Global heating's effects are all around us, but powerful plutocrats suppress recognition of global heating in the US (and Canada, Australia and the UK). So US cities that want to plan to cope with the consequences expected in the next few decades have to tiptoe around the cause.

Assange: Google is effectively the private equivalent of the NSA.

UK schools have taken the fingerprints of a million students as if it were nothing.

Why poor people eat junk food and smoke, and can't make long-term plans that would improve their circumstances: they can barely cope with each week.

Being sleepy all the time makes it harder for people to plan well. When the system imposes that on people, it's the system that must be changed. However, discouragement plays a role too. It is hard to summon up attention for long-term dangers when you know you can't protect yourself from the immediate dangers.

This shows that the US needs to undo the plutocratic changes since 1980, so as to make most people's lives no worse than they were then.

However, it also shows the importance of helping the poor in ways that don't require them to make plans, choose carefully among options, and apply for support. Because they don't have the time for that on top of their daily obligations.

When a woman who did not want to get pregnant has an abortion, it means the system failed to give her the means to avoid pregnancy and she is correcting that failure.

We should help poor women avoid pregnancy by having high school steer students into effective modern birth control, such as implants or IUDs. The state should pay for these, for all women. To refuse is stupid penny-pinching.

If you want to buy Ms Tirado's book, please don't order it, especially not from Amazon. Buy it with anonymous cash in a local independent book store.

How the "privatization" of Britain replaced government services with foreign-controlled monopolies.