Mongolia on a happy trajectory

I'm back to San Francisco, refreshed mentally though not physically, after nearly two weeks as a tourist in Mongolia with a delightful small group of women. (Women Who Explore if you are curious; great company.)

I'm not going to pretend I really know anything deep about this fascinating country after this short visit, but here are a few photos. This a view of the capital and only large city, Ulaanbaatar (known in English as UB). A thriving core houses international commerce and the seat of government, then gives way to crowded haphazard neighborhoods and a sprinkling of the national Mongolian round tent housing -- gers.

More than half the national population of 3.5 million lives in the city. Younger people flock to the modern metropolis; older people continue the rural herding life which is what we were introduced to. Out of 244 countries in the world, Mongolia's population density ranks 240th. There's a lot of beautiful land and not that many people. Though green and pleasantly warm in the late summer, Mongolia sees temperatures of -20°F in winter and UB averages 29°F for the full year. 

The countryside is all about sheep, yaks, goats and horses whose human herders live in gers which they move for better pastures several times a year. One day we were shown how they disassemble a ger and then erect it again. Since it happened to be the one we were staying in, we laughed happily as we were shown how fast they could get it up again as rain began to come down on our beds!

Extended families raise and milk their herds while their young people find enough internet signal to study for college admission exams!

 

Inside a welcoming ger in Gobi province, we spoke in the evening about a Chinese-owned nearby fenced-off development, ostensibly for a gold mine operation. Like so many rural people everywhere, retired bookkeeper Tsingit was suspicious of the facility which have been set up despite herder protests.

About fifty percent of Mongolians are Buddhists and both city and countryside are dotted with monasteries and temples.

  

This is a proud country conscious of ancient greatness. A monument at Kharkorin displays the extent of three historic Mongolian empires.

 

The greatest of these empires was that of Genghis Khan in the late 12th century -- the largest contiguous land empire in world history reaching across Asia into modern Poland and east to modern Korea. 

Living today in our declining US empire, it was instructive to encounter this smart, proud, welcoming people whose history has taught them that empire comes and goes.

And Mongolians do welcome the world; we returned to UB in time to see signs for the COP17 UN conference on climate change in the central plaza.

Some of us took one more day after the tour to visit UB's LGBT Centre; yes, we are everywhere! 

With Director Enkhmaa Enkhbold

Mongolia feels like a place rising to renewed happiness and prosperity. They seem eager and ready for the challenges of the 21st century. 

Blog interrupted

We're off to see the world until late August. This isn't politics; it's curiosity. The destination is Mongolia, visiting sheep herders and yurts and the vast steppe. Hope to come back invigorated and somewhat rested and ready for a vigorous fall season.

When the shouting ends, it will be time to focus

Tonight -- the first Tuesday in August -- we'll find out who won the Michigan Democratic Party primary for the chance to contest an open US Senate seat in November. Polls and tea leaves tell us it will be a win for Dr. Abdul El-Sayed over Rep. Haley Stevens. If it comes out as expected, the good Doc with the fighting agenda will have knocked off the perfectly adequate candidate of the professional Democratic class. There will be rejoicing in one camp and hair pulling in the other. 

And then, if Michiganders can lean into what's good for them and us all, they'll get back to work promoting whichever candidate comes out on top as their state's contribution to taking their country back from the GOP MAGAs. 

Journalist Paul Waldman offers some smart and thoughtful commentary on this year's intra-party kerfuffles.

... While centrists often complain that Democrats are trapped in their self-reinforcing bubbles and disconnected from reg’lar, salt-of-the-earth Americans, nearly all the centrists that I’m aware of are just as disconnected, if not more so.

They live in Washington or other major cities, they’re immersed in politics, and they suffer from the Pundit Brain ailment that makes its victims believe ordinary voters have coherent ideological beliefs and respond to subtle changes in the policy-based appeals candidates make. There’s something else going on, too: Their view of the political world is dominated by their contempt for the far left, which convinces them that what we used to call hippie-punching is the cleverest of political strategies.

This is a phenomenon I’ve noticed in many normie Democrats I know who live in very liberal places. They can’t stand Trump, of course, but the people who really drive them up a wall are the ones they encounter all the time where they live: the lefties. ...

... the reason is familiarity. If you’re a mainstream Democrat who lives in San Francisco or New York, you almost never encounter MAGA-hatted, immigrant-hating, misogynistic far-right troglodytes in person. You see them online, you know they’re there, but you don’t have to pay more than a moment’s attention to them if you don’t want to. On the other hand, far-lefties are everywhere in your actual life, and everything you find annoying about them is right in your face, all the time. ...

Yup. I recognize that condition, being a long time San Franciscan. That's not the world of most Michiganders -- well maybe in Ann Arbor. It not easy for those of us who live, by choice, in blue state bubbles to imagine what these things look like beyond our context, just as other Americans don't get how we live. 

I hope lots of blue staters really do what I've done in the past and many plan to do this year: take some time to go talk election with people in more contested places. The candidates have to meet the people where they are, and volunteers can to. 

How others see us: US democracy in decline

The British opinionater Timothy Garton Ash is not one to hold back his thoughts. He seems to have been on a visit to our shores. A long time observer of the condition of democracy in Europe, he has summed up where he thinks the US stands under the rule of the Orange Toddler. We don't look very promising... but just maybe ...

The respected Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute at Gothenburg University argues that in 2025 the US saw one of the most rapid declines in liberal democracy on record. “Democracy in the USA,” says its Democracy Report 2026, “is now at its worst in 60 years.” As the imperial republic marks the 250th anniversary of its founding, the danger seen at the very beginning of its constitutional order by anti-federalists such as Patrick Henry – that of an overmighty president abusing his executive power in an attempt to become a new king – has come closer than ever before.

V-Dem analysts note that in 2025 Trump issued no fewer than 225 executive orders whereas the Republican-controlled Congress passed just 49 laws, most of them on minor issues such as “To amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to modify the rules for postponing certain deadlines by reason of disasters”. ...

... As I saw in Hungary this spring, if the popular revulsion towards an incumbent is sufficiently widespread, and channelled into turning out to vote, it sweeps away all the obstacles that the would-be autocrat puts in place – and those obstacles were, taking all in all, larger in the Hungarian case than they are here. The election may not be fair; it may not even be entirely free; but the result is still irrefutably plain for all to see....

... As a European in the US, one keeps looking around and asking: “Where’s the leader of the opposition?” Where, to recall the Hungarian example, is an opposition figure like Péter Magyar, leading a disciplined, effective nationwide campaign, answering the widespread feeling that it’s time for a change with “and this is the change you need”?

Friends who study these things here at Stanford University tell me I’m looking for something that usually doesn’t exist at this stage. ... 

What’s at stake here is not the future of the Democrats; it’s the future of democracy. A normal midterm change in control of the House is the absolute minimum needed to start checking, if not actually reversing, the unprecedented erosion of liberal democracy under Trump. That check will come partly through Congress’s constitutional powers to control government funding, to investigate and to impeach. 

If there’s an electoral landslide, however, it will come even more through the psychological shift, as Trump begins to look like his own worst nightmare – being a “loser”. For that very reason, the man who would be king will try first to prevent, then to circumvent and delegitimate a Democrat-controlled House with all the means at his disposal. Nonetheless, this would be the end of the beginning. ...

We don't need a pretentious Brit to diagnose this. But perhaps it should be bracing to know this is how we look to a friendly observer of democracies.

Fundamentally derivative, based in a rotten nostalgia

Like all human endeavors, the American experience is complicated; MAGA responds to complexity with fear and fury. New York Times opinion-monger Jamelle Bouie derives much of his understanding of Trumpian follies from looking back at what we come through as a people and nation. [Gift link.] 

... You can understand the two Trump presidencies as attempts to relive and re-enact the most atrocious moments in American history, as if the nation were led by toxic obsessives who relished the cruelty and criminality of the past and worshiped perpetrators as heroes — the supposedly hard men who built the country we know.

The president himself gestures toward this game of copycat when he hails Andrew Jackson or praises William McKinley as a man who made America great. And the administration itself seems to want to consciously emulate those moments of infamy and ignobility in the American past.

The administration’s hegemonic war in Venezuela and anti-Canadian saber rattling evoke the crudely imperial posture of the United States at the turn of the 20th century. 

Its racist nativism is a throwback to both the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 — which it recently defended in its tendentious critique of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History — and the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which effectively closed the country to African, Asian and Southern and Eastern European immigrants for more than 40 years.

 Its use of ICE and Customs and Border Protection as a roving deportation force, aimed at anyone who looks suspect, is more than a little reminiscent of the federal bounty hunters deputized under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. It is also an echo of the first Red Scare, the Palmer raids and J. Edgar Hoover’s hunt for radicals during the Woodrow Wilson administration.

Of course this president, and this administration, would want to emulate the anti-communist hysterias of the 1910s and the 1950s. 

 ... Both Trump and his movement are, as you might surmise from the slogan “Make America Great Again,” fundamentally derivative. His vision of the future rests on a rotten nostalgia, and his plans for getting there were drawn from the wreckage of a shameful past. ...

We're faced with a president and a mob that don't want to learn, who experience contradictory realities as assault on their very being. Tough luck, MAGA. Reality doesn't work the simple way you wish it did.

Friday cat blogging -- neighborhood watch

Nope -- he's not one of ours. Though we have a similar looking one, perhaps even larger. This one keeps guard on a nearby street and didn't bother to move when a big stranger pointed a camera at him.

Reality bites

What I appreciate about Paul Krugman is that the Nobel Prize winner in economics is willing to go out ahead of the consensus of the wise and important. Today's contribution is a humdinger:

Reality is a Communist Plot: Of MAGA and the totalitarian mindset 

The Covid vaccine didn’t work, and vaccines cause autism. But hydroxychloroquine worked, and so did ivermectin. Anthony Fauci killed millions of people.

Climate change is a hoax. Wind power caused a massive TV blackout during the Trump-Biden debate. Solar power is useless because the sun doesn’t shine at night, and batteries don’t exist. Smoke blanketed North America, not because of climate change, but because Canada didn’t rake its 2 million square miles of boreal forest.

We’ve destroyed Iran’s military, and the Iranian regime is begging for a deal. Also, the U.S. isn’t running out of precision weapons as a result of the Iran war, and furthermore the shortage is Joe Biden’s fault.

The economy is in a “golden age.” Prices are down. And Trump has a 59 percent approval rating.

Trump won the 2020 election. ...

Such is the wisdom of Trump, MAGA, and dimwits like Senators Rand Paul and Josh Hawley. If you want to control people, keep 'em stupid and uninformed as all good authoritarians have attempted to do.

... What the ongoing show trial of Fauci — which motivated this post — has really driven home, however, is that what Trump and his supporters hate most of all is reality. They know what they want to believe. They fly into paroxysms of rage whenever someone points out that the world isn’t what they want it to be. And they always want to shoot the messenger.

... I’m not immune to the temptation to believe what I want to be true. I try to fight it, but don’t always succeed. Still, I try to acknowledge and admit it when I have let wishful thinking warp my judgement.

... Do Trump and his followers actually believe these things? As I see it, that’s a category error, starting from the presumption that they even accept that objective facts exist. All the evidence (Hah! “Evidence!”) says that they don’t.  ... If you find the assertion that MAGA has a totalitarian mindset over the top, all I can ask is, have you been following the news?

... [Republican pols] behave as if they were courtiers to Kim Jong Un. Trump speeches are sometimes followed by “endless applause moments,” because none of Trump’s loyalists wants to be seen as the first person to stop clapping. ...

Read it all.  

What I would add that Krugman does not: he instinctively believes that knowing the truth of difficult things -- like why masses of New Yorkers were dying of an unknown illness in spring of 2020 -- requires intellectual work. He also believes that there are people who are equipped by training to figure mysteries out. And that those people work for all of us.

MAGA is for people who want or maybe need answers for life's mysteries without work. For many, perhaps there is no space in their lives for the intellectual work of discerning what's true. But for some, there's a comfortable indolence which outsources judgment to glitzy influencers and charlatans like the Orange Toddler.

By the way, this isn't about educational attainment. Lots of people without fancy degrees can see what is in front of their faces. They looked at things.

Historically, the mass cure for this debilitated condition occurs when unanticipated realities intrude on daily life -- kind of like when you bark your shins on a low end table you didn't notice. Oops, there's a hazard. Maybe I ought to move it out of here? Maybe I should figure out why ICE wants to kidnap my nanny? Maybe bombing Iran without a plan might lead to more war?

If representative democracy withstands the Trump onslaught, maybe we can bring some of these willing know-nothings back to consensus reality. On to November ...

Internal refugees and the return of the ballot measure wars

Transgender folk are fleeing to blue states. This didn't begin with Trump coming back into office; aggressive persecution in red states revved up the push out at the beginning of this decade.

Silvaria Lysandra Zemaitis provides a statistical picture.

The American Transgender Refugee Crisis
If this were occurring abroad, to an ethnic minority, we would call it ethnic cleansing. 

... Annualized, what we are seeing is a displacement rate of roughly 15% a year. And because trans people are largely not fleeing blue states (which means that the pool of leavers would actually be the 47% of trans adults who live in the 29 states with at least one restrictive law), the rate among trans people in the states doing the persecuting is closer to 29%. Nearly a third, in a year.  

... the sheer scale of this movement is breathtaking. Hundreds of thousands of trans people have had to flee persecution within the borders of the United States ....

... To put this in perspective, the last time an American subgroup migrated at these rates was the Great Migration, in which roughly 6 million Southern Black people fled Jim Crow violence and repression. This occurred over a period of decades, in the face of political repression, systematic violence, and legal apartheid. In its fastest decade, the 1940s, 1.5 million left the South—against a Southern Black population of roughly 10 million. Black America fled Jim Crow at about 1.5% a year, at a time when baseline inter-state mobility was higher than it was today. Trans America is fleeing red-state persecution at ten to twenty times that. ....

This should be seen as appropriately alarming to every decent person in the country.

... trans people who cannot afford to run are forced to hide.

Since November 2024, 55% of transgender adults report taking steps to be less visible as an LGBTQ person in their community—at work, at school—compared to 24% of LGBTQ people overall. This is what “eradication” looks like in practice. Instead of forcing the trans person to leave the state, the fascists are forcing the trans person to leave themselves. ...

To subject some of us to this level of terror -- along with migrants and all people of color -- is simply not okay.

• • •

In general, many Democratic politicians know they have to hold the line on trans rights -- however little actual sympathy they may feel. But those who break ranks with trans rights should feel heat. It's sad to see this happening in Ohio where there's an actual contest for governor: Top Ohio Democrats retreat on trans issues, leaving some transgender activists feeling abandoned.

I can begin to understand Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur's defection; she's ancient, a good labor stalwart, and yet uniquely continues to hold a district that has been redrawn many times by Republicans to make it more hostile to her. But for the Democratic candidate for Governor, Amy Acton, to adopt a transphobic trope about "boys playing in girls sports" crosses the decency line.

• • •

Meanwhile, it seems that the trans haters are experimenting with the ballot box. In five states --Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Nebraska, and Washington -- citizen initiative petitions have put anti-trans measures up for a vote this fall. This feels awfully familiar to anyone who lived through the gay marriage wars of the early 2000s. For a long time during that period, fear and ignorant revulsion enforced by initiative succeeded across the country -- until it didn't. Before the Supreme Court got around to upholding gay marriage, very blue states had legalized marriage and then voters in Colorado repealed one of these bans which they had passed a decade earlier -- marking the turning tide.

Erin in the Morning warns of this new danger from the transphobes and other all purpose MAGA zealots.

... For transgender people who have sought refuge in blue states to escape the bans spreading through Republican-controlled legislatures, these measures represent a new and more direct threat: the possibility that their neighbors, not distant lawmakers, will vote to strip their rights.

Erin's description of the Washington state proposition suggests to me that it might well encounter successful opposition. 

... a ballot initiative funded by conservative hedge fund manager Brian Heywood would institute a K-12 sports ban—and require every girl who wants to play to have her sex verified by a doctor first. The measure’s language is explicit: to be eligible, a student must provide a statement from her health care provider “that verifies the student’s biological sex, relying only on one or more of the following: the student’s reproductive anatomy, genetic makeup, or normal endogenously produced testosterone levels.” That requirement applies not to transgender students specifically but to every girl in the state who wants to play any sport with a sex-separate classification—from basketball and soccer to cheerleading, bowling, and golf.  ...

Yeah, sure -- subject every girl child to physical sex verification! I can imagine some resistant kids and parents. 

Washington state has a proud history of fighting terrible initiatives. I'm pretty hopeful about the voter's finding their way to turning down this one. 

The Missouri trans-hate initiative is a sneaky one. Republican pols have added the anti-trans stuff to an anti-abortion measure as a sweetener. Considering Missouri voters passed a citizen measure protecting abortion rights a couple of year ago, they've got resistance to overcome. Might transphobia get a new batch of abortion restrictions across the finish line? Read about Missouri trials and tribulations here.

• • •

Something delightful to close this catalogue of horrors; how about a little joy? Here's Dylan Mulvaney, a transwoman who appeared in a beer commercial and has been subjected to unrelenting persecution by MAGA bigots ever since, delighting in being herself: 

What is it that I have that they don’t? Oh my God, freedom. I am free in a way that they will never have the privilege to experience. And they want to use their power to take away my freedom. But what they don’t understand is that my freedom has zero contingency on what they can provide for me, because my freedom is fully dependent on the moment that I acknowledged my real, authentic self, and every day since. And sharing that with the world? It’s just icing on the cake. But they don’t want me to be able to share that, because it would mean young people realizing that if someone like me can be themselves and find success and freedom, then they can find success and freedom for themselves too.

You go, girl! 

Ignorance by intent

You have to love Marc Rosenblum's parting shot on leaving federal employment: 

“I’m thrilled to end my relationship with the current administration,” Rosenblum said in a LinkedIn post over the weekend. “Between the war on immigrants, the war on feds, and the war on facts (not to mention the crazy war in Iran and the brazen corruption), I just need a change.”

Rosenblum served as executive director of the Office of Homeland Security Statistics in the DHS (that's the Department of Heimat Security for the historically minded).

“He had one of the most interesting charges at DHS,” a former colleague tells WIRED of Rosenblum. “There's 22 component agencies, and so there are 22 different ways of aggregating data that were just completely siloed.”

“So Marc's charge was to consolidate all the data and put it in a way that internally, I at headquarters could know exactly how many Coast Guard interdictions happened off the Coast Guard station in Miami, and how many of those were Cuban, Haitian, Nicaragua, Venezuelan. And then kind of conceptualize that with the same population of people that were crossing the Southwest border,” the former colleague adds.

Knowing and showing that sort of information, it's no surprise he no longer felt he had a place in current government. Reconstructing the government's ability to understand what is going on in this huge, multifaceted country will be one of the more difficult tasks required when we evict the MAGA morons.

ICE is evil

Here's another San Francisco action from Saturday. I had thought to attend this one also, but accepted that getting to two had to be good enough. Do turn the sound on and listen when you open.

The Human Banner crew has done it again! 

ICE kills

 

San Franciscans gathered Saturday outside the Tesla dealership on Van Ness Avenue.

The national movement follows two recent, horrific killings by ICE agents. On July 7, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a beloved father and worker, was shot and killed by an ICE agent in Houston, Texas, while driving a work van. On July 13, ICE agents killed 26-year-old Johan Sebastian Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine, in front of his partner and toddler. There have now been 53 deaths in ICE custody since Trump was inaugurated, 33 deaths in fiscal year 2026 alone. 

ICE agents were not even looking for Lorenzo Salgado Araujo.

Salgado Araujo, 52, was killed during a traffic stop by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, prompting thousands of Houstonians to take to the street in protest and to demand justice. 

Salgado Araujo was a Mexican immigrant who had lived in the US for more than 30  years without legal status, according to his family. He was not the intended target of the ICE operation that resulted in his killing. 

... Democratic Congressman Christian Menefee said ICE needs to be “torn down to the studs” and rebuilt as an agency that recognises the “dignity of the people that it encounters”. 

“But we all know that that will not happen under this administration,” he added.

Johan Sebastian Guerrero, shot in Maine, again was not an intended ICE target. 

Investigators have not released details of the shooting in Biddeford. But a spokesman for Senator Angus King said this week that the senator had been told by senior officials that Mr. Guerrero was not the intended target of the immigration operation. Mr. Guerrero was in his car just after 7 a.m., as he headed to work.

Benjamin Gideon, a lawyer representing the Guerrero family, said at the news conference that Mr. Guerrero had been working in the United States lawfully. “The Trump administration issued him a permit to work in this country legally,” he said. “And they issued him a Social Security card and a Social Security number.”

“Do we accept the idea that innocent, loving partners and loving and devoted fathers of 3-year-olds can be collateral damage to this government’s policies?” Mr. Gideon asked. “Do we agree that this is just an acceptable cost of doing business?”

Passing motorists on busy Van Ness Avenue honked enthusiastically. The Tesla dealership is a regular weekly protest site and drivers know what to do. 

• • •

Later in the day, members of Indivisible hosted a more contemplative memorial for ICE's victims at Sue Bierman Park, gathering around an improvised altar.