Choosing Coercion or Compliance | A Tale of Two Trump Cities | Thoughts on Nike

“Life is not an easy matter…. You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness.” – Leon Trotsky

“Every society is three meals away from chaos” – Vladimir Lenin

Spycraft 101: Choosing Coercion or Compliance: The Kremlin has figured out it can get more flies with honey than broken bones, so to speak. Today when it wants to recruit informants, it sends a gentlemanly agent over with flowers. One such individual showed up unannounced last month at the apartment of a 29-year-old woman who works for a pro-democracy group in Moscow. The man was courteous, smiling well-dressed, carrying a bouquet and pretending to be an old friend, albeit one she didn’t recognize. He also seemed to know a lot about her; she soon realized what was going on, that he was there to recruit her to act as a spy for the Russian state at home and abroad. Despite banning the practice in the early 1990s, of luring Russians into informing on their fellow citizens, it again seems to be a widespread, insidious tactic of the FSB, the successor intelligence agency to the KGB. An expert on Russia’s security system noted that being polite was “standard tradecraft” in security services around the world. “Everyone knows that coercion is the least effective way of getting people on your side,” he said.

At least, physical coercion isn’t that effective. Rather, agents will look for individuals with something in their background, something embarrassing perhaps, or a legal problem. One individual who was approached and questioned at length is a gay man who worked as a researcher for a gay rights group studying attacks against LGBTQ people in Russia. He realized his “super vulnerability” made him a perfect target. “Their strategy is to find vulnerability and use this to make you collaborate with them. The weaker you are, the higher the probability that they will approach you sooner or later.”

Moscow, We Have A Problem: Russian officials who examined a tiny hole, found a week ago inside the Russian-made Soyuz capsule attached to the International Space Station, have determined the hole was drilled, possibly deliberately. The ISS is one of the last remaining joint projects between Moscow and Washington, currently with a crew of three Americans, two Russians and one German.

The Cold War Never Ended: A Russian man, who is a potential witness in America’s investigation into Russian hacking in the 2016 presidential election, has been held since 2017 in a Greek jail on an American arrest warrant. A lower court initially decided to send the man to the United States. But after an ensuing tug-of-war over his extradition, and Moscow’s threats of diplomatic reprisals, Greece’s Supreme Court appears poised to send the man to Russia instead.

Fish, Meatballs, Cheese, and…Nazis?: Sweden has long been considered a moral superpower, with its strong social safety net and tradition of welcoming immigrants. Now the country appears to be surrendering to the pressures of globalization, immigration and anxiety about cultural and national identity that has seen the rise of extremist parties in Germany, France and elsewhere. The Swedish Democrats, a populist nationalist party with roots in Swedish fascism and neo-Nazism, is poised to receive perhaps 20 percent of the votes in Sunday’s national election, while the long-dominant Social Democrats are facing their worst showing in a century. (NYT)

Indonesian Aquawoman: Indonesia is a southeast Asian nation made up of some 18,000 volcanic islands between Asia and Australia. It has the world’s fourth largest population, but the most admired woman of all is Fisheries Minister Susi Pudjiastuti, a cigarette smoking grandmother who just loves blowing up boats. Not just any boats – illegal wood and iron fishing boats; the fiber ones are removed from the water first. She is determined to preserve Indonesian resources for locals. Since entering government in 2014, Minister Susi has sent almost 500 illegal vessels to sleep with the fishes. (WaPo)

Russian Poisonings: British police and prosecutors announced Wednesday that two Russian nationals identified as GRU officers, Russia’s military intelligence agency, have been arrested and charged with the Novichok poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, in Salisbury, Wiltshire last March. (Guardian)

– “Putin signed decree on freelance spies days before Skripal claims: Russian officials dismiss claim by Theresa May that GRU was to blame for Salisbury attack” They’re like normal spies, but they don’t have healthcare benefits. (Guardian)

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A Tale of Two Trump Cities: For Trump voters, a tale of two counties should demonstrate how the president’s pledge to revitalize economically troubled swaths of the country is working. St. Charles, in the suburbs northwest of St. Louis, Missouri, is a county Trump won by 26 points, and the prosperity is apparent. St. Charles is doing well; however, St. Charles had had the state’s highest median household income for several years prior to the 2016 election. Meanwhile, 200 miles to the north in Illinois, Knox County ranks in the bottom fifth of prosperity nationwide.

According to rankings by the Economic Innovation Group in Washington, which focuses on geographic disparities in the American economy, the most prosperous Trump-supporting counties added jobs at about 2 percent annual rate in 2017. The least prosperous Trump counties, called “distressed”, did not add any new jobs on net. Distressed counties as a group saw more businesses close than open in 2017, and they lost population as well over the year. (NYT)

“Sperm Count Zero: A strange thing has happened to men over the past few decades: We’ve become increasingly infertile, so much so that within a generation we may lose the ability to reproduce entirely.” (GQ)

– “Should You Track Your Teen’s Location?: …location tracking can confuse the question of who is mainly responsible for the safety of the roaming adolescent — the parent or the teenager?” (NYT)

– “mSpy, the makers of a software-as-a-service product that claims to help more than a million paying customers spy on the mobile devices of their kids and partners, has leaked millions of sensitive records online, including passwords, call logs, text messages, contacts, notes and location data secretly collected from phones running the stealthy spyware.” (Krebs on Security) Quiz: If you are tracking your teen who is tracking you? And if they are tracking you, who is tracking them? Answer: Facebook, Hackers, or Russians.

– “Watch: Nike’s powerful Colin Kaepernick commercial: The ad is scheduled to air during the NFL’s season opener.” (Vox) It’s an effective ad at inspiring and motivating one to just do it: knock out one’s workout and dream big. Nike makes excellent ads and we can’t help but also recall that some of our favorite ads growing up were the Nike Lance Armstrong ones (it’s hard to always pick the winners but MJ and LBJ more than make up for the Lance endorsement). And more recently another sports ad we’ve found inspiring (and less controversial) is Under Armour’s ad with Michael Phelps.

Many of the best decisions combine vision & transaction. Or as they say sleep well and eat well..and then maybe go for a run if one ate too well. Nike has nailed it with this latest ad in that it’ll do well for the company in the long run in regards to vision (being on the right side of history) & transaction (free brand mentions and mindshare that will lead to more sales). And we aren’t counting Kaepernick out and think a team might still pick him up as he’s definitely talented enough to play the game (There are so many awful QBs right now that we are halfway tempted to pull a real life George Plimpton Paper Lion escapade and quit the humdrum of our day job. And the lack of great QBs is probably the bigger reason NFL fans are checked out). A Kaepernick return would truly be a made for TV story (or a 60 minute long extended biopic, cough advertisement). But days to decades from now we might all be wondering whether such a dangerous sport for the brain is one that we should even care about or even give our tacit support.

For all of you Nike player haters who think the company is unpatriotic please quickly note that the Nike founder Phil Knight is an U.S. Army veteran. And for all you real player (athlete) haters who like books more than footballs, baseballs, basketballs, etc… we recommend Phil Knight’s memoir Shoe Dog. We’ve read the book twice and it’s interesting, entertaining, and a fast read.

“I am always amazed when I hear people saying that sport creates goodwill between the nations, and that if only the common peoples of the world could meet one another at football or cricket, they would have no inclination to meet on the battlefield. Even if one didn’t know from concrete examples (the 1936 Olympic Games, for instance) that international sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred, one could deduce it from general principles.” – George Orwell in The Sporting Spirit(A fantastic essay)

“You are remembered, he said, prophetically, for the rules you break.” – Phil Knight, Shoe Dog

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