Category: reason

Calling it “an extreme gerrymander,” a Maryland judge on Friday tossed out the state’s new congressional district map and ordered state lawmakers to produce a new one before the end of the month.

In the ruling, Judge Lynne A. Battaglia said the eight congressional districts drawn by the Democrat-controlled state Legislature lacked compactness and demonstrated a disregard for existing political boundaries like counties and cities. The map “subordinates constitutional criteria to political considerations,” Battaglia wrote, and in doing so violates the Maryland Constitution’s equal protection and free elections clauses. It’s the first time in Maryland history that a judge has discarded a redistricting map for being too politically slanted, according to The Washington Post, which is really saying something given the state’s recent history.

The congressional map used in Maryland for the past 10 years was one of the most highly gerrymandered in the country—even though Republican gerrymanders in places like North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin attracted more attention to the problem of politically motivated mapmaking. That’s part of the reason why Maryland’s congressional delegation has been split 7–1 in favor of Democrats for the past decade.

This time around, Democrats in Annapolis drew an even more gerrymandered map that would have given them an electoral edge in all eight of the state’s districts by carving up Maryland’s deep blue Baltimore/Washington corridor so that nearly all of the state’s congressional districts include some part of it. The new map received a grade of “F“ from the Princeton Gerrymandering Project, which grades congressional maps on partisan fairness, geographical compactness, and other factors.

In the ruling, Battaglia pointed to how the Maryland map scored poorly in several metrics used to access the compactness of political districts. These mathematical formulas are imperfect ways of assessing congressional districts—not every district ought to be a perfect circle, of course. But, as I argued in a 2018 feature for Reason, that sort of statistical analysis is vital for lawmakers and judges to use when assessing the question of how much gerrymandering is too much.

Battaglia’s ruling bears that out. She points to the fact that Maryland’s districts scored worse than all but two other states on the Polsby-Popper scale—a metric that measures the ratio of a district’s area against a theoretical circle with the same circumference as the district’s perimeter. Maryland scores equally poorly under the Reock metric, which requires drawing the smallest possible circle that would encompass all points of a district, then comparing the area of the circle to the area of the district.

When compared to other current and former congressional maps, the scores given to Maryland’s maps compare “very poorly relative to anything drawn in the last fifty years in the United States,” wrote Battaglia in Friday’s ruling.

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, called Friday’s ruling “a monumental victory for every Marylander who cares about protecting our democracy, bringing fairness to our elections, and putting the people back in charge.”

Hogan encouraged state lawmakers to respond to Battaglia’s ruling by voting to adopt a map drawn by the Maryland Citizens Redistricting Commission, a group that included three Republicans, three Democrats, and three politically unaffiliated residents of the state.

Though the commission was powerless to implement its vision, the map it produced is undeniably fairer than the one approved by state lawmakers and ultimately rejected by Battaglia. The districts make geographic sense, and the parts of Maryland with more Republicans (the Eastern Shore and the western panhandle) are placed in districts more likely to reflect their local politics. The Princeton Gerrymandering Project gave the commission’s map an “A” grade.

By rejecting that proposal and “adopting a new map that was even more blatantly political” than the previous map, “the Maryland Legislature virtually dared the courts to do anything about it,” Walter Olson, a member of the citizens’ commission and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, tells Reason. 

Courts are increasingly taking that dare in other states too. State judges in Pennsylvania and North Carolina have recently tossed out Republican-drawn maps for being too politically slanted.

As those cases and the current situation in Maryland make clear, both parties seek to put their thumbs on the scale of congressional elections by trying to use redistricting to let politicians select their voters rather than the other way around. But Maryland’s highly gerrymandered map has also exposed how support for redistricting reform is often warped for partisan purposes too.

As I wrote in December, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D–Md.) has been one of the loudest voices in Congress calling out Republican attempts at gerrymandering. He’s claimed on Twitter that “gerrymandering empowers political minorities to redistrict political majorities into near-oblivion,” issued an official statement claiming that “Republican state legislators…have perfected the art of redistricting for the goal of destroying the political opposition,” and was one of several members of Congress to submit an amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court calling for it to “end partisan gerrymandering” when the Court reviewed Wisconsin’s GOP-drawn gerrymander last year.

But Raskin’s district in Maryland is highly gerrymandered and would have gotten even more misshapen if the new map had survived Battaglia’s review. Raskin has refused to comment on the map-drawing process in his home state—a place where his supposedly reform-minded principles would likely have more influence, if he chose to exert it, than would his performative outrage on Twitter or in front of the Supreme Court.

At the same time, the obviously superior maps drawn by Maryland’s citizens’ commission suggest there is a way forward for those actually interested in reforming redistricting. It’s impossible to remove politics from the process entirely, of course, but anything is probably better than letting sitting legislators from a single party control the mapmaking process.

The defeat of Maryland’s highly partisan congressional map is a terrific real-world example of how greater use of statistical analyses and greater involvement of the general public can defeat the incumbency-protection scheme that is gerrymandering—or at least lessen the damage it does.

The post Judge Tosses Maryland's Highly Gerrymandered Congressional Map appeared first on Reason.com.

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Please enjoy the latest edition of Short Circuit, a weekly feature from the Institute for Justice.

Last call for Short Circuit Live! RSVP now for our live recording of the Short Circuit podcast at the National Press Club on Wednesday, April 6 at 6:30 p.m. Featuring Paul Clement, Lisa Blatt, and Kelsi Brown Corkran, the event is nearly full!

Plus, just released on the Short Circuit podcast, lemon lawyer and YouTube celebrity Steve Lehto joins the panel to talk about an arrest over f-bombs at an Ohio county fair as well as a takings case in Minneapolis.

• Despite losing its RLUIPA case in the First Circuit, it does seem that the Shrine of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker, Patron of Sailors, and Brewers and Repentant Thieves will be allowed to proceed with the renovation of its brewery (operated by Orthodox Christian monks), chapel, and fellowship hall in Marblehead, Mass. God be praised.
• Disgruntled fantasy baseball players sue Major League Baseball, the Red Sox, and the Astros, alleging that they would have done better in their fantasy leagues—and won more money—if the Sox and the Astros hadn’t broken the rules on electronic sign-stealing and if MLB hadn’t covered it up. Second Circuit: MLB never claimed that its league was free of cheating—a regrettable reality in sports—which means there was no fraudulent misrepresentation.
• Police officers are not entitled to absolute prosecutorial immunity for omitting exculpatory information on an arrest warrant affidavit, says the Second Circuit. And, over a dissent, neither are these East Hartford, Conn. officers entitled to qualified immunity.
• In return for not reporting her, Virgin Islands inspector seeks sexual favors from unlicensed manicurist who is in the country illegally (and who adroitly downloaded a call-recording app, allowing his solicitations to be played before the jury). Third Circuit: He’s probably guilty of something, but not bribery. Conviction vacated.
• We’re not saying we don’t appreciate the Hamilton references strewn throughout this Fifth Circuit opinion, we’re just saying we’re disappointed the dissent did not challenge the majority to a rap battle.
• After a Louisiana state court awards some $10.5 mil to property owners who claimed a New Orleans flood control project took their property, the city declines to pay. Indeed, the state constitution makes clear that such judgments are just unenforceable IOUs, and state courts have no means to order cities to pay up. Fifth Circuit: Frustrating! But perhaps the city will someday do the right thing. There is no federal right to timely payment of judgments. (Click here for a IJ amicus brief urging the court to reach the opposite conclusion.)
• Under federal law, a tax credit is available if you mix a taxable fuel (like butane) with a liquefied petroleum gas (like butane), but not if you mix a taxable fuel (like butane) with another taxable fuel (like butane). Sparks fly as this Fifth Circuit panel weighs what to do about lighter fluid.
• Man is kicked out of sex offender treatment program for failing polygraph tests and sent to prison, where he remains for nearly 13 years. Yikes! Polygraphs are not only junk science but also inadmissible as evidence under Texas law, and a state court orders him freed. Can he sue Dallas County over its purported polygraph policy? Fifth Circuit: That depends on whether the Dallas County District Attorney—who may be elected by county voters, may exercise his authority exclusively in the county, and may have “complete dominion” over county policies—was acting on behalf of the county or the state. And since the DA was acting on behalf of the state, no, the man can’t sue.
• A one-time use of a racial epithet doesn’t always make for a viable hostile work environment claim, says the Fifth Circuit, but in this instance—where a Hispanic supervisor allegedly called a Black employee the N-word in front of other employees—the claim is indeed viable. Claim undismissed.
• Detroit high school freshman winds up with a broken jaw, among other injuries, after he is allegedly slammed to ground and kneeled on by (230-lb.) assistant principal and then struck by (230-lb.) police officer. Excessive force? Sixth Circuit: To a jury this must go. No qualified immunity.
• Ohio University police officer sexually assaults high school student for several months—not the first time he’d been accused of such conduct—after meeting her at “career day” on the university’s campus. Can she sue the university? The Sixth Circuit says no, because her complaint didn’t sufficiently allege, as is necessary under Title IX when plaintiff is a nonstudent (at the university), that the career day was an “education program or activity.”
• Salinas, Calif. church buys a new building on Main Street, but the local zoning code prohibits it from hosting worship services on the first floor (a fact the church was aware of when they bought the building). After unsuccessfully seeking a zoning code amendment and a conditional-use permit, the church sues under the RLUIPA. Ninth Circuit: Even though the church has now sold the building, they sought $1 in damages, so the case is live. But have they considered holding their services on the second floor?
• Portland, Ore. police officer pepper sprays woman outside City Hall. Might the officer have thought she was attempting to drag another officer into a crowd of angry protesters? Or did she merely grasp the officer briefly to steady herself after he pushed her off some steps? Ninth Circuit (over a dissent): To a jury this must go. No qualified immunity. (See 23:25 to decide for yourself. But steel yourself for expletives.)
• Ninth Circuit: It’s clearly established and also obvious that police shouldn’t shoot people who pose no immediate threat, even if they are armed and the situation is volatile. So no qualified immunity for a Riverside County, Calif. police officer who shot and killed a man, who was holding a bat or maybe a stick, six times without warning. A jury should decide if the deceased was threatening or not.
• Allegation: After transgender inmate tells investigators that she was raped in Colorado federal prison, she’s put back in general population anyway, where she is again raped. Can she sue the investigators? District court: No, she’s claiming they were deliberately indifferent to risk posed by other inmates, and we only have precedent about deliberate indifference to risk from a medical condition. Tenth Circuit: Instead, we say she pled herself out of court when she wrote in her complaint, without the assistance of a lawyer, that the investigators did not “comprehend and realize the seriousness of the situation,” which means they couldn’t have been deliberately indifferent at all. Qualified immunity. (Click here for an IJ amicus urging the court to reject the district court’s reasoning.)
• Nusret Gökçe, better known as the internet-famous Salt Bae, has made a mint bouncing kosher salt off his forearm and selling $1k gold-covered ribeyes to suckers gourmets. But did he also violate federal labor law by applying a mandatory 18 percent service charge at his restaurants toward employee wages, rather than treating the charge as a tip? Eleventh Circuit: Customers may not like adding tips on top of mandatory service charges on top of overpriced meals, but the service charge remains a service charge, not a tip.
• And in amicus brief news, IJ is asking a federal district court to apply strict scrutiny to a New York law that prohibits non-lawyers from giving individualized advice on how to respond to debt-collection lawsuits. The law would impose criminal penalties on a pastor in the Bronx who started a nonprofit to assist low-income congregants who face such lawsuits without any legal help.
• And in more amicus brief news, IJ is asking the Fourth Circuit to reverse a district court‘s grant of qualified immunity to a Winterville, N.C. officer who prevented a passenger at a traffic stop (initiated over a minor alleged infraction) from livestreaming the encounter. The district court ruled that while there may be a clearly established right to record the police, that does not mean there is a clearly established right to livestream the police.
• And in further amicus brief news, IJ is the asking the Fifth Circuit to reconsider its grant of qualified immunity to a Fort Worth, Tex. officer who wrenched a restrained, unresisting 18-year-old’s arm up and behind her back, admittedly to cause pain, when she didn’t answer his questions with sufficient alacrity.

For just shy of a century, and thanks to an old-timey bootlegger case in which the U.S. Supreme Court misread Blackstone and established the “open fields” doctrine, it’s been blackletter law in federal court that the government doesn’t need a warrant to search private land (beyond the immediate confines of a home). But this week, a three-judge state circuit court panel ruled that Tennessee’s Constitution “offers a broader guarantee of security for an individual’s real property” and that it won’t do for officials to roam around at will. Hear, hear for state constitutions! Click here for more.

The post Short Circuit: A Roundup of Recent Federal Court Decisions appeared first on Reason.com.

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There’s a powerful David vs. Goliath lesson emerging from Russia’s brazen, unprovoked invasion of Ukraine that should give deep pause to global superpowers who still think they can simply muscle the world into any shape they want.

Every Russian tank that gets fried in Ukraine is sending the message that traditional armies can no longer expect to dominate simply because they have more troops, weapons, and money. Russian armored vehicles are falling victim to Next Generation Light Anti-Tank Weapons (NLAWs), which can be carried by individual soldiers, unslung in seconds, and deployed with little training and fatal accuracy. There are credible reports that Russia has already lost $5 billion worth of military equipment in a month of fighting in Ukraine. The human cost for Russia is even more staggering: Nearly 10,000 soldiers have been killed in action, including at least five generals.

That’s the reality of contemporary warfare: Smaller, nimbler groups fighting back effectively against lumbering, dumb relics of the past. Despite being the fifth largest fighting force on the planet and starting the war with five times the number of active military as Ukraine, Russia has been stymied in what virtually all observers expected to be a cakewalk.

This isn’t to say that Russia isn’t also inflicting massive, horrific violence against Ukraine—or that it won’t prevail in this conflict, especially the longer things drag on. But this war underscores what James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg called the changing “logic of violence” and “the diminishing returns to violence” in their prophetic 1997 book The Sovereign Individual.

As weapons have become smaller, cheaper, more effective, and more widely dispersed, it’s harder and harder for old-style militaries and countries to quickly and effectively achieve their objectives through brute force as they meet resistance at every turn. That resistance includes “information warfare”—which includes hacking and cyber attacks—but also the use of social media, which Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy has excelled at to project an aura of invincibility and to cast the conflict in stark terms of good vs. evil.

This lesson shouldn’t be new to Americans, as our failures over the past two decades in Afghanistan and Iraq underscored the new reality that old-school invasion and occupation is more expensive and temporary than it is quick and effective. But Russia’s incompetence drives home in graphic detail to us—and, one hopes, to the Chinese officials supposedly eyeing an invasion of Taiwan—that even if Goliath does take out David, the price is too high and the victory too transient to bother undertaking.

If the collapse of the Soviet Union—that gargoyle incarnation of belief in top-down authority, power, and decision-making—was the beginning of the end of the 20th century’s romance with the nation-state, then Russia’s blundering in Ukraine and the United States’ disasters in central Asia and the Middle East may be its epitaph.

The future belongs not to the ignorant armies of the night who seek to command and control but to those who embrace and empower the decentralization of weapons, technology, information, currency, and individual ingenuity and courage.

Photo Credits: EyePress/Newscom; LOC; Artvee; Sun news; Jorchr, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Ministry of Defence, OGL v1.0OGL v1.0, via Wikimedia Commons; MoD, OGL v1.0OGL v1.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Ministry of Defence Ukraine/MEGA / Newscom; Maximilian Clarke/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Ministry of Defence Ukraine/MEGA / Newscom; U.S. Navy Photo by Photographer’s Mate Master Chief Terry Cosgrove., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons; CHINE NOUVELLE/SIPA/Newscom; Havrylo Pustoviyt (1900-1947) [2], Antikvar magazine (Ukraine), issue 4(112), 2019, p.16, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons; Mvs.gov.ua, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Viewsridge, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Kremlin.ru, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Music Credit: “Bold,” by Faith Richards via Artlist.

Written and narrated by Nick Gillespie. Edited by Regan Taylor.

 

The post Ukraine Changes the Face of War Forever appeared first on Reason.com.

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By adopting Democrats’ strategy of attacking so-called dark money groups at this week’s confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, Republican senators are fueling efforts to undermine core First Amendment protections.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R–Iowa), the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, denounced the “role of far-left dark money groups like Demand Justice” in his opening remarks. And he wasn’t the only one to do so. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R–S.C.) made vague references to “the most liberal people under the umbrella of Arabella.” Prior to the hearing, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R–Ky.) criticized the “dark money” being spent to “raise [Jackson’s] profile.”

Predictably, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D–R.I.) responded to Republicans’ dark money fear mongering by suggesting that they support his legislation to “get rid of it.” No one should take the bait.

Whitehouse is a sponsor of the DISCLOSE Act, a bill that Republicans in Congress, including Grassley, have thankfully opposed because it would force advocacy groups to publicly expose the names and addresses of their supporters. In today’s polarized political environment, that would be a recipe for disaster. This legislation, which is regularly included in Democratic voting reform proposals, is a direct attack on the First Amendment right to associate privately.

The American Civil Liberties Union also recognizes the threat, with senior staff writing that these provisions “could directly interfere with the ability of many to engage in political speech about causes that they care about and that impact their lives by imposing new and onerous disclosure requirements on nonprofits committed to advancing those causes.”

Armed with donor lists, powerful politicians in Congress could shift the target of their name-and-shame attacks from groups like Demand Justice and the Judicial Crisis Network to the individual Americans who support them. The result would be a loss of donations to groups that speak out, a chilling of political speech, and a shrinking of civil society.

Whitehouse’s proposed “solution” would dramatically expand the federal government’s power over political speech by redefining many communications about legislation and judicial nominations as “campaign-related” speech. True campaign speech—which calls for the election or defeat of candidates—is already heavily regulated.

Under the DISCLOSE Act, however, a “campaign-related disbursement” would include “a Federal judicial nomination communication,” which is defined as any paid communication effort “that is susceptible to no reasonable interpretation other than promoting, supporting, attacking, or opposing the nomination or Senate confirmation of an individual as a Federal judge or justice.” Such communications “shall be treated as campaign-related disbursement[s] regardless of the intent of the person making the disbursement.”

In plain English, the bill would transform speech about nominations into a regulated form of campaign speech, even if neither a candidate for office nor an election is mentioned. Organizations that trigger the “judicial nomination communication” regulations would have to submit donor lists to the Federal Election Commission, even though judicial nominations and confirmation processes are not elections.

These invasive and misleading disclosure mandates would thrust the judicial nomination process even further into the realm of partisan politics. Organizations that have always maintained a nonpartisan position and have never participated in elections would likely be unwilling to engage in speech that may trigger the bill’s provisions. Nonprofits could fall silent because they prioritize their supporters’ privacy over their ability to call on lawmakers to support or oppose a nomination.

Partisan campaign groups won’t be scared away. They may be the only ones still willing to speak about nominees besides politicians and major media outlets, because they are already legally obligated to expose their donors and comply with other reporting requirements.

The difficulty of complying with those laws and the risks of navigating new, vague regulations will be enough to silence many small groups. Groups that do take on those burdens will likely suffer a loss of donations from Americans who fear retaliation for their beliefs or simply prefer not to be publicly associated with “campaign-related” speech.

The end goal of such legislation is to force any group that speaks about the government to operate like a political action committee—leaving people who support a cause to defend themselves against whatever harassment comes their way. Democrats in Congress have long used the “dark money” smear to avoid engaging with their critics and to gin up support for extreme new speech restrictions. Republican senators, in seeking to turn the tables, risk empowering a movement that puts everyone’s First Amendment rights in danger.

The post When They Attack 'Dark Money,' They're Really Attacking Free Speech appeared first on Reason.com.

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The Girl from Plainville. Available March 29 on Hulu.

The Girl from Plainville is being billed as a true-crime miniseries account of the peculiar 2014 suicide-by-manipulation of a Massachusetts teenager named Conrad Roy III, and the resulting manslaughter trial of his girlfriend, Michelle Carter, who was charged even though she was miles away in another town at the time he died. And it’s a good story, well-told.

But the centerpiece of the show is something else again. We don’t reach it until the third hour, when Michelle has been arrested and learns one of the conditions of her bail is the end, at least temporarily, of her on-line existence: no computer and especially no cell phone or texting. “What am I supposed to do?” she gasps in mute disbelief. Replies her attorney, his own incredulity stretching in another direction: “Read a book?”

At heart, the riveting The Girl from Plainville isn’t the story of a murder but a bewildered look at the gnarled and bewildering relationship between teenagers and their phones, a culture in which nearly every idiotic and incoherent word is recorded for posterity and passion is measured in emojis. Though Michelle and Coco (as his friends called him) lived just a short distance apart and regularly pledged their cyberlove for one another, their liaison was almost entirely electronic, occasional phone calls sandwiched between so many text messages that, when cops printed them all out, they filled eight cardboard file boxes.

The story the texts told was unsettling, particularly those in the days just before Coco’s death, as the teenagers took up a recurring subject that fascinated them both: his suicide. They’d been chatting about it for weeks. (Her:  “What about hanging yourself or stabbing yourself?” Him: “Carbon monoxide or helium gas. I want to deprive myself of oxygen.”) But a week or so before it happened, their conversation took on a frightening urgency. “You better not be bullshitting me and saying you’re gonna do this and then purposely get caught,” Michelle warned him. “YOU KEEP PUSHING IT OFF!”

On the night Coco died, he pulled his truck into a parking lot, shut all the windows, and turned on a motorized water pump to fill the vehicle with carbon monoxide. Twice he spoke with Michelle, lengthy conversations of more than 40 minutes each. When they were over, Coco was dead. Unlike text messages, phone calls don’t leave a record of their content. But a text Michelle sent another friend did.

“I could have stopped him,” Michelle wrote. “I was on the phone with him and he got out of the car because it was working and he got scared and I fucking told him to get back in. I could of stopped him but I fucking did it. All I had to say was I love you.”

Police take the message both seriously and literally. “With due respect, those are fucked-up texts,” the lead investigator tells the chief. Michelle’s friends, who thought she was a show-off and a drama queen, are less impressed. “People will say anything to get a like,” one shrugs.

Based on a story from Esquire magazine, The Girl from Plainville is neither the first nor the most incisive television account of the case. Though it does a reasonably good job of recounting both the tale of the suicide and the thorny legal issues it raised—is encouraging somebody to kill themselves really a criminal act or just a reprehensible and even demented (but legal) form of free speech?—Plainville is a drama and its strong suit is its characters. For a better brief on the legal issues, hunt down HBO’s superb 2019 documentary I Love You, Now Die.

But when it comes to unraveling the tangles of digital adolescent psychology, or at least observing it lucidly, The Girl from Plainville is a better bet. It portrays Michelle (played brilliantly by the emerging star Elle Fanning) as an emotional vampire who greedily appropriates Coco’s fascination with suicide when he’s alive and his family’s fractured grief when he dies. She’s also an untethered fantasist whose roadmap of her own life consists mostly of imagining herself in scenes from the high-school musical melodrama Glee. The show’s most chilling scene is one in which, to play her self-assigned role as the martyred girlfriend, she stares into a mirror while mimicing a grieving tribute to a departed Glee character. Are her feelings real, or plagiarized? Does she know? Or care?

Fractured identity and self-deception are themes that run throughout The Girl From Plainville. The doomed Coco (Colton Ryan, Homeland) is so alienated from his own life that he longs for a checklist that would tell him how to live it. His mother (Chloe Sevigny) seems to have been relying on one herself. (“They told us to get him a shrink, we get him a shrink. The shrink says get him some pills, we get him some pills. What were we supposed to do, chain him to the fucking radiator?)” Prosecutor Katie Rayburn (Aya Cash, You’re the Worst) isn’t really sure Michelle committed a crime, but is thrilled by the prospect of setting a legal precedent. After pinpointing a bunch of falsehoods in Michelle’s texts, Rayburn declares: “You know who lies? Guilty people.” Retorts another prosecutor: “You know who lies? Teenagers.” In The Girl from Plainville, you know who lies? Everybody.

The post A Dark Look at Modern Teen Culture Roots True-Crime Retelling of <em>The Girl from Plainville</em> appeared first on Reason.com.

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I’ve been listening to, and much enjoying, this series of short Russian-language verse satires. They started 4 years ago, but of course in the last month they have focused on the invasion of Ukraine; I’ve found them to be witty and incisive.

The performer’s persona is a slightly dense and naive old man, who on the surface appears to be endorsing (or at most musing about) the authorities’ official party line, but of course is actually mocking it. Very nicely done; if you know Russian, I think you’ll enjoy it. Here’s a simple:

As best I can tell, “Archimedes” is just a funny rhyme in Russian for “Дед,” which here means old man (though it can also mean grandfather); I don’t know of any other meaning it would have, nor any connection to the great ancient Greek.

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