Yeah, we miss NMT being the lone internet destination for criticism of the TCOT auto-hagiography of Greg Mortenson. Jon Krakauer’s expose validates our suspicions, although it fails to explore the likely role the CIA played lubricating the works. Yet even today Mortenson’s acolytes still defend his million little fictions as serving a good cause, and his non-school building expenditures as whims due their imperfect savior. So let’s be clear about Mortenson’s dishonest finances. With the Pennies For Peace raised by schoolchildren, Mortenson buys copies of his own books, at retail price, to boost their rankings, and to ensure his author royalties, which do not flow back to his charity CAI, while it pays the expenses to promote his books.

You don’t care what our neighborhood Pikes Peak Justice & Peace Commission has gotten its leash tangled around –I shouldn’t– but the latest is just too funny. FIRST, in November they sponsored an Israel-BDS protest to boycott a local Ahava outlet and promptly got two participants arrested. Wrongly of course, but the police were awaiting them with a letter fashioned for the occasion by the City Attorney giving the CSPD authority to drive the activists from the private property. Although planning had been kept on the QT, do you think the reception might have been due to monthly confabs which the PPJPC executive director keeps with city law enforcement? Later in debriefing, the director pronounced his incredulity that the “new policy” hadn’t been spelled out to him at the last meeting. So what kinds of things do the PPJPC & CSPD discuss? SECOND, just as the PPJPC fell for the Save Darfur intervention-as-peacemaking faketivism, then zipped it for Obama’s false hopetivism, now the pitiful dupes call their Muslim-Jewish-Christian “Evening in Jerusalem” gathering a THREE CUPS OF TEA PARTY! Would this be in deference to Greg Mortenson‘s Western Empire [school] building enterprise? That puts the PPJPC in the company of the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security, Mortenson’s biggest boosters. The next chance I get I will ask known J&P’ers I promise you — who are the Idiot Iscariots taking this tack? The PPJPC is soliciting donations from earnest yous and mes in the name of peace and justice, to advocate for forfeiting civil liberties and 3CoT’s participatory militarism.

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Three Cups of Tea, now Stones Into Schools author Greg Mortenson saw stones turned against Americans as the US suffered its first soldier casualties from an IED in the northwest boarder region of Pakistan. The US troops were training the paramilitary Frontier Corps, mercenaries hired to protect the all-girls schools built by Mortenson’s Central Asia Institute and USAID to which local Muslims and the Taliban take such umbrage. Oh, and lots of teenage girls were killed and injured too.

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Greg Mortenson, stealth poster boy for the GWOT Pax Americana, nominated for the same Nobel suggested for Henry Kissinger, will be in Denver this Sunday at Red Rocks, to emcee JOURNEY OF HOPE, to collect “Pennies For Peace” to build Western Education settlements to justify more US military advance camps, and to lead a “Prayer For Peace.” Wanna bet it’s not an Islamic prayer?

It’s impossible to make this yuppie humanitarian interventionist lunacy up on our own, and since we at Not My Tribe have talked so much about Greg Mortenson and his Three Cups of Tea, why not take a quick look at Jay Leno’s wife’s new “cause celebre.” See: Jay and Mavis Leno turn serious about the plight of Afghan women.

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Not many maps show the location of the Pakistani airport from which US drones are launched against targets in Afghanistan and Pakistan. To plot the Shamsi Airport in Baluchistan, I started with a graphic supplied by the Central Asian Institute (CAI) showing Greg Mortenson’s school building projects, which appear to encircle the Taliban resurgent Swat Province, where schools are a battleground.

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“Washington policy now encompasses a series of ‘democratic’ or soft coup projects which would strategically cut China off from access to the vital oil and gas reserves of the Caspian including Kazakhstan. The earlier Asian Great Silk Road trade routes went through Tashkent in Uzbekistan and Almaty in Kazakhstan for geographically obvious reasons, in a region surrounded by major mountain ranges. Geopolitical control of Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan would enable control of any potential pipeline routes between China and Central Asia just as the encirclement of Russia controls pipeline and other ties between it and western Europe, China, India and the Mideast.” -William Engdahl

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Commander Steve Recca, of the new DoD endowed UCCS Center for Homeland Security, told his Shove Chapel audience last night that Homeland Security is about being safe. That means everything to him from keeping his daughter safe at school to keeping the streets safe from excessive snow fall. Does the DHS want a crack at Climate Change?

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One of the greatest blogging joys is giving a post a title. I favor arcane, abstruse or esoteric titles, mainly because it’s fun to take disparate notions and weave them together, if only in the tapestry of my mind. I think obscure titles draw potential readers into what might be easily-ignored prose by eliciting in them the type of curiosity that would lead them to utter something akin to “what the hell does that mean?”

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Have I a verdict on Greg Mortenson now that I’ve had a chance to see him? He’s an incredibly likable guy, doing great good; to my values, doing fantastic work. But I’m a secular westerner, concerned about preserving the ideals of the enlightenment, and worried about the challenge posed by overpopulation. Are these the concerns of Islam? Do fundamentalist Muslims favor personal fulfillment of the individual and smaller families?

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There is nothing more thrilling than being the wild one on the outer edge of the pack, seeing the horizon more clearly than those safely ensconced in the middle of the herd. It isn’t easy being a lonely maverick, relying on animal instinct to find hidden dangers, while other more domesticated souls happily munch nuggets of truth dispensed by politicians and mainstream media. But someone has to lead the way.

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I remember a time, not so long ago really, perhaps last month, when I was blissfully unaware of a wayward mountaineer named Greg Mortenson. After nearly reaching the summit of K2, and having lost his porter and his way on the descent, he limped, hungry and cold, into a tiny town in northeast Pakistan called Korphe. After several days spent recovering from his misadventure, Greg Mortenson stumbled from the village leader’s hut into the rarefied Himalayan air.

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In his own words, Greg Mortenson is quite a bit more revealing about his motives in Pakistan. Pax Americana is definitely a subtlety lost on him.
 
This map is from the Central Asia Institute‘s own brochure. It shows the parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan where Greg Mortenson’s CAI has helped finance community building projects. I thought the shaded area formed an interesting buffer zone along the border to… CHINA! Is that region of greater interest peacewise than the war-torn borders facing Afghanistan or India?!

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I’m afraid my Neo Liberal roots are showing. Greg Mortenson is delivering a lecture at CC on January 15th and I hardly know how to object. I too believe that the fate of mankind depends on education.

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