1880s, before working men and women had the right to vote. In 2026, we keep hearing it’s “complicated” and our politicians need more time because they might get sued by the wealthy landowners. What happened to the will of the people? Isn’t Parliament sovereign? Wasn’t that what all the Brexit lark was about? And doesn’t this Labour government have the second biggest parliamentary majority in its 126-year history as the so-called working people’s party? Keir Starmer can do a TikTok stunt on ground rents. But he can’t run away from the truth. His government are peddling a draft Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Bill that has been purged of policies that you voted for in the The Labour Party manifesto. Policies promised again in the July 2024 King’s Speech: the remaining Law Commission enfranchisement and Right to Manage recommendations. So you can finally “take back control”. The Starmer administration appears to be captured by the deep-pocketed freeholder lobby and property cartels. And the Prime Minister is in thrall to the hand-wringing lawyers who bleat on about the risk of judicial review and ECHR lawfare, as if the rights of extortionists, many offshore, and lofty international law matter more than the British people being looted in their homes and what election manifestos have promised time and time again. This government claims that they are ending the feudal leasehold system. Instead, they keep it on life support by protecting money-for-nothing ground rents until 2068. We’ll have flying cars before feudalism is banished from our homes! And buried away in the small print, the Labour government concedes our point: “leasehold as a tenure will not disappear overnight and it will be a feature of the housing market for many years to come.” The government is also siding with the leasehold grifters by failing to restrict development value in the draft legislation, which means many flat leaseholders will never be able to afford to buy their freehold, something that must happen before conversion to commonhold. Remember, the freeholders’ main lobby group, the Residential Freehold Association, admits that the typical freeholder owns just 2.5% capital value in a block of flats. These wealth-destroying corporates own a sliver of our homes and have the cheek to talk about their human rights. We are not Mugabeists. We will, of course, pay a fair rate to compensate the freeholder to leave our homes for good. But demanding more of our money so they can thwart our right to buy them out, on the basis that they could theoretically build a skyscraper in the garden, is taking the mick and must end, as the government first promised in 2021. Don’t take our word on the scam of freeholders invoking development value to block leaseholders’ bid for self-rule. Barrister Nicola Muir, of Tanfield Chambers, has written that “it is amazing what developments landlords believe are possible and the profits they claim they will generate”, citing a telling example from practice: “The landlord initially claimed £34 million for the alleged potential to build a skyscraper in the front garden of the block. Such claims can obviously be a deterrent to leaseholders, who probably have no intention of developing.” And we were the ONLY campaign group that urged the Housing, Communities & Local Government Committee to ensure that this government sets enfranchisement rates high in the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act 2024, to the benefit of leaseholders. There is a major risk that, due to the influence peddling of ground rent grifters and their lobbyists in Westminster and Whitehall, the government will fail to implement these long-awaited reforms already on the statute books. Matthew Pennycook MP promised in November 2024 to put enfranchisement rates out to public consultation last summer, but it never happened. And if the government is forced to begin the enfranchisement changes in the 2024 Act, it will likely set the deferment and capitalisation rates artificially low, stuffing freeholders’ mouths with gold when desperate leaseholders try to extend their leases or buy out the freehold. These deferment and capitalisation rates are already derived from freeholder-friendly case law, specifically the 2006 Upper Tribunal decision known as Sportelli, with the deferment rate set at 4.75% for houses and 5.0% for flats, and a capitalisation rate of 6.0%. While the 2024 Act is vague on what these rates should be, we know that investors routinely buy freeholds at auction or directly from developers at higher rates than those implied by Sportelli, meaning they pay significantly less than leaseholders are already required to pay under statutory schemes with the low Sportelli rates. For example, an analysis of Allsop Ground Rent Auctions found that investors have been paying an average 9% capitalisation rate for the ground rent in freehold titles – well above Sportelli’s 6%. This situation is clearly unfair, and there is significant industry lobbying to keep the deferment and capitalisation rates low, i.e. below the going market rates, so that freeholders are excessively compensated by leaseholders. Once the rates are set in the 2024 Act, they remain fixed for ten years, creating jeopardy that they will be set to the disadvantage of leaseholders, who are less organised and resourced than industry interests to influence policy. If the rates are set substantially below Sportelli rates, the savings from other provisions of the 2024 Act – such as the removal of marriage value, the 0.1% restriction on ground rents, and the end of the requirement to pay the freeholder’s reasonable legal and valuation costs – would be more than cancelled out, leaving leaseholders paying more than they do today under the current rules. Minister Pennycook highlighted this risk while in opposition during the passage of the 2024 Act, stating that Labour “remain[s] convinced that this government, or a future one, could be lobbied by vested interests to set a deferment rate that will be punitive to leaseholders.” He proposed an amendment on the deferment rate to guide the Secretary of State, requiring that “in setting the deferment rate, the Secretary of State must have regard to the desirability of encouraging leaseholders to extend their lease at the lowest possible cost”, although the amendment was not passed. This policy ought to be in the draft Bill, yet it remains absent. We are urging that the 2024 Act be amended to require that the enfranchisement rates must not fall below an absolute floor of the existing Sportelli rates (with the deferment rate of 4.75% for houses and 5.0% for flats, and a capitalisation rate of 6.0%). But leaseholders should really benefit from market rates, i.e. those which developers and investors already enjoy being significantly above Sportelli, to ensure that they do not pay excessive compensation to freeholders, as occurs under the current system, to buy their freehold or extend a lease. And this isn’t just about what goes into the algorithm for the online enfranchisement calculator under the 2024 Act, or about ending the development value scam, a reform dropped from the legislation after behind-the-scenes lobbying. We will not accept a failure to bring forward a Universal Right to Manage, as part of a glidepath to commonhold. Watch what our founder said about a well-connected landlord and tenant barrister who bragged to the property tribunal last year that he had worked on the Law Commission’s Right to Manage reforms, all while representing an offshore billionaire freeholder trying to block leaseholders’ quest for Right to Manage. It should be easy. But the leaseholders at this development had to spend £150,000 just to defend their no-fault right against this legal onslaught at the First-tier Tribunal. They won, but the freeholder is now appealing… Beyond Right to Manage reform, we need a Right to Participate in collective enfranchisement so that all flat leaseholders can buy a share of the freehold even if they miss out the first time when one group of neighbours has enough support to enfranchise the block. It is unfair for leaseholders to be locked out of decisions over the charges they pay and the services affecting their home when they are ready to buy their share of the freehold. Sorting this inequity was the will of Parliament with Right to Enfranchise provisions in the 2002 Act. It’s also what the Law Commission originally recommended before seemingly being pressured by vested interests to drop the policy from their final recommendations in 2020. Also, why on earth should leaseholders have to contort themselves to get 50% support of all unit-owners in a block? Satisfying the onerous 50% participation threshold is near impossible in bigger buildings and those with high levels of buy-to-let, yet scummy investors face no qualifying criteria when hoovering up the freeholds of our homes from developers or auctioneers behind our backs. Don’t patronise us with Lord Best’s scheme for managing agents. We want liberation, not regulation. There’s a reason both the freeholder and managing agent lobbies are gagging for the cosy Lord Best policy, which wasn’t promised in either the Labour manifesto or the King’s Speech. It will jack up leaseholders’ already sky-high service charges, repeat the cruel joke of the Building Safety Regulator, and keep freeholders and their managing agent cronies firmly in the ecosystem. At the same time, a statutory regulator of managing agents will no doubt restrict competition by keeping out small ethical new entrants. It will also allow the government to claim job done while failing to end leasehold. Even without leasehold abolition, leaseholders will still be denied rightful control of their service charges and the power to easily sack their managing agent - the real regulation needed to rein in rip-off service providers and put them out of business, not some powerless or captured regulator in Whitehall. Labour should be for the grafters. If the government wants to win back public support after the Gordon and Denton by-election drubbing, salvaging this draft legislation and swiftly commencing the 2024 Act must be its priority. Show that politics can be a force for good. Stand up to the ground rent grifters and offshore property mafia. Free leaseholders. 5.3 million households in England and Wales are watching.](https://image.24vids.com/tw-2028949666432205114/media/HChK-xoXEAAI0u3.jpg)
![The Royal High Courts are certainly a place of grandeur and perhaps some are intimidated by the surroundings. Well that impressive 19th century Gothic architecture is a sight to behold but the Judges less so. I’ve seen too many judges in the UK and Pakistan and by God, they leave a lot to be desired. Especially when one comes across McGowan the Mediocre. What should have been a straightforward win has turned into a cheating exercise by the very judiciary meant to uphold justice in this country. Why do I say straightforward? Let’s recap. After 3-4 failed complaints to the GMC, the Jewish lobbies upped the ante. First came my loss of contract at South Tyneside and Sunderland NHS Foundation Trust where I was doing some clinics. No investigation. Just blocked from the email and can’t address patient queries. Then started the defamation in the press – articles in the Jewish News, Jewish Chronicle and Telegraph followed by loss of contract with Medinet with whom I’d worked since 2018 intermittently and had glowing reviews. The GMC now opens an investigation – given the pressure from Wes Streeting, elected in July 2024. They wanted an Interim Orders Tribunal (IOT) to decide if any sanction should be imposed whilst I was being “investigated”. I had a trip abroad for my brother’s assassination case and I had clinics. Patients who had waited 12-18 months to see a Neurologist. The GMC and MPTS didn’t care. The Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service (MPTS) is allegedly an independent body to the GMC and runs the IOT panels. They would not move the IOT by 11 working days as the GMC had refused (so much for independence!) – instead of 20th December I had suggested 13th January 2025. Recall this was over the Christmas period – people going on holidays and yet I was expected to get legal advice when I was in clinic from 8am – 6pm. I told them patients came first – I stand by that. Hurt Jewish feelings aren’t urgent and they don’t come before my patient care. I requested deferment by 11 working days, told them I would defend every single tweet and indeed, looked forward to it. This was all via email. Multiple emails. All ignored – including the one letter that contained my “defences”. They would not budge – the Jewish lobbies were demanding action and the GMC wasn’t going to risk their ire again. Wes Streeting was breathing down their necks. On 20th December 2024, I saw my Neurology patients and on 23rdDecember, I found out that I’d been suspended for 18 months. No other doctor had an 18-month suspension or got one since – in their absence. My remaining clinics in December and January all cancelled. Some patients were cancelled as they were making their way to my clinic. I requested the transcript of the IOT hearing – the GMC had been demanding conditions on my license on public interest grounds yet 3 batty women decided I should be suspended for 18 months for public interest and patient protection! Later, the barrister for the indemnity body stated he “couldn’t get purchase on” how they came to that decision. In any case, after being misled by my indemnity body – who suggested that I first ask for an early review, delayed asking for it and then the GMC refused. They were refusing to allow me to be heard after claiming I wouldn’t attend. The indemnity body then reneged on the agreed High Court action. The GMC even send me the Rule 7 letter – the final “allegations” against me on 5 February 2025 which they then updated in March. Ordinarily this takes about 9 months to send – in my case, they managed to do it within 6 weeks! Yet one of the reasons they claimed I needed to be suspended for 18 months was because of the lengthy investigation…. I had to reply by 5 May 2025 which I did via a191-page response. The GMC usually respond within 3-4 weeks. As of 21 January 2026, I have yet to hear from them. I then took matters into my own hand. Let down by cowardly lawyers except one (Yasmin), I filed a High Court application under Section 41 A(10) of the Medical Act 1983 to challenge my unlawful suspension. I requested an urgent expedited hearing as I was being left with no way to earn a living. There were 10 grounds of appeal. The High Court date was set for 10th July 2025. Meanwhile, the MPTS is obliged to give a 6-month review – 16th June 2025 afternoon was scheduled. I stated I wanted this in person and in public. I flew back from Kashmir on 9th June – it’s cheaper to live there - and found myself arrested at Holyhead under s12 of the Terrorism Act for “alleged support of proscribed groups” – apparently I was “on the wanted list. I’m released 14 hours later. They’d seized my mobile phones and laptop and wait for it, all my GMC documents that I’d carefully put together. I’m still not sure why I couldn’t get those back. I learn that the GMC is seeking information about this non-reportable arrest within 24 hours of it – they know. In any case, I go for the IOT hearing – and the GMC Counsel attempts to utilise the arrest. I object. The panel agree that it will not be considered. However, the MPTS have set an insufficient amount of time for the hearing – they would have known. There were over 1000 pages in the bundle of nonsense – the only worthwhile part of that was my beautifully written 191-page response. I was quite proud of it if I’m honest. It could be considered my second PhD thesis. As I have to return to Pakistan for hearings and the High Court case was 10thJuly, the IOT hearing was re-scheduled for 14th July 2025. So, fast forward to 10th July 2025. Under 48 hours before the hearing is due, the GMC submit their skeleton arguments – ordinarily submitted 7-14 days before – no doubt, to wrong foot me. They finally admit that the IOT panel made an “error of law” in not properly applying the Article 10 rights but argue they got to the “right decision but by the wrong route” (!) I am self-representing in Court 1 at the Royal Courts of Justice – the GMC have their in-house lawyer, their GMC Counsel and her clerk. But I have the best lawyer (currently abroad) and an excellent McKenzie friend, Sean Naughton and my well wishers who attended to support me. We start at 10 30am – and I ask the Judge to review the admission of illegality. On that basis alone, my suspension should be revoked. She declines and wants to hear the case. I then detail the IOT powers and how the grounds to sanction me had not been met – they had not proven public interest or public protection. I discussed the GMC actions, the unfairness, disproportionality, the abuse of process, the outright lies by the GMC, the draconian 18-month suspension, the persecution by the Jewish lobbies and the breach of my rights under Articles 8, 9 and 10 of the ECHR. My opening lines: “I submit that the suspension was political in nature. It was subject to bias and external pressure was clearly evident. It was unlawful and demonstrated seriously flawed reasoning. It was manifestly wrong and the panel erred in law. It was completely unnecessary. It’s been tainted by marked procedural errors, unfairness and it has demonstrated gross abuse of process by the GMC and the MPTS and the IOT panel and those abuses have continued. The suspension is draconian and disproportionate and inconsistent with other decision makings of the IOT panels. It is a complete violation of my rights under Article 8, 9 and especially Article 10 of the European Court of Human Rights. And it is demonstrated also limitation of the panel’s expertise, both in terms of law, but also, importantly, the context of the rights of the Palestinian people and it brings into serious question whether the GMC should be policing speech of doctors. It should certainly not be policing or interfering in political speech.” I went through each ground in detail giving the relevant case law. I talked openly about the nature of that persecution: “All of the complaints against me have been made by Jewish and pro-Israeli affiliated organisations and I think it’s necessary to list them – Lawyers for Israel, in collaboration with Gnasherjew, the Jewish Medical Association twice; the unnamed Jewish Zionist doctor; the Jewish News who defamed me; the reporter is Michelle Rosenberg - who is Jewish and Zionist; the Daily Telegraph defamation - George Chesterton is married to a Jewish woman; Miranda Levy and Jacob Freedland are both Jewish and Zionist. I had the Jewish Chronicle defamation - Jane Prinsley is Jewish and has a home in Israel; Campaign Against Antisemitism by Stephen Silverman, who is Jewish and has submitted three similar tweets in March 2025 to the GMC which have been included in my Rule 7 letter without due process the GMC is obliged to follow on receipt of a new complaint. And then, twice in the Jerusalem Post - Mathilda Heller and Michael Starr are both Jewish Zionists. And despite the suspension, Sabrina Miller, a Jewish Zionist journalist at the Daily Mail attacked a number of pro-Palestinian doctors, including myself. So, these previous complaints that have been dismissed by the GMC included tweets of a similar nature. The tweets have not changed, but I would contend that the priorities of the GMC had and my complaint was clearly being handled by individuals who appeared conflicted. In my witness statement, I have detailed the behaviour of XXX, XXX, XXX who refused to respond to emails on where disclosures from the GMC themselves, since I submitted this appeal, have since revealed that XX XX had made false notes on my record claiming I had prior FTP history. In addition, in July 2024, Wes Streeting became the Health Secretary. I refer Your Honour to pages 327 to 337 of the bundle. There’s a Declassified article, incidentally, that’s been written by a Jewish journalist, Matt Kennard. He has investigated Streeting’s support of Israel since his days at the National Union of Students. It documents that he visited Israel in 2022 paid for by the Labour Friends of Israel. That organisation’s former chair was Joan Ryan, infamously found to be discussing her £1 million payment from Israel with Shai Masot, the Israeli diplomat. Streeting has taken over £20,000 from Israeli lobbyist, Trevor Chinn. Trevor Chinn’s father heads the Jewish National Fund which supports illegal Israeli settlements and from Lord Mendelsohn and David Menton. The Jewish Chronicle even ran a profile of him entitled “Wes Streeting, our friend at the NUS”. So, there’s little surprise that Wes Streeting made comments in The Telegraph stating he would urge medical regulators to discipline staff expressing views which he, as a pro-Israeli and Zionist, opposed. He stated that regulators had the power to set conditions that a healthcare professional must work under. Suspend them or strike them entirely from the medical register. He made similar comments to The Times. He then met with the Board of Deputies for Community Security Trust, which is also behind my complaint, the Jewish Leadership Council and the Jewish Medical Association, reiterating “I expect employers and regulators to take action”. The idea that this political pressure by the Health Secretary in November 2024 was irrelevant to my suspension is untenable in the face of this clear intervention, which actually represents political interference and undermines the alleged independence of the GMC.” And I made clear the Jewish privilege at play “So, from what I’ve just presented, it’s very clear that the red line concerns Israel. Tweets, that’s words. Criticising an entity, carrying out the mass slaughter against innocent civilians will be punished more severely than malpractice, blatant dishonesty, criminal convictions or even genuine Jew hatred, as long as you are not a Muslim. And if you’re Jewish and you belong to a powerful lobby group like the Jewish Medical Association, then the GMC gives you a clear pass as shown in the case of Liz Lightstone and Justin Stebbing.” I made clear that even the GMC referral to the MPTS explicitly stated “that there was no evidence of [her] racially discriminating against anyone or discriminating against Jewish people.” I stated in the High Court “And I should point out that the Jewish people are not a race; Judaism is a religion” and “It is my inalienable right to be able to disagree with the narrative from Israeli lobbies and express it. Their free speech does not trump mine.” I made sure that she understood that my patients and even Grok approved of me: “In fact, Grok is positively glowing – “Dr Rehiana Ali’s tweet carry a fiery, unapologetic tone blending sharp intellect with a raw defiance against injustice echoing the spirit of Malcolm X, mirrors Malcolm’s blend of moral clarity, confrontational rhetoric and distain for oppressive systems.” “I can’t think of a better person to be compared to.” I further stated “I do not believe that legal, that legitimate political commentary or reporting facts can be antisemitic. I do not believe that any groups, be they Jewish, Muslims or Christians, are exempt from criticism where the situation warrants it. I do not believe in hate speech, as that’s the very antithesis of free speech, but also, importantly, there is no tweet of mine that demonstrates hatred for any group simply by virtue of their religious identity and, indeed, none has been identified as such.” I even quoted the Queen: “I do not accept that stating facts becomes anti-Jewish simply because the majority of those committing the crimes are Jewish. If you take that to the logical conclusion, that would mean that no Jewish person could ever be criticised for their bad behaviour. That cannot be right. I would also point out that the late Queen, according to the Israeli press, and the ex-President of Israel Rivlin, was reported to have viewed every Israeli as a terrorist or the son of a terrorist. Who would have thought that the Monarch would have been so based?” At 1pm, the Judge wants a lunch-break – I haven’t finished. We continue after lunch break – and I complete my submission dealing with the GMC’s arguments. “Before I sum up, I’ll just briefly address the skeleton arguments that the defence submitted on 8 July. And obviously I’ve already raised disgruntlement about that but I think it’s important to note, that the GMC has finally conceded, after over two months since receiving my skeleton arguments, that the IOT erred in law. On that basis alone, that suspension should be quashed today. If the GMC was capable of self- reflection, it would have withdrawn its objections to my appeal gracefully but that is probably too optimistic an outcome to expect of this bureaucratic monster which has become a law unto itself…” Then the GMC repeats their arguments and argues that the High Court have broad powers and should take original jurisdiction over the matter: “And that is an exercise that this Court can properly make, exercising its original jurisdiction” In fact, the words “original jurisdiction” were repeated about 7-8 times. The GMC Counsel repeated to the Judge “We accept that you have a free-er hand” and again “Because, as I say, this Court is free-er to exercise the original jurisdiction” and so on. Look at the tweets! She said “Mossad did 9/11” and that “Israelis shouldn’t be allowed near humanity”. She said “Israelis are involved in organ trafficking”. All true. I was amused. Ordinarily the High Court usually looks at technical and legal aspects without going into the actual details of the issue itself (e.g. on covid, they wouldn’t debate the merits of the covid vaccine – the issue was whether the conditions/suspension was legal according to rules and procedural fairness). I reply I have no issue but it wasn’t necessary – the grounds did not require that. However, if the Judge wanted to look at the tweets she should acquaint herself with the facts that I presented in my 191-page response. I request a judgement that day or the next day. I had no faith in the MPTS and GMC. That review hearing was due a few days later on 14 July 2025. Judge McGowan was fully aware of that review IOT hearing. She stated “We need to finish this during the course of today. It cannot go part heard and I understand that your review hearing is listed on Monday next.” She stated the following: “And if there is not a decision from this Court today then, presumably, the review hearing will be made aware of these proceedings, but their decision is independent of this. If they decide to not lift the suspension, then my decision either does the same or lifts or terminates the suspension. If they terminate the suspension on Monday, then my decision probably becomes quite academic, but necessary, nonetheless.” Even the GMC Counsel admitted that the Court’s decision was “of interest” I didn’t agree it was “academic” The Judge continued: “There is too much material. It is too important.” And later that her decision was “nonetheless, an important exercise.” I emphasised in my response that I wanted the High Court to rectify that injustice done to me in December 2024 and that “the overarching question is “was my original suspension, was it correct or not?” McGowan replied : “I – I do understand that and in order to reach a decision about that I have to look at what you say are the procedural mistakes. I have to look at what you say are the errors of law. I have to look at what you say is unfair about the way the hearing was conducted...” and again,“Until I have made my mind up about the procedural unfairness and all the other points you have raised, I have got to consider everything.” I again pointed out “..I would argue it’s an abuse of the system and I’m actually paying the price for their deficiencies, or rather procedural irregularities. I’m having to live with the consequences of being deprived of an income…” In other words, there have been consequences for me – financially and professionally. And I ended with “I have no faith in the IOT. I have no faith in the MPTS, and I have no faith in the GMC, and I am not the only one to feel that way. The fact that we are calling for a different body and we’re calling for the GMC to be dismantled. I’m simply asking that the injustice that was done in December is rectified…” The concluding remarks of McGowan? “Well, I am certainly not going to give judgment in this case at 3.55pm. You raised an awful lot of important issues. The importance of a decision to you, personally, is obviously great. The importance of a decision to your potential patients is high and the importance of a decision to the public is equally important. So, all of those matters have to be considered and balanced and I will get to a decision early next week. I think that is probably the best way, which will be handed down in the usual way. All right, well thank you both very much. Thank you all very much for your attendance.” At no point did McGowan state there would be no Judgement. On 14 July 2025, my suspension was revoked. I self-represented and I didn’t concede a single point or any tweet. What happened next was a shocking abuse of the judicial process. My registration was reinstated – no conditions. But that 7 months suspension remains on my record visible to every employer. The very next day GMC emails the Court to state that the High Court no longer has jurisdiction over the matter as the suspension was revoked! The IOT panel has very limited powers so whilst it revoked my suspension, it will not deem it unlawful or indeed make any comment about the previous panel’s decision – and certainly not its legality. The MPTS admitted that only the High court could rule it was unlawful. I contacted the Court pointing this out and that I was expecting a judgement as per McGowan’s position in the High Court. The High Court had a full day’s hearing and the court was independent of the tribunal and had seized jurisdiction. All my grounds including the legality of the suspension were outstanding. The revocation was to some extent irrelevant to the Court issuing the Judgement – if anything, it rather supported my contention that the suspension imposed on me in December 2024 was unlawful. I ask the GMC to provide what law they’re relying upon….they quote this section and claim it is written in the present tense! “Section 41A(10 of the Medical Act 1983, Interim Orders, states Where an order has effect under any provision of this section, the relevant court may –..” Yes – that is the best they could come up with it. Needless to say, the convention in UK legislative drafting is the simple present tense …because the law is “always speaking”. I call and even visit the Royal Courts of Justice. The Court staff chase the Clerk …I’m asked to be patient and await the Judgement. Even up to 6th August 2025 I was told that the Judgement was coming. On 11th August 2025, I am informed by email that there will be no Judgement!! I spoke to a number of barristers and solicitors – it’s almost unheard of. They're all useless though. I get no replies to my emails to the High Court. So in November 2025, I requested the Hearing transcript. On 12th December 2025 – over 5 months after the substantive hearing – I received an Order (not a Judgement). It was a bare order – simply stating “Upon the Court hearing the substantive hearing on this matter on 10 July 2025 And upon following consideration of the documents lodged by Respondent on 15 July 2025 confirming revocation of the Interim Order pursuant to Section 41A of the Medical Act 1983, the application is dismissed.” No reasons whatsoever as to why the Judge had contradicted her own position in Court. I replied to the Court and file an application for permission to appeal – not just to McGowan (the system is so barmy that you have to ask the same judge for permission to appeal) but also to the Court of Appeal – the latter for both permission to appeal and the appeal itself concerning McGowan’s bare unreasoned order. McGowan now responds (miraculously) via the Court staff wanting a 30-minute hearing for permission to appeal – that is set for Tuesday 13 January 2026. So, yet again I am at the High Court now requesting permission to appeal. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting much. McGowan had shown she lacks the spine to address the issues – and has zero integrity. You don’t get a DBE in the UK for nothing. In fact, she started this hearing by asking the GMC to interpret the Section 41A of the Medical Act!!! Then she turned to me – the Claimant – and asked if “I understood what was being said”. I replied that I understood full well. English after all is my first language and I’m a Cambridge graduate. I can understand basic English. She clearly has difficulties though – I later learnt that she dropped English at Manchester University for Law. At the expense of sounding very snobbish, I just knew she wasn’t Oxbridge material…. I present my arguments – including case law. The GMC has no relevant case law – their arguments are “it is written in the present tense” (I did correct them that in actual fact, it was written in the simple present tense to be more precise) and that the decision of the High Court “is final”. Of course, I point out that finality is based on two aspects – firstly, getting a reasoned Judgement! I never got a judgement. I effectively got a blank piece of paper. On no grounds, could that be considered “a decision”. And secondly, if there were any errors of law, procedural irregularities …they were always appealable. Appeal however was not automatic – all that meant was that one had to request permission to appeal. Can you imagine a system where a Judge makes an error but you can’t appeal it?! I point out that every issue remains live. I even simplify it for them – I point out that in the case of rape, and using GMC logic, we’d never prosecute the rapist – after all, the rape was no longer in progess. That is not justice. The High Court seized jurisdiction by having a substantive hearing and had to produce a judgement. Of course, I understood that had I appealed after the revocation, the application would have been dismissed. McGowan sat there clearly not listening. This was merely an exercise to show there’d been a hearing. She tried to claim she has “no power”!! She then had the audacity to say “You’ve had a success. Why aren’t you satisfied with that?” I point out that I was suspended unlawfully – I had 20 years of an impeccable record and it states “misconduct” on my record. I have a right to get that unlawful suspension struck from my record and remedy with regards to the consequences I had suffered. The GMC – a public body – should be held accountable not just for my sake but for other doctors and I remind her of her own words “for the wider public interest”. In fact, I quote liberally from the transcript and point out her contradictions. At no point did she ever state – because it’s not possible – that the High Court lost jurisdiction. That’s the legal principle: “Once seized, always seized.”](https://image.24vids.com/tw-2014084863523991988/amplify_video_thumb/2014081102336438272/img/PO6AC1MzPmGnWRpm.jpg)
![‘Doctor Death’ Gives Life to Gold Mines Dave Fennell chain-smoked and studied law while winning 6 Grey Cups. He sent 3 quarterbacks to the hospital in one game, becoming 'Dr. Death' and a household name in Canada. Next Dave turned to gold exploration, building 5 ventures worth ~$5 billion. He's never shared his story publicly—until now. After dominating football, Dave Fennell's Midas touch in Guyana could lead to his greatest victory. Mining legends Louis Gignac, Rick Rule and others weigh in. "I was capable of playing very violently," recalls Fennell. "If you're going to survive as a defensive lineman. The people who are opposite you, have to be afraid of you." He played 10 seasons for the Edmonton Eskimos (renamed Elks in ‘21), appearing in 8 Grey Cups (Canada’s Super Bowl). The Eskimos won 6, including 5 in a row 1978-1982. Fennell, who turned 71 Feb 4, is chain smoking Marlboros on a Zoom call with me Feb 5. He’s reflecting on a career that spans beyond the gridiron to golden ventures. His resume includes co-founding Golden Star (US $467M sale in ‘22) and Miramar ($1.5B sale in ‘08). Fennell was a tenured director of Sabina ($1.1B sale in ‘23) and Torex ($1.2B market cap). His Reunion Gold ($485M market cap) has rapidly discovered a major gold deposit after setbacks. Fennell's sons picked up his drive too. David Jr. played Michigan State football then turned engineer. John raced luge at the Sochi Winter Olympics, now he's a corporate analyst. – Raised in a middle-class Edmonton, Alberta family, Fennell was the second of four children. “I was taught very early on, you're not allowed to quit when you start something. It was not acceptable.” He completed a 4 year undergrad degree at U of North Dakota in 3 years. Fennell could have gone to the NFL, but chose to stay in Edmonton, joining the Eskimos on the condition he’d also go to law school. It's hard to imagine a pro athlete smoking, studying law, and winning six championships today. But Dave Fennell did it all. He planned to play pro for 10 seasons, and wondered, “What do you do when the cheering stops?” Joining a law firm next, the bosses leveraged his "Dr. Death" fame for networking. Fennell recalls, “They loved taking me to the Petroleum Club on Mondays.” His law practice worked with many small miners. After three years and a Guyana field trip, Fennell decided to get into gold mining himself. At 32, Fennell founded Golden Star Resources (GSR). He partnered with Roger Morton, a U of Alberta geology professor, to explore Guyana. GSR spent $20K staking the forgotten Omai gold deposit. “It was open ground.” Anaconda Copper explored Omai extensively in the late 1940s but stopped when the Korean War began. Secrets of the Anaconda Library A private detective helped Fennell find Anaconda’s geological data. They learned of a cavernous library in Montana, holding 100 years of records. A librarian, just laid off, liked Fennell and sold him the Guyana files for $30K. GSR hired SNC Lavalin, with their top supercomputer, to process this historical information. It showed a big potential mine. Placer Dome partnered on Omai in ‘87, before walking away. Fennell didn't give up. He invited Louis Gignac’s Cambior to visit Omai during a 3 day rainstorm. Cambior ended up funding construction for a 70% stake. It produced 3.7 million gold ounces from 92-05. Renowned mining investor Rick Rule says Fennell is easy to underestimate. "The physicality obscures a great intellect and a guy that's actually very kind. He's the classic entrepreneur. When he sees an opportunity, he can't not grasp it.” Next, GSR pursued Cambior to partner in Suriname. “If I had a mine each time someone told me a story about a property, I'd be a very rich man,” Gignac says. GSR’s Rosebel discovery was in region reeling after Suriname’s civil war. “David, why don’t you settle down, get married, do something easier than this,” Gignac advised him. Fennell persisted, inviting Gignac to tour Rosebel. It poured rain again on that trip, which Gignac saw as a good omen after Omai’s success. Cambior eventually built the mine. Rosebel became one of South America’s largest, yielding over 6 million ounces. Today, it’s operated by Zijin. GSR stock jumped 600% in the early '90s thanks to these wins. Investor Mike Halvorson says GSR’s work in the Guianas and Suriname put the area on the map for mining. “Back in those days, from a political point of view, it was considered high-risk to go into the Guianas,” Gignac remembers. “It took a lot of guts for [Fennell] to get involved, and a lot of guts to follow him there. We eventually mined about twice the [initial] reserves at Omai. By doing Omai, it was that much easier to do Rosebel. We were comfortable with the region and its people. There's a lot of advantages in these countries. It's simpler. Decision makers are easier to know and be in contact with.” Halvorson remembers Fennell throwing a 'chirping' analyst into a pool on one Suriname stay. The guy skipped on the water like a stone. Fennell and Halvorson connected in Edmonton in the 1980s through their love of migratory bird hunting. “Anything that walks, flies or swims, Dave has killed,” says mining engineer Bruce McLeod, who hunts and fishes with Fennell. A massive Anaconda snake skin once adorned the crown mouldings in Fennell’s Montreal offices. At 41, Fennell lucked out as the sole bidder for Sigrist House, once King Edward VIII's Bahamian villa. Fennell lived there 28 years before downsizing. In the late 90’s, Fennell clashed with GSR's board and was pushed out. Later, GSR refocused on Africa and was sold to a Chinese company. To avoid GSR conflicts, Fennell eyed new gold regions. BHP's Hugo Dummett offered him all their gold assets for $80 million. But with few flush bidders, BHP sold the portfolio in pieces. Ivanhoe got Mongolia and discovered Oyu Tolgoi. Randgold took West Africa, and Harmony got East Africa. "If you'd have kept that package together, it'd be the second largest copper company [today]. And you'd be arguing with Newmont about who was the biggest gold company," Fennell says. He bought the Canadian assets for US $20.4 million. It had Hope Bay, a 4 million ounce gold discovery in the high arctic. Fennell dealt through Cambiex Exploration (CBX), where he’d been appointed Chair and CEO in January ‘99, when CBX was a 15 cent stock with a $3.5 million market cap. CBX split the tab with Miramar, a modest gold miner sitting on cash. Miramar swallowed CBX in 2002, appointing Fennell Executive Vice Chairman. Miramar invested about $100 million in Hope Bay and led it through permitting. In 2008, Newmont bought Miramar for $1.5 billion. Every $1 invested in CBX’s equity funding when Fennell took over in early ‘99 was worth $19.50 when Newmont acquired Miramar 9 years later. CBX shareholders made even more money through a spinout company, Ariane Gold, acquired by Cambior in ‘03. Rob McLeod, a geologist at Hope Bay, admired Fennell's strong presence, humour, and optimism. Fennell built bonds with Inuit partners through fishing and Crib games, easing the permitting process. Fennell would need that optimism for his next venture. – In 2004, Fennell listed Nevada explorer New Sleeper. A name change to Reunion Gold (RGD) came in 2006, after recruiting former GSR colleagues and pivoting again to the Giuanas. The stock ran from 30 cents to over $2 in early ‘07 on the back of a Suriname gold find. It didn’t pan out. RGD crashed to 3.5 cents during the ‘08 financial crisis. “When you take your shareholder's money and you say you're going to do this, and if it's not successful, my job is to fix that and I'm not going to roll all the stock back. I'm not going to wipe shareholders out,” Fennell says, explaining RGD’s current 1.23 billion shares. Reunion roared back above $2 again after a Guyana manganese discovery. Then, metal prices crashed, cutting RGD to one penny by 2016. “You're going to fail a hundred percent guaranteed in both exploration and football,” Fennell says. “The real question is, what are you going to do after you fail?” A US $10 million sale of the manganese project provided a lifeline. In 2019, Barrick partnered with Reunion on exploration, committing $4.2 million. Reunion was a 7 cent stock in 2020 when they found gold at Guyana’s Oko project. But, Barrick quickly abandoned the alliance and skipped a $3 million commitment. They even sued Reunion after Oko's success. In 2023, Barrick and RGD settled, owing nothing to each other. Oko moved from a prospect to a major gold deposit rapidly. An initial 2023 resource estimate showed 4.3 million ounces (indicated plus inferred). Fennell believes Oko could be the best gold mine in South America. He sees a 300--400,000 ounce per year, low-cost mine, with a 12 year initial mine life. "It’s going to be much bigger and longer,” Fennell says, optimistically. “Whether we're going to live longer is a whole different question." Reunion aims to publish a PEA study on Oko before Summer. Fennell also looks forward to a feasibility study and final permits in Q1 2015, with construction to start soon after. "From a discovery to a tier one mine in [potentially] six years, it doesn't get any better," Fennell says. He’s in Georgetown this week, talking with the Guyanese government about Oko's future. Reunion’s looking at options: build, sell, merge, or partner up. Fennell wants RGD to avoid execution risk and debt. G Mining Services, led by Fennell's old friend Gignac, is advising on Oko. They've successfully built many mines, like Fruta del Norte in Ecuador (Lundin Gold - $3.7B market cap). Gignac's G Mining Ventures, doing well and on track in Brazil, could be a key player in Oko's future. “There will be a mine [at Oko]. There's absolutely no question,” says Gignac. “The size, grade, and gold content. That's going to be the next one to put on his record.” There’s a slight problem with Venezuela’s claim over Guyana’s Essequibo region, where Oko is. Fennell isn't worried. He says the US will protect it because of Exxon and Chevron’s huge oil investments there. Gignac says Fennell hasn't changed since they first met in the late 80s. "Always glass half-full, always enthusiastic. A track record as good as anybody at finding deals, doing exploration, and developing orebodies." Fennell is honest and a consummate salesman according to Rule. “I don't think in 35 years he ever lied to me, but he would polish the living shit out of the rear view mirror.” Some colourful highlights of my 2 hour Zoom with Mr. Fennell were published in raw video form below. It’s full of wisdom about gold exploration and football. “David is one of the most low key and commercially successful entrepreneurs in [mining],” Bruce McLeod wrote. “He has played a huge part in mentoring others too. Without David I wouldn't be where I am today.” Fennell says, "We always overcome challenges. I never give up." Reunion Gold (RGD-TSXV) is worth $485 million at press time, last at 39.5 cents. Fennell owns 61 million RGD shares. He has warrants and options to purchase 12.6 million more. B. McLeod, Rule & Halvorson all own the stock. All figures CAD unless otherwise indicated. Like, Share, & Follow me Tommy Humphreys for more Big Score stories!](https://image.24vids.com/tw-1756310764544197095/ext_tw_video_thumb/1756167133699141632/pu/img/HDmCXr4un9vC0uxD.jpg)
![An interview by VERY DARK AND CORRUPT Wall Street Journal aired today [1] WSJ's terrible "journalists" (and I use that term lightly) made many false statements about Sarepta's worthless, dangerous drug and Vinay Prasad's firing [1,2] I explain how the FDA sausage is made in excruciating detail Buckle up To get readers up to speed -> In June, corrupt pharma company Sarepta Therapeutics paid $40,000 to lobbying group Michael Best Strategies (MBS) to deal with a problem [3] -> MBS had recently hired Chris LaCivita, who had close connections with "MAGA" influencer Laura Loomer [4] -> With stock down 88%, Sarepta needed to sell their very bad, very dangerous drug or the company would go bankrupt [5] -> After several deaths from the drug this year, FDA official Vinay Prasad said "no way" and kicked the drug to the curb [2,6] -> Sarepta panicked and paid MBS (we believe) to deal with Prasad [3,4] -> If this story is right, LaCivita recruited Laura Loomer to take down Prasad [4,7] -> Loomer said she was defending Trump, but she was lying [7] -> She was defending taxpayer-funded payouts to a worthless, corrupt company [7] -> Laura Loomer so brave A history of bad drugs and regulatory failure -> This is one of the worst pharma scandals in American history and corrupt mainstream media isn't covering it -> Sarepta has a very long, troubled history [8] -> For more than a decade, every major Sarepta FDA drug approval has required INTENSE political intervention [8,9] -> Scientists at FDA have been repeatedly overruled [8,9] -> Many scientists have resigned, very publicly, over these POLITICAL decisions, some writing scathing public criticisms of these terrible decisions [10,11] -> The most recent resignation by Vinay Prasad is not something new; it follows in a long tradition [2,10] -> In fact, standards have dramatically deteriorated since the first controversies about the company's drugs in the 2010s [8,9] -> Prasad was trying to hold the line in the face of rapidly deteriorating standards at the agency [2,6] -> For that, pharma launched a coup--a literal coup of a drug regulator [4,6] -> This is unprecedented -> Banana republic sht, unbelievably corrupt 2016: first Sarepta drug approval and the "highly unusual" decision -> The first Sarepta drug approved by FDA was called Exondys 51 [8] -> This drug was for patients with mutations in dystrophin, a muscle protein [8] -> This is a debilitating and fatal disease affecting children [8] -> Exondys 51 increased dystrophin by 0.2% of normal levels [8,12] -> Unsurprisingly, there was no good evidence the drug worked [8,12] -> Why would it? It increases the protein from zero to 1/500th of normal levels -> One reviewer wrote: "I can find no precedent of an accelerated approval for a marketing application where the effect size on the surrogate endpoint is as small as 0.3%." [12] -> The study submitted by the company included no proper control group [12] -> The techniques used were so bad not even a first-year PhD student would do a study that way -> This the level of work you would expect from a mediocre undergraduate with no guidance -> It's almost like it was so bad on purpose -> (Narrator: it was on purpose) -> Nerd time: -> One reviewer wrote: "The Western blots submitted by the applicant for Study 201 were oversaturated, unreliable, and uninterpretable." [12] -> Another wrote: "Because CDER also determined that the conditions under which the original IHC analysis was performed were inadequate, including that the reader was not masked to sequence and time, the Center requested a re-reading of the stored images by three masked pathologists under different conditions. The IHC results from the reread were not nearly as favorable, as compared to the initial IHC results reported by Sarepta." [12] -> "The lack of concordance between the IHC and the Western Blot results is 'striking'" [12] -> "Study 201/202 had fundamental flaws, including baseline biopsies from external controls who could differ in unknown ways from study subjects, Week 180 biopsies from different muscles than baseline, and potential protein degradation in stored baseline samples." [12] -> And on and on. -> FDA commissioner Robert Califf wrote at the time: the submitted study was "characterized by major flaws in the clinical study design" and "Blinded experts assembled by the FDA fundamentally debunked this study, which has yet to be retracted and continues to be cited" [9,12] -> That's right, the FDA commissioner expressed dismay that the study that the company used to gain approval hadn't yet been retracted, it was so bad [9] -> Senior FDA official Janet Woodcock decided to approve before scientific review team had even voted [9,12] -> Woodcock be like: yeah i'm going to decide before you guys can because i know what you're going to say lol -> Despite external intense pressure, FDA scientists voted against Exondys 51's efficacy [9,12] -> They then voted against its accelerated approval [9,12] -> The review team filed an appeal with FDA commissioner after "passionate" disagreement with Woodcock [9,12] -> One reviewer called Woodcock's decision "unprecedented" [12] -> In a 126-page report, FDA commissioner Califf called Woodcock's decision "highly unusual" [9] -> The FDA board wrote: "[Woodcock's] involvement here appears to have upended the typical review and decision-making process. ... Care should be taken to avoid the appearance of interfering with the integrity of scientific reviews at the lower levels of a Center." [9] -> Again, the data were unbelievably bad, literally every technique in the study was inappropriately used [12] -> I would fire an undergraduate student who did science like this, immediately -> FDA's chief scientist accused Sarepta of "serious irresponsibility" for selectively publishing only some of the data [9] -> Even Woodcock, who approved the drug, called the research "seriously deficient" [12] -> Yes, even the person who approved the drug over the heads of FDA's scientists said the research was horrible [12] -> Still, FDA tried to bury their heads in the sand and beg that, basically, Sarepta pretty please do a better job next time -> FDA commissioner: "The utmost attention should be paid to optimizing the methodological rigor of [future] trial[s]" [9] -> FDA also demanded a clinical trial "to verify the benefit" of the drug [8] -> Welp, this was in 2016 [8] -> The trial results are supposed to be available in 2026, maybe [13] -> Or maybe later, depending on how much money needs to be made first -> As an article published in Nature three years later despaired of the decision: "The approval was conditional on the company agreeing to conduct a two-year post-approval trial to show Exondys 51’s efficacy. But by August 2019, the company had yet to begin such a trial and in the meantime had profited from sales of $300 million in 2018." [13] -> If it sounds like Sarepta used political pressure to get its drug approved and then tried to avoid actually publishing the study showing it didn't work, it sounds that way because that's exactly what happened [13] -> FDA commissioner after deferring to Woodcock: "I am confident this unique situation will not set a general precedent for drug approvals under the accelerated approval pathway, as the statute and regulations are clear each situation must be evaluated on its own merits based on the totality of data and information." [9] -> This statement was profoundly naive, and the historical record bears this out [8,14] -> Three FDA scientists resigned, including the lead reviewer of the drug, understanding the grave implications of the collapse of scientific standards and where they would lead [10,11] -> One was John K. Jenkins, M.D. Director, Office of New Drugs Center for Drug Evaluation and Research/FDA [10] -> In a presentation given just before his resignation, he wrote: -> "Path taken by Sarepta NOT a good model for other development programs" [10] -> Crucially: -> "Upholding statutory standards for approval in face of hopes and desires of patients, families, sponsors, and investors is a very difficult job" [10] -> "Personal attacks on FDA reviewers creates an atmosphere of distrust and isolation rather than collaboration" [10] This brings us to WHY Sarepta's drug was approved Facebook FDA -> So why did the drug get approved? -> Basically, Sarepta propagandized extremely desperate patients [9,15] -> They used miraculous snake oil promises and patients believed them -> Remember that this is life or death for patients, and they are extremely vulnerable -> Sarepta also professionally trained some patients to give testimonials to FDA and congress [15] -> The patients then went to congressmen who don't have time to understand the science [15] -> They gave emotional stories to congressmen [15] -> The result: -> Letter from 109 House members [15] -> Letter from 24 Senate members [15] -> And a media circus documented in the New York Times [16] -> Patients screaming at scientists during meetings [9] -> 2,792 emails written to FDA urging approval [12] -> One of them: "Dear Dr. califf: How is it that everyone in and around DMD understands this simple Idea and the science geniuses at FDA don't? You stupid fckers are costing each and every DMD kids days of their lives with your Moronic Dystrophin dance. Time to get a fcking clue" [12] -> Upon approval, a journalist for Reuters wrote: "owing to pressure from patient advocates, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Monday approved a treatment for Duchenne muscular dystrophy even though an outside panel of experts and the agency's own reviewers questioned the drug's efficacy" [17] -> A commentary in Nature Medicine was also published called "Railroading at the FDA" [9] -> Its author wrote: "In the words of one FDA committee member, Exondys lowers the agency's evidentiary standard for drug effectiveness 'to an unprecedented nadir.'" [9] -> A highly critical commentary was also published in Science, titled "Sarepta gets an approval - Unfortunately" [18] -> The article's author pharma veteran Derek Lowe wrote: "The company... called up Duchenne-affected boys and their families to plead with the FDA, and won over Janet Woodcock, and that appears to be enough. Is this going to be the new way to get a drug approved? Run a trial in a dozen people, generate unconvincing data, and then lobby Janet Woodcock? I share the worries that this might open the floodgates, because after all, Sarepta got their drug through." [18] -> One FDA reviewer ended in an equally grim note: ". Approval of this NDA would send the signal that political pressure and even intimidation – not science – guides FDA decisions, with extremely negative consequences. The public is well aware of this development program: the meager size of the study population, the marginal (at best) effect size, the Division’s dim view of the efficacy data, and the robust activism of some members of the DMD community. Many would be amazed at an approval action, because other DMD drugs, recently turned down for approval, appeared to provide stronger evidence of efficacy. ...The ramifications here are profound. The public will perceive that it was their unprecedented lobbying efforts that made the difference and earned eteplirsen its accelerated approval. For the future, this will have the effect of strongly encouraging public activism and intimidation as a substitute for data, which is one of the worst possible consequences for communities with rare diseases. This type of activism is not what was envisioned for patient-focused drug development." [12] -> A new era was born -> Activism had replaced data -> Facebook had fried people's brains -> And now Facebook-fried brains had fried FDA too -> FDA's credibility as a regulatory agency would now be hollowed out -> FDA's Facebook age had begun -> But the worst was yet to come Sarepta approvals: 2016 to present -> Three more drugs were approved from Sarepta on the same shoddy basis, proving Califf's promises that Exondys 51 was an isolated case empty [8,14] -> But things would take a turn for the worse with Sarepta's newest drug Elevidys in 2024 [19] -> At last a rigorous clinical trial looking at actual clinical outcomes was published [19,20] -> All would be put to rest -> At long last the issue could be resolved with HARD CLINICAL DATA -> There was only one problem -> The trial failed to show any benefit according to the primary outcome [19,20] -> The surrogate biomarker of micro-dystrophin meant absolutely nothing; it wasn't actually helping patients [19,20] -> What did FDA scientists do? They voted against approval. Of course [19] -> How could they not? The drug didn't actually work in the clinical trial [19] -> It's the only thing that made sense, since FDA is a scientific agency -> AND THEY WERE OVERRULED AGAIN BY PETER MARKS [19] -> YES THAT'S RIGHT, OVERRULED YET AGAIN -> PHARMA WINS AGAIN -> HAHAHAHAHAHA PHARMA ALWAYS WINS YOU FOOLS -> What happened is that Marks crossed his eyes somewhat, trying to make the words on the page blurry -> He prayed really hard, "my god please give me a sign, something, anything, I need this for my career" -> lzzosolsolzzolzozlslzolosllslozllzlzl -> Marks was trying really hard to see SOMETHING, come on come on, give me SOMETHIGN he said -> And he said: wait, look, there are these secondary, exploratory endpoints and a two of them look pretty good, I'LL APPROVE [19,20] -> AHAHAHHAHAHA YES PHAMRA WINS AGAIN -> And Marks said, "Thank you pharma go- I mean god, not pharma god, why did I just say that, FCK" -> The trial was explicitly designed for what Marks did NOT to happen [20] -> Once the primary endpoint was not met, the secondary endpoints couldn't even be statistically tested [20] -> And the trial explicitly said that they could not be interpreted the way Marks interpreted them [20] -> They were not adjusted for multiplicity and they were, like expression of dystrophin, simply bad endpoints [20] -> These two secondary endpoints were time to rise from lying on the floor and the 10-meter walk/run tests [20] -> Subjects who received the Elevidys performed, on average, about 0.5 seconds better than placebo recipients on these tasks [20] -> However several facts must be borne in mind when interpreting these: -> 1. At the time of testing, patients receiving the drug were receiving more corticosteroids than placebo patients, biasing the results [20] -> 2. Blinding might have been broken because those receiving the drug experienced lots of nausea and vomiting from the drug (~70%) [20] -> 3. These differences were tiny and may be attributable to chance, since the natural course of the disease varies widely [20] -> Marks knows this but who cares? Pharma I mean Facebook needed to be placated Elevidys: the drug -> To understand why this is so messed up, one must understand a few things -> On a Bayesian basis, one must assume that Elevidys is harmful until proven otherwise, for two reasons: -> 1. All drugs are potentially "toxic", but some toxins heal: by default you must assume it is a toxin that does not heal because this is what is actually usually the case; you need evidence that it actually heals -> 2. Elevidys IN PARTICULAR must be assumed to be harmful until proven otherwise because of the very nature of the drug -> Let's do a breakdown of the basic science of Elevidys that supports this (Bayesian) hypothesis: -> Gene therapy that permanently integrates into human genome [21] -> Meant to replace dystrophin, the protein that these patients cannot produce themselves [21] -> Preferentially targets muscle but gets expressed everywhere [21] -> Killed three people this year [6,21] -> Costs $3.2 million per injection [21] -> Truncated version of the protein it is supposed to replace [21] -> 3X shorter than the real protein [21] -> Has to be truncated because the technology cannot create the full protein [21] -> Because it's an abnormal protein, it's foreign, so immune system attacks it [21] -> Patients injected with drug are basically given an autoimmune disease [21] -> Patients have to be given anti-inflammatories to fight the disease that the drug causes [21] -> Causes terrible muscle inflammation [21] -> Inflames the heart, heart walls thicken because of the inflammation [21] -> Blows up the liver, causes acute liver injury and death [21] Drug should actually be assumed harmful, not beneficial -> Given all of the above, since the drug failed to meet its primary endpoint, it should actually be considered harmful by default, not beneficial [19,20] -> In other words, what we would actually expect if we added more patients and did an even larger study... -> Is that the drug would do worse than placebo, i.e., patients taking the drug would do worse than those taking placebo -> Why isn't this the default interpretation? -> They are reading the study with an intervention bias -> An intervention bias is natural, which is why "do no harm" is such a central tenet of medicine -> If I may put forward a thesis: most of Vinay Prasad's 500+-paper body of work has been dedicated to demonstrating the "do no harm" principle empirically [22] -> Rose-colored glasses study interpreters are simply not applying this principle properly and are thus failing scientifically in the most fundamental way -> Incomprehensible -> Back in 2016, scientists were adamant that the approval of Sarepta's first drug indicated the profound deterioration of scientific standards [8,9] -> But this latest approval is even worse: actual clinical data is now being overruled -> No standards at all are being enforced anymore; anything can now be approved based on any evidence whatsoever -> What Vinay was trying to do was simply to stop the unrelenting downslide -> And his firing punctuated that downslide for what it was The WSJ segment -> When Elevidys was approved, former FDA chief scientist and one of the original reviewers of Sarepta's first drug Luciana Borio said: -> "I don’t know what to say. Peter Marks makes a mockery of scientific reasoning and approval standards that have served patients well over decades. This type of action also promotes the growing mistrust in scientific institutions like the FDA." [23] -> To return to this video, these two WSJ reporters show an incredible level of ignorance and arrogance -> Finley says that the drug is "clearly" beneficial by misreading the secondary endpoints, just like Marks did -> An FDA memo from last year says about these endpoints: "Under these circumstances, they are misleading and cannot guide any stakeholders—including patients, family members and caregivers, and prescribers—in making informed decisions about the potential benefit of treatment with ELEVIDYS." [20] -> It really doesn't get any clearer than that -> But these two journalists are overruling the actual scientists, just like Marks did -> One of the most incredible comments during this interview was the complaint that "90% of clinical trials fail", as if that's bad thing [1] -> It's actually a good thing; most drugs suck; failing in clinical trial actually allows us to use only the drugs that don't suck -> These people don't understand the most fundamental purpose of the clinical trial -> They think clinical trials failing is a bad thing, as if it means that patients now won't get to use a useful drug -> No, it's a good thing, because it means that patients won't be exposed unnecessarily to a useless drug that might harm them -> The level of ignorance really is unbelievable -> What's worse is that these "journalists" defend their decision -> But what they did is exploit social media hysteria caused by Laura Loomer [1,7] -> Following up on her heels with editorials, using her as pharma attack dog [1,4] -> This is a huge blow to WSJ's credibility, and they know it -> Unbelievably shameful Where do we go from here? -> The Vinay Prasad firing creates a serious crisis of credibility at FDA [2,6] -> Up to this point, we could call these approvals a difference of opinion, but as we've seen, that's a huge stretch -> But any illusion of that is now shattered: the firing shows that drug regulation is explicitly political -> Janet Woodcock: approve, keep job -> Peter Marks: approve, keep job -> Vinay Prasad: block, transparently fired -> Make a decision that is anti-pharma and lose your job: that's the message -> Who can trust any decision at FDA anymore? -> RFK Jr. and Marty Makary both stand behind Vinay Prasad [24] -> Trump went along with lockdowns, he went along with mask mandates, he went along with all of the Covid pseudoscience that he now decries -> He should reverse course and not go along with this -> Trump has created a profound crisis of credibility at FDA and needs to fix it](https://image.24vids.com/tw-1952294845248114806/amplify_video_thumb/1952292444621451264/img/SPXp7ZpvQZ3FQV7_.jpg)
![My fellow Kenyans, Many of you have seen my recent posts about the deadly cancer that is corruption in our country. In my last post, I tried to paint a picture of the disconnect between our potential as a country and the economic circumstances we find ourselves in today, and the connection between corruption and the incalculable pain and suffering and cruelty that is meted out every single day to the most vulnerable among us by thieves operating out of public office. And after covering the goings-on in Mandera County, I told you that in my honest opinion, our governments exist to cater for the filthy-rich lifestyles of the vilest and most corrupt among us, at the expense of everyone else. I received tremendous support from all of you, for speaking on behalf of so many struggling Kenyans who don’t have a voice, or the audience necessary to spark the much-needed discussion about where we are heading as a country. But even with all that support, I have received messages asking me to be careful. One compatriot told me: “prepare to be relentlessly pursued, threatened, enticed, guilt-tripped, and gas-lit”. This is from a someone who knows how our government operates, and how it uses violence and its monopoly on power to silence those who question why politicians are stealing so much. I am not naive about the dangers of speaking up and calling out thieves who control state machinery, and who possess the ability to shut me up in a few seconds. But I will tell you why we CAN NOT and MUST NOT keep quiet. In November of 2023, I stumbled upon the story of a young man from Turkana, Calvin Esekon Esewit , who, despite scoring an A-, and getting an acceptance into medical school, spent two years not knowing whether his dreams of becoming a doctor would ever come true. I was moved by that story in a way that I can never adequately explain. I could not understand how it is possible that, in our country, a young man who appears to be every parent’s dream child can spend two years in limbo while we as a country possess the ability to invest in our best and brightest. And so, I spent weeks trying to chase down Calvin to see how I could help him attend college. After a lot of searching, I finally found Calvin, and by this time he had managed to get some help and is now in college. While this story has a great ending, it did not to be this way. And we know that the number of cases that end like this, with some success, are a small fraction of those ones which end tragically, with broken dreams. This is what happens when corruption consumes anything and everything in a country. It destroys lives. See attached video to learn about Calvin's story. I tell you all this story because it provides context to today's topic. For one story like this one that you see on the news, there are millions that never make the news. But they are real situations, nonetheless. There are millions of your compatriots who are devastated by this killer cancer of corruption that is perpetuated by people that you and I have put into public office ostensibly to improve our lives. They go into these offices and abuse the trust you bestowed upon them and deny you and everyone else a decent opportunity in life. You see, Calvin and millions of other victims of this shameless level of corruption and plunder have no voice, and no real ability to look the thieves that are destroying lives and generations of Kenyans in eye and tell them to stop this unbearable pain and the cruelty. This is the reason I embarked on this journey to attempt to expose this shameful situation. Watch the attached video of Calvin’s situation, and I am sure that you will agree that the millions of Calvins in our country need a voice, NO MATTER THE RISK. The thieves that are destroying the futures of millions of children just so they can have beachside homes in Miami, Dubai and other places count on the idea that most people will fear for their lives, and therefore not speak up. They count on the growing apathy in the Kenyan psyche. But we cannot give in to that. We cannot cower to thieves. We must look them straight in the eye and tell them that they MUST STOP. If we don't, our children and their children are guaranteed the same level of cruelty. And so with that, today I want to talk about the utterly insane crime scene that is Turkana County. I don’t know any other way to describe it, other than, it is a “shit-show”. Just follow along, and let me know if you disagree. As I did in my previous commentary, I will ask you to indulge me a little bit, and allow me to use a couple of pictures, because pictures speak louder than a thousand words. The first picture shows the state-of-the art County Government offices, that the County Government of Turkana decided to invest an ungodly amount of money on. Close to a billion shillings. The second picture is a classroom in session. In Turkana County. These two realities are occurring in parallel in the same county, at the same time. Ladies and gentlemen, let me just tell you that I do not go out of my way to find bad news. I want stories that would help re-affirm our belief in the fundamental decency of human beings. When I find good news as I review these Counties’ decisions and how they behave with our resources, I will be the first one to report it to you. But I don’t have any good news today. I have bad news. If you read my commentary yesterday and were offended by what you saw, I am afraid you might not make it to the end of this article, because what you will hear will be quite shocking. The cancer of corruption, particularly at the County Government level, is worse than your wildest imagination. And so, as I like to do, I like to start off by putting some numbers on the table for us to use as reference points. Bear in my that all the information I put in this article is publicly available. Nothing came to me through a whistle blower. The first number is KSH 100 Billion. With a B. In the last decade or so, you and I, through the National Government, has sent over KSH 100 billion to Turkana County. To support recurrent expenditure, and development. For example, in the 2022-2023 fiscal year, we sent KSH 12.6 billion. In the 2021-2022 fiscal year, we sent KSH 11.4 billion. And on and on and on. The second number is 1 million. This is the population of Turkana County. The third number is KSH 18.4 billion. This was Turkana County’s budget for the 2022-2023 fiscal year. The fourth number is KSH 190 million. This was the amount of money that Turkana County was able to generate on its own accord within the county, from all its investments and other activities in the period in question. This number is an important proxy, in my view, for the value of the county’s economic prospects for the foreseeable future, and to people that are not driven by greed and corruption, would be an important consideration when they are thinking about how and where to deploy your money as taxpayers. If you are doing the math, Turkana County, for the 2022-2023 fiscal year, was only able to raise 1% of the funds needed to keep the lights on. 99% came from you and I, and a tiny amount from grants. The next number is KSH 129, 040. This is the average ANNUAL [emphasis added] income of a resident of Turkana County ( Keep that number in mind when we are discussing the massive theft of public funds by Turkana County leaders. The next number is 80%. 80% of the residents of Turkana County live below the poverty line. They have a really difficult time putting food on the table. ( The next number is KSH 12 Million. This is the basic salary of the Governor of Turkana County before other benefits that, as I explained yesterday, can often double the salary. Remember the “housing allowance”, the “hardship allowance”, the “commuter allowance”, the “risk allowance”, the “extraneous allowance”, etc.? Remember that? I still cannot figure out, for the life of me, what “extraneous” means in the context of County business, but we don’t time to dwell on this. The next number is 93. The Governor of Turkana County makes 93 times the average Turkana County resident’s annual income. 93 times! The next number is 82%. This was the percentage of people that were illiterate in Turkana County in 2013 ( Could not read or write. A point to note about the above literacy figure. Ten years later, and despite over KSH 100 billion is spent in Turkana County, including many billions for education, that literacy rate HAS NOT CHANGED ONE BIT. Only 20% of the population can read or write today. ( KSH 829 million. This is how much it cost to build the County Government offices. Yes, the ones shown in the first picture. KSH 120 million. The County Government decided that it was prudent to pay a contractor KSH 120 million to construct the Governor’s personal residence. Get this, even after this payment, no construction took place. The money was stolen. All of it. KSH 90 Million. This is the amount that the County Government paid to another contractor, to build the Governor a mansion, having previously lost KSH 120 million. So, the tally for the Governor’s residence now stands at KSH 210 million. Never mind that the limit allowed by law is KSH 45 million. KSH 5 billion. In the last days of his term in office, an outgoing Governor of Turkana, Koli Nanok, EGH. , sought to inflate pending bills by adding KSH 5 billion so that it can be paid to his criminal cartel. KSH 5 billion. We have our key numbers, ladies and gentlemen, so let us discuss. So, we have a county that is dead last in literacy, and in the top 2 of the poorest counties in the republic. Only 20% of the population can read. The Governor earns 92 times the average citizen. The Governor lives in a house that cost over KSH 200 million. When he leaves his house in the morning, he goes to his office that cost KSH 829 million. And this is all happening when 80% of the County residents struggle to put food on the table. Those are the facts, and they are not in dispute. During the same time, the County Government geniuses decide to build the Speaker of the County Assembly a house. And a home office, and a garage. The house was initially estimated to cost KSH 75 million. But due to circumstances that not a soul in the government could explain to auditors, the contract expired before the house was completed, and the County Government found a new contractor to complete the job for an additional KSH 29 million. But this palace in the jungle worth apparently worth over KSH 100 million in Turkana County was not enough. The County proceeded to build the Speaker a guest house for another KSH 19 million, and a few other amenities, and so the whole cost went to KSH 276 million! The legal limit for a Speaker’s house is KSH 35 million, and they spent close to KSH 130 million just for one residence. By this time, I am sure you are getting tired of these obscene numbers. You and I work, and pay taxes. Nobody pays you 92 times the income your average neighbor is making. And for sure nobody will drop KSH 100 million to build you a house. These are the perks of working in government in a poor country. Go figure. And so, as a country, we need to answer for ourselves the question I posed yesterday, which is, what is the point of government? What is its role in our lives. If this level of criminality and pillaging can occur in our country in the midst of so much poverty, questioning the need for government is a totally valid question. I said in my last post that, when the average citizen looks at the thug on the street and the government, and is unable to discern any meaningful difference between them, that society from that point on is on its journey to becoming a failed state. A journey to anarchy. Over the last two months or so, Kenyans have been shouting at the top of their lungs, begging for their government to listen. To hear them out. Kenyans have asked that their government stop this unbelievable level of plunder. Dozens of Kenyans have died, thousands injured, and many more are missing today. To this day, the people that govern us continue to use the power of the gun to subdue Kenyans, until they can take everything in their sight. And so, as a society, we all have to ask whether today there is any difference between the thug on the street and our governments. Every Kenyan will have to answer this question for themselves. And before answering this question, everyone needs to remember the many Calvins in our society. Smart, upright children whose only crime is to be born in an unforgiving, lawless, and corrupt purgatory that is Kenya today. For myself, I have concluded that there is no difference between the thug on the street and our governments, county and national alike. If you can see any meaningful difference, let me know. I am willing to listen. So despite over KSH 100 billion in money sent to Turkana County, there is almost no measurable improvement in people’s life today. None. And it makes sense, when you look at how that money is spent. I want you to forget for a second the obscene obsession by the County Government with spending ungodly amounts of money on themselves. The houses, etc. If you step back and look at how the government is actually spending the hard-earned money on other things, you will be depressed. I am telling you that I wept three times in the middle of the night trying to make sense of this crazy situation in Turkana County. Three times. I have never imagined that human beings can be so greedy and cold-blooded. Think about this: In the couple of years I reviewed, the County spent around KSH 400 million annually in “tourism” initiatives, including marketing, and apparently upgrading certain facilities. KSH 400 million for tourism. In Turkana County. In 1 year. KSH 400 million per year in marketing and other money pits. The government’s own website says that the county gets around 3000 visitors per month. Around 36,000 per year. That’s them saying that, on their website. Are you curious to know the return on that KSH 400 million investment? I have an answer for you. Remember that I told you that the County has never raised more than KSH 200 million in a year within the county, despite its KSH 18.4 billion budget? Let me walk you through the breakdown of the absolutely embarrassing shit-show that is the County Government’s “own source revenue” operations. In 2022-2023, the County Government collected KSH 190 million locally against their KSH 18.4 billion budget. 1% of the budget. Remember, there is absolutely no requirement on the County to cut costs, or achieve certain local revenue targets today. So they raised KSH 45 million in single business permits, KSH 72 million in CESS, KSH 8 million in market fee, KSH 9 million in “slaughter fees”. And then finally, there is the return on the tourism investment that you were looking for. A whopping KSH 209, 000 in “park fees”. KSH 209,000 in fees, after investing KSH 400 million. And so, take this as an example and extrapolate it across the entire budget, and you can see how one can spend KSH 100 billion and get NOTHING in return. You don’t need to be a genius to see the absurdity of this situation. Let me explain using an example that should illustrate the utter dimwittedness of this situation. Remember the KSH 100 billion sent to Turkana by you and me? Part of this amount is supposed to be for “service delivery”, or “recurrent expenditure”. Usually about 70% of the budget. The balance, 30%, is designed to go to development projects. With that in mind, from KSH 100 billion, the County apparently has made KSH 30 billion worth of investments, right? 30% of the KSH 100 billion. Now, if you employed someone to run a business for you, and they asked you to invest KSH 30 billion, which is no small fortune, at some point you would have to start seeing returns, right? That’s common sense, isn’t it? So, when we look at the revenues streams that make up this paltry sum of KSH 190 million, and see things like “slaughter fees’ and “market fees”, what does it tell you? It tells me there is no real “development” happening in that county. Trust me, if you had real development totaling KSH 30 billion, you would have corporate taxes in the hundreds of millions or billions, a booming real estate market, rising wages and standards of living, etc., low unemployment, etc. You would not have 80% of the people living hand-to mouth, and a County Government that can not afford to support itself for 5 days out of the year that has 365 days! We do not have enough time, trust me, to deal with the shit-show that is Turkana County. Dealing with that mess would require a forensic team. I will just highlight a few of other “in your-face” type of theft of public funds, and then conclude my submission. A government that has a budget of KSH 18.4 billion annually, and which has never raised more than 1% of its budget had the wisdom to do the following with your money: · Spend KSH 222 million on a project building something that NOBODY uses. You got that right. They spent KSH 222 million on a facility that NOBODY uses. KSH 222 million gone to waste, in a county that is dead last in pretty much all measures of human progress. · Remember the County Government offices that cost KSH 829 million? The County spent KSH 82 million on “air-conditioning” for that building. · Despite the County Spending hundreds of millions for the top three officers of the County, the Governor and his Deputy, in the 2022-2023 year, illegally charged the county (you and I) KSH 2.2 million in housing allowance! · Built two facilities for KSH 16 million, that were completed, but NOBODY uses them. · Entered into a contract for the construction of a plastic use facility for KSH 13 million in 2021. The contractor gets paid KSH 4.9 million, and has never been seen since. · Paid out KSH 62 million in salaries that were not supportable in just one year. They could not point to anybody and say, that is who we paid. · Paid out KSH 27 million in legal fees that nobody could say what they related to. And the County’s Legal Advisor, who, in 2022-2023, had a budget of KSH 123 million, apparently did not know anything about it! · Had an outstanding bill at Kenya Revenue Authority in the amount of KSH 486 million, that did not show up on the County Government’s financial statements. Think about that. KSH 486 million owned to the Kenya Revenue Authority, and that liability is not on the financial statements! This only means that someone took those funds for themselves, which is why the liability would be missing from the county’s books. · Could not account for KSH 367 million in expenditures for 2022-2023. KSH 367 million, in unexplained expenses. · Awarded a contract worth over KSH 200 million to a bidder with no bank statement, against the law. This contract was entered into and approved before the statutory time after the bidding process lapsed. Someone was in a hurry to get paid. KSH 200 million, illegally awarded to a bidder who did not have a 6-month bank statement. · Apparently purchased KSH 1.5 billion in assets in 2022-2023, but kept no records of the said assets. For this reason, NOBODY can verify where these assets are located. KSH 1.5 billion. Let me just say this. In my last article, the most common critique was that it was too long. Too many words. I did not intend to make another long article. Trust me when I tell you this, we do not have the time to detail half of the problems in Turkana County. For just 1 year! We do not. Now, you recall my point about how societies descend to madness and anarchy. In our country today, our leaders are accusing those of us who are agitating for honest and transparent governance of being traitors to the country. They call us anarchists, criminals, and merchants of chaos. They are questioning our patriotism. You have all seen the government and its horde of propagandists threatening the Ford Foundation and others because they may have helped civil society keep the lights on, and investigative journalists to have the capacity to continue to do the Lord’s work of investigating criminality in government. As though citizens are so dumb and ignorant, that they cannot see what is going on. The reason why millions of Calvins in this country will never graduate from college and earn a decent living is not because of the Ford Foundation. No. It is because of the thieves we have in office today, like the ones in Turkana County. In this post, I copy our leaders, the President and his deputy. I copy them because I want them to help Kenyans understand the following conundrum, about crime and criminals. There is nothing so special or peculiar about criminals or where they pop up. There are criminals in the US, Canada, France, and other places. Just like we have criminals in Kenya. The difference between banana republics and failed states, and civilized societies, is WHAT we do to and about criminals. In civilized societies, criminals are prosecuted and punished heavily. They are shunned. In some places, those charged with serious crimes such as corruption are executed. These are societies that are committed to sending the message that corruption, which robs citizens of their rights, is not acceptable. And they demonstrate this commitment by heavily punishing those who steal from the most vulnerable in society. In Kenya, we see the opposite. Criminals are exalted. They are promoted and embraced in government. It was just last week that the president unveiled his nominees for his Cabinet. Among them, are the likes of Hassan Ali Joho, EGH. , @GovWOparanya , and Davis Chirchir, ALL people who have been accused or charged with massive corruption against Kenyans. And am sure you remember that I mentioned Koli Nanok, EGH. , the man who tried to steal KSH 5 billion in his last days in office. Would you believe it if I told you that he works in government, at State House? He plunded billions of your money, got no measurable improvement in the lives of his subjects, and now has a government job in State House. Let that sink in. And so, the question is, how is it that in a country of 55 million people, with thousands of highly qualified people who have never ever stolen from Kenyans, he ends up with the criminals and thieves in the government, despite the fact that their crimes are in the public domain? How is this possible? Is it possible that these thieves possess a certain unique ability to run government, save Kenyans billions, and solve problems in a way that the president performs a cost-benefit analysis, and the benefits outweigh the costs of their theft? If not, what message does it send to Kenyans, when their own president puts into office known thieves? I think that is a fair question, don’t you? Dr. Ekuru Aukot Rigathi Gachagua William Samoei Ruto, PhD Okiya Omtatah Okoiti Citizen TV Kenya Nation Breaking News TI-Kenya CNN County Government of Turkana](https://image.24vids.com/tw-1818840969066037558/ext_tw_video_thumb/1818834432502951936/pu/img/ab9du2ECDO-A_5N7.jpg)