Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Gold Bullion Development (GBB.v) defends normal industry standards

Rant alert


And thus your humble scribe received a mail from Frank J Basa, President, CEO and Chairman of Gold Bullion Development Corp (GBB.v). Mr Basa wrote to complain about this post featured on IKN dated July 8th (i.e. last week) that pointed out how GBB.v was smearing its drill results to try and make them out to be something they're not. And oh-amaze-me-again, his company is pumped by that prize fool and scumball liar, Louis 'Lobito' James of Casey Research

So to Basa's mail. As well as requesting that the post be removed from the blog (you gotta be freakin' joking, dude), Basa defended the NR about his drilling by explaining that (and we quote) "What we do is normal industry standards."

That was interesting to take in context, and the context is the accusation of 'smearing' (i.e. taking a short, higher grade intersect, adding in the worthless rock around the hit and making it look like a company has a whole big wide meterage of economic rock on its hands when in fact it's all a big crock). In the main news release of GBB.v in question (though there are plenty of others displaying the same level of BS) the headline offered to the world was that GBB.v had found "80 metres of 1.36g/t gold". But in fact, if you run the breakdown of that 80m intersect through Brent Cook's handy-dandy drill hole interval calculator, you'll see that what GBB.v really has is one single metre of a vein hit at 322.5m downhole which grades 89.83g/t gold, and all the other 79m of width come to a piffling, measley and totally uneconomic 0.24g/t gold. Screenshot for your pleasure:

This is a classic, typical example of smearing, ladies and gentlemen. That 79m of 0.24g/t would cost far too much money to bring it overground for the tiny amount of gold it contains, but that doesn't stop Basa and his crew from making out that it's all lovely crunchy goodness. And if you think a major mining company is up for clearing away a third of a kilometre of hard rock in order to access that 89g/t vein that's a metre wide, I'd really like to show you a bridge I have for sale right now. Low deposit, friendly credit terms, low interest rate, call now.

I digress. This smearing is what Frank J Basa of GBB.v defends as "normal industry standards" and that's really the whole point, isn't it?

  • It's normal industry standards to have 1000 prospects and deposits out there and only ever get one of those 1000 into production.
  • It's normal industry standards to take a crappy drill intersection and make it look like something else.
  • It's normal industry standards to pull the wool over the eyes of people who know no different.
  • It's normal industry standards to rely on paid pumpers with no sense of geology to promote companies to the masses.
  • It's normal industry standards to regard your own patch of moose pasture as the next Voisey's Bay.

What passes for "normal" in the wild'n'whacky world of Canadian junior mining isn't normal where the vast majority of humanity operates, namely in bleedin' reality mate, so we thank Frank Basa for his solid defence of normal industry practices. Meanwhile we at IKN will continue to search out and recommend companies that go far beyond such mediocrity. We prefer to reco those who give existing and potential shareholders something far above the crummy Canadian norm and more akin to respect and proper treatment. GBB.v is highly unlikely to be included in the list.