A lot of us feel hopeless today. There’s the return of energy dominance as a federal goal, which places oil, gas and coal extraction above all other uses.

There’s the extinction crisis affecting animals and plants that’s 1,000 to 10,000 times the regular rate of extinction. Then there’s the erosion of soil, as half of the planet’s topsoil has been lost in the past 150 years.

Water pollution has increased because about 80% of untreated wastewaters worldwide get discharged into waterways that supply communities.

Worse is the elephant in the room—climate change—causing ever more major floods, violent hurricanes and extreme wildfires. Last year was also the first year the world exceeded the climate threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, at which climate impacts are expected to significantly increase.

These are just the headlines. It seems so grim today on Planet Earth that archaeologists, biologists and other ologists want to name this epoch the “Anthropocene”

for our human-dominated, hopeless present.

Is there an alternative to this gloom and doom? To function, I think there has to be, and much of that certainty comes out of a freshman course I teach called Environmental Conservation at Colorado State University in Fort Collins.

A hundred or more students enroll each semester, representing majors from pre-business to interior design, and the students are just three months out of high school when they arrive in the fall. The world they’ve begun studying seems anything but stable.

At the beginning of the semester, I ask them if their generation can “save the world.” There are always optimists who say “yes,” though in recent years fewer and fewer hands reach for the ceiling.

Over the course of the semester, we discuss the losses on the land and to wildlife, as well as the impacts of human population growth, the starkly different levels of per-capita global consumption, and the unintended consequences of technology. 

We also gain familiarity with our local and regional watershed. We do that by participating in “ecological restoration” workdays, going to work on ranches with conservation easements. There the young students use their hands and tools to protect water sources, build wildlife-friendly crossings, and slow soil erosion by filling in gullies, among other solutions.

Watershed-based experiences like this can cut through the murky esoteric to the pragmatic: There are ways to live on our home planet without spoiling it. The best part is seeing students shifting away from a sense of despair.

Colorado has over 150 collaborative conservation groups—  collaborativeconservation.org—that bring people together where they live, work, recreate and worship. Their aim is to improve the health of soil, water, plants and wildlife. This movement has grown West-wide, spanning 11 states.

The antidote to our planet’s illnesses also has global reach. Paul Hawken, in his book, The Blessed Unrest, describes the more than one million bottom-up groups around the globe working toward environmental sustainability and social justice. Unlike traditional movements, this network is decentralized, collaborative, diverse and not driven by a single ideology or leader.

This good news applies to climate change as well, even though President Trump has, for the second time, removed the United States from the Paris Climate Accord. That leaves our country in the company of Yemen, Libya and Iran.

But people concerned about global warming reacted by going public and objecting. More than 3,800 leaders from America’s city halls, state houses, boardrooms and college campuses have signed the “We Are Still In” declaration  (https://www.wearestillin.com/we-are-still-declaration). Signers represent more than 155 million Americans and $9 trillion of the U.S. economy.

My gut tells me that many of us refuse to give in to hopelessness. But can young people, inheriting our mistakes and the determination of some to deny there’s even a crisis, “save the world”? That’s a gigantic ask.

But can they make the watershed where they live better? If the state of one watershed after another improves, might the Earth over time become healthier, one watershed at a time? All we can do where we live is to get involved in conservation locally, regionally or nationally, joining a group or starting our own.

We can also contact our elected representatives to protest this administration’s intent to maximize extractive uses on public lands.

Let’s choose hope, get our hands dirty, and make our optimism real.

Richard Knight is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He works at the intersection of land use and land health in the American West.

The post When reality weighs you down appeared first on Writers On The Range.

Though radically different, the twin budget proposals released early this week by the Washington State Senate and House share a focus on highway expansion. The Senate budget proposes a broad array of new transportation revenue sources intended to stave off cuts, including a brand new 10% sales tax on new e-bikes and a new vehicle fee for public transit agencies. Contrarily, the House budget includes deep cuts across public transit, active transportation, and commute-trip reduction work.

The main thing the two budgets do have in common? A laser focus on getting Washington’s highway capacity projects back on track, after cost increases threatened to force the legislature to cancel or defer many of them indefinitely. Under both budgets, megaprojects like the North Spokane Corridor, the Puget Sound Gateway, Clark County’s Interstate Bridge Replacement, and a widening I-90 at Snoqualmie Pass would all continue to move forward.

Both budgets propose an increase in the state’s gas tax, six cents in the Senate and nine cents in the House, largely because few other revenue sources get close to providing the sums available to fill the gap on these large highway projects. The Senate budget, for example, would allocate $2.5 billion over the next six years to plugging budget holes, while keeping more than $1 billion on hand for potential projects down the road, like the widening of I-5 through the Nisqually Delta near Olympia.

But lurking beneath the surface is the fact that it’s these highway projects themselves that are the root cause of the budget crisis legislators are scrambling to fix. As detailed in presentations to the House and Senate transportation committees last month, deferring highway projects that haven’t yet been contracted would be the easiest path to balancing the state’s transportation budget. But while the two chambers — and the two political parties — in Olympia are out of alignment on many different things, the perceived need to continue hitting the gas pedal on expanding the state highway network is not one of them.

Senate budget focuses on achieving “bipartisan” agreement

The Senate’s proposal would raise more than $3 billion over the next six years via the gas tax increase, a luxury vehicle tax on cars and trucks that cost more than $100,000, expanded rental car and carsharing fees, and increased fees on electric vehicles. It also includes some bizarre revenue options, including the 10% e-bike sales tax, and a move to force transit agencies to not only pay vehicle registration fees on their taxpayer-funded vehicles but also to pay tolls on public roads as well.

Those new taxes are largely symbolic rather than significant revenue generators. An e-bike sales tax only brings in $9 million over a six year period, and additional fees on transit $33 million. This is pocket change in the context of the multi-billion-dollar budget.

Marko Liias (D-21st, Edmonds), chair of the Senate’ transportation committee, was open about the fact that those items were included at the request of the ranking Republican member of the committee, Curtis King (14th, Yakima), in order to bring along other Republicans.

“When we entered into bipartisan negotiation, one of the principles that Senator King served to the table was: if we’re going to be investing more in the system, he wanted as a priority that a variety of users would be contributing,” Liias told The Urbanist.

The Senate’s Republican caucus wanted to repeal Washington’s Climate Commitment Act (CCA), which represents the biggest new funding source for public transit and active transportation projects seen in Olympia in decades. So it’s not surprising that the top Republican on the transportation committee is fine with sticking it to transit riders and people who are trying to get around without a car in Washington. Voters are not on the same page: a Republican-backed state initiative seeking to repeal the CCA just failed by a wide margin in 2024.

Why then is the prospect of producing a bipartisan budget so appealing to the Democratic caucus that they’re willing to go along with the plan? After steadily building their majorities over the last decade, Democrats hold 60% of the seats in both the House and the Senate. That makes a bipartisan package a luxury, rather than a need — unless the package is so unpopular with the Democratic caucus that defections are widespread when it’s up for vote.

Liias told The Urbanist that he sees the benefits accrued outweighing the concessions, and asserted that progressive priorities will ultimately come out ahead in the context of the overall budget.

“The e-bike fee raises $9 million and we invest $266 million over the same time period into additional new funding for active transportation. So we are asking everybody to contribute, but we are leaning in to fund the active transportation, particularly the safe systems infrastructure that people need everywhere,” Liias said.

When it comes to the fact that Washington is on the cusp of rolling out an e-bike rebate at the same time that the Senate is proposing a new surcharge, Liias said at least they weren’t proposing to scrap the rebate program all together. The e-bike rebate program, which has been in the works for nearly two years, is set to make a $300 rebate available to the general public via lottery system, and a separate $1,200 rebate will be open to households showing proof of modest income.

“There certainly was an idea on the table about ending the rebate program,” Liias said. “The surcharges certainly add a little bit to the upfront cost for folks that are low income that qualify for a higher value rebate, and [it] more than covers the surcharge. And for folks that are not low income, it’ll be more than the cost of the surcharge, so they’ll still be getting a net benefit from it.”

$3,000 is not an uncommon price for a more heavy duty e-bike and many cargo e-bikes can run much more than that. That’s spendy for a bike but not as a car replacement, but the larger issue is whether the state should be adding any disincentives to purchasing e-bikes at all.

On the added fees for public transit, Liias pointed to two new grant programs that are included in the Senate budget that will outweigh the new charges on public transit vehicles. One is a $100 million transit safety grant program, and the second is $100 million for green transit projects, e.g. electric bus purchases and charging infrastructure. Neither of those grants would explicitly make up for any lost service that could have been funded via the new added fees that public transit agencies will now have to account for.

While the concept of adding costs to transit agencies and e-bike riders clearly cuts against priorities that the broader Democratic caucus has, the Senate’s Majority Leader is still assessing whether to upset the apple cart over the issue.

“I’m still kind of mulling what to do about that,” Senate Majority Leader Jamie Pedersen (D-43rd, Seattle) told The Urbanist. “I have not yet heard concerns from the agencies about it. If I heard from, you know, Sound Transit or Metro, that it would become a significant problem for them, rather than just a symbolic thing, then that might change my perspective on what I should do.”

House budget focuses on highway projects that are “well underway”

In contrast with the Senate budget, the House proposal does propose putting some highway megaprojects on ice: an expansion of State Route 18 in southeast King County, for example, would be pushed out past 2029, as would a widening of State Route 9 in Snohomish County. In that way, it’s more fiscally conservative than the Senate proposal, which proposes moving full speed ahead with those projects.

“There is a number of projects that we just can’t begin to think about going forward with because of the revenues that we’re working with at this point in time,” House transportation committee chair Jake Fey (D-27th, Tacoma) told reporters Monday.

Fey confirmed that a guiding principle behind the House budget wasn’t which projects were most aligned with state goals, but rather which projects were simply further along in the process.

“A lot of these projects are at different stages. We try to not interrupt projects that were well underway and ready for the next phase. And then there’s some projects that are just in the right-of-way [acquisition] and planning stages, and those were the ones that we were more focused on, pushing those programs and projects out,” Fey said.

But the House proposal also takes an ax to multimodal programs, cutting the state’s Regional Mobility Grant program, which pays for transit access projects around the state. Existing projects will be funded, but no new regional mobility grants will be offered until 2031, under the House’s plan.

And in an ironic move, the House proposal would also indefinitely suspend the Sandy Williams Connecting Communities grant program, which is geared at repairing the harmful legacy of Washington’s past highway decisions. Projects funded via the Sandy Williams program include a study looking at how to improve access to Seattle’s Judkins Park light rail station at Rainier and I-90, and how to improve access across I-5 in Tacoma, in Fey’s district.

Additionally, the House proposal take a hatchet to commute trip reduction (CTR) programs. By providing dollars to organizations around the state that are focused on offering alternatives to single-occupancy vehicle travel, CTR programs encourage transit use, coordinate vanpools, and provide transportation education. Clearly, they are climate programs.

In a letter sent in the wake of the budget’s release, a broad group of organizations engaged in transportation demand management asked for the cuts to be reversed. They include Expedia, Seattle Children’s, Commute Seattle, and cities like Seattle, Bellevue, Tukwila, and Vancouver.

“CTR is a cornerstone of Washington’s efforts to reduce congestion and air pollution, directly supporting the state’s goals under the Clean Air Act. For over 30 years, this program has provided a proven, cost-effective way to reduce single-occupancy vehicle trips and increase access to reliable, affordable transportation,” the letter states. “Cutting CTR funding by 60% would severely undermine the state’s ability to leverage this long-standing, successful program — diminishing our ability to meet state environmental and transportation goals and compromising the effectiveness of a law that has served Washingtonians for decades.”

The sum savings of these cuts is minuscule, even when just looking at the scale of the funding being used to plug highway project budget holes, much less their full project costs. The Puget Sound Gateway projects alone need $153 million to move forward, along with $227 million for Snoqualmie Pass and $267 million for the North Spokane Corridor.

Proposals ignore climate implications

At a time when the federal government is not only withdrawing the U.S. from international climate agreements but also actively working to claw back federal dollars that had been allocated to climate-friendly modes of transportation, the climate impact of the state’s transportation budget remains an area of weakness for Democrats in Olympia.

Ahead of this year’s legislative session, as the budget crisis was beginning to come into full view, both Liias and Fey actively downplayed the idea that the state is focused on, despite the amount of funding within the budget that is allocated to capacity projects and the head of the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) was issuing warnings about continuing to invest in new infrastructure over basic maintenance. Even as the proposed Senate budget allocates more than $2.5 billion over the next six years to highway capacity projects, that hasn’t changed.

“I just fundamentally disagree that we’re expanding the highway network,” Liias said this week. “The one greenfield highway that’s being proposed — the two — are the Gateway Program and North Spokane Corridor. Those were projects that were initiated 10 years ago, and we’re in the last stages of them. I don’t propose that we do those sorts of projects in other parts of the state.”

As other states, like Colorado, have begun to calculate climate costs on their new highway projects and shift resources to greener projects, Liias defended the way that Washington builds highways.

“We, in the environmental review of projects, are looking at the impacts they have in terms of congestion and adding induced demand,” Liias said. “We’re looking at the impacts in terms of capacity for various users of various types. We’re doing that because of the HEAL Act. We’re doing environment justice review, which is not just thinking about the impacts on adjacent communities, but also who are the overburdened and vulnerable communities that haven’t been consulted or engaged?”

But the existing system allows WSDOT to conduct environmental review on its own projects, doesn’t allow for any outside agency to confirm that the state’s highway projects are in alignment with state climate goals. The recent environmental review of the Interstate Bridge Replacement — the most expensive highway project in Pacific Northwest history — completely omitted the issue of induced demand, the concept that a widened highway will fill up with traffic, cancelling out any benefit in travel time that was gained by expanding it.

The prioritization of widening SR 18 also raised questions about the assertion that Washington is being data-driven with its decision making.

While agreement between the twin budgets is set to be hammered out over the next month, all signs point to the legislature continuing to focus on a small number of highway capacity projects, to the detriment of broader state goals. Even a major budget crisis has not yet been enough to prompt a rethinking.

Legislature Considers Cutting Highway Expansion Projects to Address Budget Woes

Facing Budget Crisis, Washington’s Leaders Downplay Focus on Highway Expansion

The post State Budget Proposals Focus on Highway Expansion in Both Chambers first appeared on The Urbanist.

Something is in the air. Unseen. Vibrating. Friscalating. Between A Message from the Stars, City of Six Moons, and Out of Sorts, it almost seems like we’re being prepared for some grand task, an entire species press-ganged into the labor of translating alien missives.

Or maybe I just really like first contact stories.

Signal, created by the design collective Jasper Beatrix, bears a singular honor. This is the best of the recent spate of games about communicating with aliens. But more than that, it’s a game I’ve delayed writing about so I could play it over and over again, reveling in its unparalleled sense of experimentation and discovery.

It begins with the appearance of an alien.

Illustrated by Cricks Rose, the twenty-five extraterrestrial bodies included in Signal are more silhouettes than profiles. They remind me slightly of Stephen Gammell’s nightmare-inducing images from Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, suggesting peristalsing appendages and inhuman trunks. Unlike Gammell’s illustrations, however, Rose’s approach is more curious than horrifying. One horned beast, furred along the edges, seems to sport ordinary legs until on closer inspection it becomes apparent that the creature’s head is also its abdomen is also its mode of conveyance. Another adorns itself with burning candles, whether decorative or natural. Yet another radiates like a glow-worm, but in such a way that suggests its gleaming outline is merely a stripe of something larger.

While an alien’s appearance offers the first glimpse into its behavior, there are clues aplenty yet to discover. By the conclusion of a ten-to-thirty-minute session, hopefully you’ll even know what some of those clues are.

Signal is a cooperative game. One player takes on the role of the alien. Everybody else, from one to however many people you can cram around a table, constitute a panel of experts. That’s right. “Experts.” In which field? How do you staff such a panel? It’s anybody’s guess. The obvious option is linguists, but there’s no reason to hold back. In our sessions, we’ve fielded translators and mathematicians and artists. My friend Adam plays the videographer, snapping still images of the panel’s experiments and recording videos of the alien’s responses. Recording is explicitly permitted by the rules, and good thing, too. Those videos have staved off misunderstandings on more than one occasion.

Unlike City of Six Moons, which offered the commonality of written language to fall back on, or A Message from the Stars, which saw alien and human bantering words back and forth, Signal begins where all bridges between cultures lay their actual groundwork: pointing to sticks and rocks and listening to what your opposite party has to say.

Really, that isn’t too far off. The experts have an assortment of triangles, cubes, rods, and discs in two colors at their disposal. They arrange these shapes on a fabric mat according to any logic of their choosing. Together, apart, touching, stacked, piled atop the mat’s test-pattern leylines — anything goes.

And then the alien responds. It moves shapes. It removes some and adds others. Perhaps it stacks one piece atop another. The objective, for both experts and alien alike, is to alter the experiment until it resembles a certain predetermined arrangement. Maybe three triangles next to each other. A rod atop a disc. Something like that.

One of the great strengths of playing Signal, as opposed to the (frankly dull) call-and-response exchanges of A Message from the Stars, is the stark degree of latitude entrusted to both sides of these conversations. As the panel of experts, you need to prompt the alien to create the right pattern, but you’re given total control over the starting parameters of each experiment. Those early moments are overwhelming, each experiment producing what seems like random noise, until little by little you begin to feel out the shape of the rules governing the alien’s behavior.

Speaking of which, the alien’s rules may be ironclad, but this is a melty, bendy alloy of iron. Every alien is given three separate rules. Early on, only the first rule applies. Later the second rule is added, and then the third. I won’t spoil anything, but a rule might be something like “Remove any black cubes touching a line.” Later, once the experts have successfully mastered that first edict, another is appended: “Push apart any touching triangles.” Eventually, a third rule appears: “Place a disc atop any cube not touching a rod, then remove any rods.” That sort of thing.

This entire process is quietly brilliant. Both sides are bound by the alien’s rules, but there’s a surprising degree of leeway in how the alien can execute them, not to mention how the experts interpret what they’ve witnessed. The result is something like conversational frisson. Even when both sides understand the gist of what the other is doing, little inconsistencies or misunderstandings tend to accumulate in the wake of each experiment.

I’ll give an example. Let’s say my alien is operating on a simple rule. “Stack a disc on top of any two touching cubes.” Easy, right?

Except you, as our resident expert, might place two cubes side by side, one black and one white, and watch me add a black disc to the top of those cubes. What should you take away from that? Maybe you will deduce the correct rule immediately. But the rule might have instead been “Cover any differently-colored pieces with a black disc.” Or, crud, even “Stack a disc on top of any other piece.” Maybe there are outside considerations. “If there is a triangle within the inner circle, place a disc on a piece outside the inner circle.”

The point I’m trying to make is that you aren’t only grappling with the rules, but with the gray areas that surround those rules, with the waffling specificities that govern how those shapes are moved, subtracted, generated, or replaced. This is where a skilled alien can do so much more than follow the rules like some program adhering to lines of code. You’re free to get creative. Are my experts stuck on the idea that two non-matching shapes make a black disc? Okay, I’ll give them a white disc instead. I’ll give them a reason to pause and reevaluate. Consistency is but one key of communication. In the right hands, inconsistency unlocks a fair few doors as well.

The result is a fumbling conversation, absent any real precision or even true understanding, and I mean that entirely as a compliment. More than once, I’ve watched a team of experts “successfully” commune with their alien, only to laugh themselves silly when they heard the rules they were ostensibly interfacing with.

That might sound like a weakness, but it’s no more a problem than speaking a language without being able to fully explain its grammatical rules. That’s the beauty of this thing we call communication. It’s enough to know that certain words hit the ear right. If you hear somebody reading Red Riding Hood and immediately launch into an explanation about how ablaut reduplication is an acceptable exception to proper adjective order, everyone in your kid’s kindergarten class is going to stare at you like some bug-eyed nerd. And they would be right. You would be a bug-eyed nerd to care that much about apophony. Just let the vibes wash over you, man.

Okay, enough of that. This is the second time I’ve been deeply impressed by Jasper Beatrix. The collective’s previous title, Typeset, also produced surprising heft despite its tiny box and twenty-minute duration. Signal is even stronger than Typeset, a commendable achievement indeed. I can’t wait to see what these folks get up to next. More immediately, I can’t wait to hold another fireside chat with the rest of these aliens.

 

(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi. Right now, supporters can read big stonking essays on the movies and video games I experienced in 2024.)

A complimentary copy of Signal was provided by the publisher.

From reader Rob Coberly, an article that seems like it was ripped right out of the pre-worldbuilding stage of my novel Arctic Rising: Canada Just Checked Trump’s Ego: Carney’s Super-Corridor Sets Stage for a Global Power Shift Without America.

“Carney’s masterstroke is a National Energy/Shipping/Travel/Digital Corridor, a coast-to-coast-to-Arctic strategy to unite the country like never before… This isn’t just a pipeline or a highway—it’s everything. Imagine a multimodal lifeline spanning 7,000+ km—road, rail, pipelines, power lines, fiber-optic cables—all in one corridor. That’s the vision. The concept has been called a “visionary project that could unlock extraordinary economic potential.

Now, it’s government policy.

Carney outlined a First Mile Fund to connect remote energy sites to the grid of roads and rails. There will be no more stranded resources; if we dig it up or pump it out, we’ll ship it out. A “one-window” approval process will blitz through red tape for nation-building projects while still upholding top safety and environmental standards. For once, Canada is acting with wartime urgency in peacetime—because economically, Trump declared war on us. Well, game on.

If Canada stays pro-immigration and does this, in addition to a boost in GDP, they will position themselves well. Mark Carney holding a snap election soon is smart as well.

Crossing fingers for them.

About a year ago a student of mine who had to take a break from studies due to Long Covid sat down with me to compare what they’d learned from a Long Covid clinic.

Let me back up. After I got Covid, while the worst of it faded, the fuzzy, logy, hard to focus mental ‘fog’ (and what a minimizing description ‘fog’ is for this, it’s like mental debilitation) that came with it (what you get with a long flu, or that slowness you feel when you have a horrible viral infection but are still working) just never went away.

It got to the point where I learned symbolic logical statements so I could use a piece of paper to reason through complicated subjects because I couldn’t process it in my head on the fly like I have for most of my life.

The first break I had was treating the brain fog like a traumatic brain injury. In fact, taking NAC and guanfacine was the first moment I stopped feeling like I was mentally drowning (see NIH article about combining NAC and guanfacine for TBI here) and got me to treading water.

It took a year to find that combo, and after months of it, I felt like I could start piecing some life back together.

In that first year walking left me gasping and winded at times. My single flight of stairs up to the bedroom some nights required me to pull myself up with the handrail when tired because my legs would feel wobbly enough I worried about being a fall risk. But as my head started to clear a bit, things slowly, slowly, improved. I started walking to work again.

But I wasn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, back to anything near normal. I was just able to muddle through.

My doctor and I tried a few other things after the guanfacine/NAC combo, hoping to get me out past just treading water and to thriving. Nothing worked as well as g/NAC.

Until I sat down with that student, and they ran through some of the things they’d heard about. And then they said “but what saved my life was LDN.”

“What’s LDN?”

According to a couple of Long Covid clinic program directors I’ve emailed with, a sizable number of patients are having positive results from low-dose naltrexone.

Naltrexone is a drug that is usually used for alcohol and opioid addicts. At the 50-80mg level, it interferes with the pleasure pathways. But what is also interesting about it is that it is also a really good anti-inflammatory.

At the 3-4.5mg level, people are taking it off-label to ‘lengthen life’ by reducing inflammation. It’s also being used off-label by doctors to tackle persistent inflammation. And several researchers I’ve talked to think that Long Covid is a persistent post-viral infection: ie those of us with Long Covid never really beat it, it’s still lurking down in the atomic level fucking with our chemistry and causing inflammation.

In the brain.

Which is why you can’t think.

I started LDN when I got back from Scotland in January. I very, very slowly titrated up from .5mg a day in January, to 1.5mg in early February, to 3mg in early March, and in mid March I finally hit 4.5mg.

I’ve made no other medicinal changes, and I would say about 60-70% of the brain fog is gone now. I’ve only been at 4.5mg for the last couple weeks, but I’ve done more in the last two weeks than I have in the last year or two.

I’m a little overtired today, I may have overdone it.

But people are starting to comment “you seem energetic” or “you seem more talkative” or “you seem like you’re more on top of things.”

Yes. All true.

If you are struggling with Long Covid, LDN is no guarantee. The number I have been given anecdotally was 50% of patients seem to respond at some level to it. But if you have this beast, you know that even a coin flip is worth checking into.

LDN studies and scientific sources:

Low-dose Naltrexone Improves post-COVID-19 condition Symptoms: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38267326

Low-dose naltrexone and NAD+ for the treatment of patients with persistent fatigue symptoms after COVID-19: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10862402/

New Study Supports Using Naltrexone to Treat Long Covid: https://solvecfs.org/new-study-supports-using-naltrexone-to-treat-long-covid/ (this study said 3/4!)

That should be enough to get you started to talk to doctors. I don’t think it’s a cure, if it’s post-viral, we’re still infected, and there’s probably going to have to be some sort of anti-viral combination (much like AIDs cocktails) to beat this out of us.

But LDN has given me my brain back in the last two weeks.

And I’m so grateful. It’s been a long, dark, exhausting two years since I first got sick.

Bob Ferguson was a great attorney general. He did not hesitate to challenge Trump’s illegal orders and executive actions, stalling off some of Trump’s worst efforts to deny basic human rights to American citizens and residents. But we see a different Bob Ferguson as governor. He seems to think that our state and our country are facing a typical struggle between corporate lobbyists and advocates for human needs and education, between Republicans and Democrats negotiating “solutions,” between a fiscal shortfall and public services. 

We are not in a typical struggle. The health and wellbeing of every single person in our state is imperiled by a federal government intent on taking away our rightful benefits and a state government that forecasts budget deficits with no funding solutions.  

We need a Bob Ferguson like we had in 2017. We need a Bob Ferguson who stands up to and confronts Trump. We need a Bob Ferguson who will build the commonwealth of our state, enabling all of us to thrive, setting an example of what is possible as the federal government descends into a kleptocracy.

How do we enable a thriving citizenry? By providing health coverage, parks for recreation and escape into our natural environment, child care, and higher education. By meeting our state’s paramount constitutional duty for the education of all children. By building transit systems that get us out of our cars, by providing lunch and breakfasts to all students in all of our schools, so that all children can learn without hunger dulling their energy, intellect, and interest. 

We will not build such a commonwealth of thriving citizens by cutting the budget here and there and finding efficiencies, as Ferguson has proposed. But we can turn Washington State’s social safety net into Swiss cheese with shortsighted cuts. Ferguson’s budget would hit a lot of important social programs hard. For example, it would:

• eliminate the employer child care assistance program (cutting $1 million)
• eliminate the Health Home Program (cutting $55 million)
• eliminate a rate increase for foster families, keeping their reimbursement at 2020 levels (cutting $12 million)
• eliminate funding for a nursery for substance-exposed and medically fragile newborns (cutting $2.5 million)
• eliminate the early childhood care program (ECEAP) for infants and toddlers from families with less than one third of the median income (cutting $9 million)
• increase, for families with less than 60% of the median income, co-pays for Working Connections Child Care to 7% of family income, doubling co-pays for thousands of families, some exceeding $400 a month for one child (shifting $15 million onto poor families), and 
• eliminate $50 million from foundation public health (just when the measles epidemic is ramping up).  

That’s just a sampling of Ferguson’s proposed cuts – these are not efficiencies, but direct attacks on the people of our state. And to add salt to the wound, the governor eliminated funding for administering the wealth tax, which could bring in $3 billion a year and fill all these funding gaps.

The Washington State Legislature is getting into shifting costs to middle class families as well. One Democratic bill will increase tuition by more than 10% for students in our public higher education system, while decreasing funding and shifting costs of the college grant program onto working class and low income students. In the Senate, the Democrats have run away from universal school lunch funding. The $120 million needed to fund it, out of a budget of $71.5 billion, is just too much. 

Meanwhile the Trump/Musk/Vance coup accelerates, with the $1 billion elimination of the local food for schools programs. On top of that, under the Republican proposed budget, almost 1000 schools with half a million students in Washington will lose universal free lunches for their kids – a direct attack on middle class and low-income students. Half a million Washingtonians will lose health coverage through Apple Health as it is defunded in the Republicans’ budget proposal. If the Republicans eliminate the enhanced premium tax credit for health coverage, middle class families can expect to see their health care costs increase by $3,000. 

This is no time for Governor Ferguson to cut programs, whether he uses a sledgehammer or a scalpel.

So what should the legislature and the governor do? They could actually tax the affluent.

• A wealth tax on residents who have over $50 million in intangible assets (stocks and bonds) would generate $4 billion a year. 
• Closing a tax loophole for Amazon and Microsoft and other global behemoths, a loophole lobbied into law by Amazon that stymies college funding, would raise $250 million a year. HB 1839 would do just that.
• Instituting an excise tax on earned income (we have one on unearned income), while exempting the first $270,000 – taxing fewer than 5% of Washington residents – with a tax rate of 5% (less than the 7% tax on unearned income) would generate $4 billion a year.  
• Closing the estate tax loophole for the extreme wealthy would generate $150 million annually. 
• Putting an inheritance tax into law, so that when privileged people receive inherited wealth in the tens of millions of dollars, they too can contribute to public services for all of us.

Taken together, these taxes on the affluent, super wealthy, and oligarchs could raise $8.5 billion a year. 

We will need every penny. First there is the $3 billion annual shortfall for current services. Then the state needs a minimum of $1 billion a year for child care compensation, to enable child care workers to actually earn their way out of poverty. K-12 is underfunded by $4 billion a year, including a $500 million shortfall for special education and the catch-up needed for inflation. Higher education tuition must be driven down through increased state appropriations. A tuition decrease of $1,000 per student FTE will require $200 million. Universal free lunches in K-12 will cost $60 million a year. Just these budget items add up to $8.3 billion. 

This math depends on federal funding for public services in our state being sustained. It won’t. Washington’s 2023-2025 biennium budget (ending June 30 of this year) has been financed with over $45 billion in state taxes and over (a projected) $26 billion from the federal government. (Of note here is that Washingtonians paid $22.5 billion more to the U.S. government than we got back in 2022. We are subsidizing states like Idaho and Mississippi through our taxes.) Millions in expected revenues from the federal government have already gone missing this year. It will be much worse in the next fiscal year. 

So rather than carve out “efficiencies,” we need to build up our own ability to deliver public services. That means we need new robust progressive taxation, bringing funding for public services and equity in taxation to the citizens of our state. We need the bolder Bob Ferguson from 2017 to lead us forward.

Ferguson Pushes Budget Cuts as Washington Legislature Seeks New Revenue

Seattle and King County Grapple with Federal Disinvestment and Threats

The post Op-Ed: We Need a Bolder Bob Ferguson as Governor first appeared on The Urbanist.