This month, I have been mostly reading:

• Bloom County — by Berkeley Breathed:
  
• Art Spiegelman Loses His Glasses: As the latest fight over Maus erupts, its artist-creator searches for his spectacles. — Abraham Riesman at Vulture spins what appears to have been a very short interview into a slightly longer article: As Spiegelman sees it, the real reason for the board’s decision may be that the narrative of Maus offers no catharsis, let alone comfort, to readers. There are no saviors. No one is redeemed. The characters — Spiegelman’s family — remain the imperfect people they were to begin with. “It’s a very not-Christian book,” Spiegelman says. “Vladek didn’t become better as a result of his suffering. He just got to suffer. They want to teach the Holocaust. They just want a friendlier Holocaust to teach.”
• Mum & Dad Bank to keep interest rates steady at 0% — Callum Wratten at the Shovel: Despite increasing anxiety about inflation and out-of-control housing costs, the Bank of Mum and Dad announced this morning that they will keep interest rates at 0%. It is the 110th month that the central bank has kept rates unchanged. Bank of Mum & Dad Governor, Mum, said the decision wasn’t made lightly. “We looked very carefully at all the data, the impact that it was having on the cost of living for working Australians. But then we thought about our little baby boy, the apple of eye, our little prince, and how he just wanted an investment property so badly.”
• Bizarro — by Wayno and Piraro:
  
• Why does Australia still sell weapons to human-rights abuser Saudi Arabia? — Dechlan Brennan in Pearls and Irritations: In 2016 the UN reported that “Since the beginning of this conflict in Yemen, weddings, marketplaces, hospitals, schools – and now mourners at a funeral – have been hit, resulting in massive civilian casualties and zero accountability for those responsible.” […] In 2018 Australia sought to break into the top 10 defence-exporting countries. Various Australian defence ministers have courted more weaponry sales towards both Saudi Arabia and the UAE. The Australian government does not provide data on where its weapons sales go —only mapping it in regions. Unhelpfully, they lump the Middle East in with Asia. It is shocking is that Australia is involved at all. […] Other abuses perpetrated by the Saudi military include “civilian populations being deliberately starved, medical supplies being blocked, rape, murder, enforced disappearances, torture, and forcing children to fight.” Human Rights Watch (HRW) stated that Australia risked complicity in war crimes if it continued to supply the Saudi-led coalition with arms.
• Those Who Support Internet Censorship Lack Psychological Maturity — Caitlin Johnstone: Arguably the most significant political moment in the US since 9/11 and its aftermath was when liberal institutions decided that Trump’s 2016 election was not a failure of status quo politics but a failure of information control, which just so happened to align perfectly with the agendas of the ruling power structure to control the dominant narratives about what’s going on in the world. We saw this exemplified in 2017 when Google, Facebook and Twitter were called before the Senate Judiciary Committee and instructed to come up with a strategy “to prevent the fomenting of discord”. […] The danger of this is obvious to anyone who isn’t a stunted emotional infant. The danger of government-tied monopolistic tech platforms controlling worldwide speech far outweighs the danger of whatever voice you might happen to dislike at any given moment. The only way for this not to be clear to you is if you are so psychologically maladjusted that you can’t imagine anything bad coming from your personal preferences for human expression being imposed upon society by the most powerful institutions on earth.
• The K Chronicles — by Keith Knight: