Stack the Week Daily

Welcome to Stack the Week for July 10th, Friday.

The daily experiment continues. Thank you for the feedback and the reviews on Apple Podcasts.

If you’re reading this instead of listening, remember this is also a podcast. You can hear me read it while you’re driving, making dinner, or trying to lessen the cognitive load at the end of the week because frankly you’re a blob of jelly and just forming words is a challenge.

Here at Stack the Whatever We Call it, we have the words.

Thank you to Laura Doan for helping me bolt all of this together.

Iran Again off Again

The repetitive rhythm of this war—attack, retaliation, ceasefire, collapse—invites a danger. Every day feels like yesterday, so we stop asking key questions.

Wake me when the war’s over.

This hands over our critical faculties to the people who try to confuse us. So I’m going to give you the news and then try to knock us all out of our presentism.

First, the news: The U.S. hit more than 170 targets in Iran over two days. Iran answered the recent U.S. attacks with missiles and drones at bases in four countries—Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Jordan—including Qatar, the mediator of the talks it’s still supposedly conducting.

The US attack included a railway bridge —civilian infrastructure, not just military hardware. Central Command says the bridge moved weapons toward the Strait; Dana Stroul, the Pentagon’s former top Middle East official, told The New York Times the strike was a message that Iran’s bridges and railways are now targets.

Problem: attacks on civilian infrastructure could constitute war crimes. The administration is trying to write around that by saying the civilian infrastructure is dual use. On the other hand, who will take the U.S. to court?

In last month’s memorandum of understanding the U.S. gave Iran sanctions relief in return for its assurance that it would allow free use of the Strati of Hormuz.

Iran cheated, taking the relief while trying to keep control of the Strait by forcing shippers onto an Iran-approved route and when tankers didn’t take that route Iran attacked, as it did with three commercial ships earlier this week.

That’s the news. Here’s the 30,000-foot view:

One of the world’s worst regimes—one that murders and suppresses its own people, funds terrorists abroad, and seeks to build the means to do both more effectively with missiles and nukes—has been significantly degraded.

The costs of the degradation are:

Death.

A thirst for revenge implanted in an entirely new Iranian generation.

Destabilization of the world economy.

Further deterioration of the American public’s faith that their leaders will tell them the truth about the highest-stakes actions taken in their name.

Missile stockpiles—both the interceptors that defend and the weapons that attack—have dwindled, weakening the United States and its allies against every other threat.

Russian oil allowed to flow, propping up a regime that kills Ukrainians.

Hardliners are in power in Tehran. Nobody in Washington can say who they’ll be negotiating with in five years.

The U.S. has publicly claimed the right to hit bridges and power plants under a dual-use theory, a precedent Russia and China can now cite back at us.

Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Jordan absorbed attacks on their own soil for hosting American forces, a bill that will come due.

Congress never voted—four months of war, 170 targets in two days, and the constitutional question has simply been steamrolled.

The war has also consumed something harder to measure but just as finite: American attention. Attention is finite. Every hour, intelligence asset, diplomat, or Patriot battery devoted to Iran isn’t available for China, Ukraine, or the next crisis.

Was it worth it? And was it worth it the way it has been done? Could it have been done no other way? The only way to come up with an honest answer is to keep the question right at the end of our nose.

Making a final calculation also depends on what finally comes of diplomatic negotiations (let’s not call them peace talks or a ceasefire—those words have lost the snap in the waistband).

Finally, and I know I mentioned it earlier in the week, but as the war heats up, I return to the spin from the administration and its allies: that when Donald Trump signed the June Memorandum of Understanding, it was a savvy move to quiet the war’s impact in advance of the November elections. That spin was folly at the time and today’s news reminds us why. It’s a double folly really: the happy talk of 18 dimensional electoral chess strategy echoes the original criticism of the war—that it was built on happy talk, fantastical outcomes and incapable of hard thinking about long-term and unintended consequences.

Houston Shooting Update

We told you Tuesday about the Houston construction worker who was fatally shot by an ICE agent during a traffic stop. The Department of Homeland Security initially said the driver had tried to run over an officer with his van, forcing the agent to fire in self-defense.

The update: in reporting by The Washington Post and the Associated Press, the three men who were in the van have now given detailed, consistent accounts disputing that version, saying the van never drove toward an officer and that agents opened fire from the side of the vehicle. There is still no body-camera footage. ICE says the agents involved had not yet been issued body cameras, even though the agency has adopted a policy requiring their use where they have been deployed. ICE has not released other evidence supporting its account.

Body cameras matter here because they reduce the space where competing official and eyewitness narratives can survive indefinitely. In ordinary policing, video increasingly settles factual disputes within days. Immigration enforcement still operates in many places without that evidentiary backstop, leaving the public to judge credibility instead of evidence.

Several other fatal encounters involving ICE agents are also in dispute, with similar claims that victims acted aggressively toward officers. In the case of two incidents in Minneapolis, reporting later showed that video evidence contradicted key parts of ICE’s initial account.

Election Assistance Commission

Donald Trump fired the remaining members of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission on Friday. If your reaction was, “The what?”, you’re not alone.

Congress created the commission after the disputed 2000 Bush-Gore election, not to run elections—despite the repeated efforts by president Trump that remains the responsibility of the states—but to make elections run better. The EAC tests and certifies voting machines, distributes election-security grants, maintains the national voter registration form, shares best practices with thousands of local election officials, and coordinates efforts to protect election systems from cyberattacks.

The immediate practical effect may be limited. States will still run this November’s elections, and the commission has operated without a full slate of commissioners before. The larger story is what this says about the long-running fight over who gets to shape American elections. President Trump has repeatedly argued that elections need stronger safeguards against illegal voting, including requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register.

Those in touch with the data and facts respond that documented cases of noncitizen voting and other forms of voter fraud are exceedingly rare. Democrats say requirements of the kind Trump is advocating risk making it harder for eligible citizens to vote. Federal courts have already blocked parts of the administration’s effort to impose document requirements through executive order, saying the Constitution largely leaves the conduct of elections to Congress and the states.

This is one of the first major tests of the Supreme Court’s recent expansion of presidential authority to remove leaders of independent federal agencies. We know that Donald Trump has a history of repeated claims that elections were rigged when there is no evidence. Removing experts who could fact-check him allows his evidence-free claims to flourish in an environment where being loud and wrong is more powerful than facts or reason.

Trump and Housing Bill

If the Election Assistance Commission isn’t really about elections anymore, maybe it shouldn’t surprise us that the housing bill isn’t really about housing anymore either.

Hours after firing the commissioners, Donald Trump refused to sign Congress’s bipartisan housing bill—not because he objected to anything in it, but because the Senate had failed to pass his SAVE America Act, which he says would require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote.

The housing bill will become law anyway at midnight because Trump chose neither to sign nor veto it, foregoing a chance to boast about an issue close to people’s election year concerns.

So what does that mean for housing costs? Probably not much this year. The bill tries to increase housing supply over time by making it easier and cheaper to build homes, easing federal regulations, encouraging local governments to permit more construction, and limiting some large institutional purchases of single-family homes. Economists generally see it as a useful, incremental supply bill—not one that will noticeably lower your rent or mortgage in the near future.

The larger point is the one we’ve been talking about all week. Increasingly, legislation isn’t judged on its own merits. It becomes leverage in a fight about something else. In this case, one of the largest bipartisan housing bills in decades has been turned by the president into something else. The thing that might help people with the necessity they care about most is overshadowed by a phantom problem that gains them nothing.

Ebola

In the United States or Europe, an Ebola case sets off a rapid, almost choreographed response: teams fan out, contacts are traced within hours, names logged on clipboards, temperatures checked, patients isolated before the virus can move. In eastern Congo, clinics in the conflict zone are attacked. Roads are unsafe. Contact lists are incomplete or nonexistent. House-to-house searches begin late and proceed slowly. Four out of five new patients were never on any tracing list at all, meaning the virus is spreading unseen. The World Health Organization now estimates the outbreak could already be two to four times larger than the official numbers. The latest news: Suspected cases have now appeared in provinces where the virus hadn’t been seen before, and one of those cases has no obvious connection to the known outbreak.

That doesn’t mean Ebola is about to become a global pandemic. Ebola remains difficult to spread; it requires close contact with an infected person’s bodily fluids, unlike an airborne virus such as COVID. But outbreaks like this remind us that conflict doesn’t just kill people directly. It also dismantles the ordinary machinery—clinics, surveillance, trust, transportation, and paid health workers—that keeps dangerous diseases from becoming much larger ones.

White House UFC Attack Plot

Last month, with spectators crowding the White House lawn and surrounding a ring where fighters were beating each other bloody, another group had a very different spectacle in mind: explosive-laden drones flying into the crowd, followed by sniper fire aimed at panicked people trying to escape. Their alleged target list included President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Elon Musk, and other senior officials.

Fortunately, they never got anywhere close. According to an indictment unsealed Friday, investigators uncovered the plot four days before the event, arrested the alleged participants across multiple states, and have now charged eight men in a single conspiracy case.

Stocks and Real Estate

Stocks now make up 34% of American household wealth — the highest share ever recorded. Real estate, which held American wealth for generations, has fallen to 26%. That 8-point gap is also a record. The figures come from Barclays’ Alexander Altmann on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast, flagged by co-host Tracy Alloway in the show’s newsletter on Friday.

For most of modern American history, the family home held the family’s wealth. Now the stock market does. That changes what a crash means or even daily market fluctuations. When wealth lived in houses, a crash hurt people who owned stocks. Now it hurts almost everyone, because people spend based on how wealthy they feel — and when portfolios shrink, spending stops. Altmann says a 20% drop in the S&P 500 wipes out about $16 trillion, half of what the US economy produces in a year.

Politicians now have more reason than ever to keep stock prices from falling, because a crash punishes voters, not just investors. And stock prices are high right now largely because investors expect AI companies to make huge profits someday. Those profits haven’t arrived. If they never do, stock prices fall, families that hold their savings in stocks get poorer, and they cut their spending. That’s how disappointment about one technology could shrink the whole economy.

Man Sucked from Plane

“I love you so much I would grab your legs and refuse to let go if you were sucked through a plane window.” As a marriage vow, that would be highly specific and somewhat odd. And yet you’d want it pressed with a rose in your wedding album if you found yourself where a 61-year-old Serbian man found himself on Friday: five minutes with his head outside a Boeing 737 at altitude. He is alive because his wife grabbed his legs and refused to let go. The New York Times reported this, God love them.

The window next to his seat came apart shortly after the plane left Thessaloniki, Greece, bound for Memmingen, Germany. The escaping cabin air pulled his upper body through the opening. Other passengers helped his wife drag him back inside. The plane, a Ryanair subsidiary Malta Air flight, turned around and landed in Thessaloniki. The man is in a hospital with friction burns, conscious.

Ryanair confirmed the window “dislodged inflight” but did not address how a paying customer ended up partially outside the aircraft, a class of service that was not on his ticket and which you can’t really purchase at any price. Boeing says it’s in contact with the airline, so that’s comforting.

A plane at cruising altitude keeps its cabin pressurized to feel like it would at 6,000–8,000 feet while the air outside is far thinner. When a window fails, the high-pressure cabin air rushes out through the hole, and it takes anything nearby with it — papers, phones, a61 year old Serbian man. If you’re seated next to the breach when this happens, the pull is strongest in the first seconds, then weakens once cabin and outside pressure equalize.

The person stuck in the opening faces three problems at once: air roaring past at hundreds of miles an hour, thin air with too little oxygen, and cold that can hit 60 below. The immediate killer, when there is one, is usually blunt-force trauma — the body slamming against the fuselage. Upsides include: that windblown look, a strong narrative spine for dinner conversation and the grace of seeing the world through the fresh recollection that our time in it is fleeting.

How often does this happen? Almost never. In 2018 a Southwest passenger did die, but it was the first passenger fatality on a US airline in nine years. The most famous precedent is stranger still: in 1990, a British Airways windscreen blew out and the captain was sucked halfway out of the cockpit; a flight attendant held his ankles for 20 minutes until landing, and the captain survived and returned to flying. Commercial windows are built in multiple layers precisely so one crack doesn’t open a hole, which is why investigators will want to know what happened to this one.

Even though this is rare, we’d be letting you down if we didn’t arm you with some practical knowledge. The first thing to do is marry well. The man’s wife did what you’re supposed to do. As a general matter the instructions are this: If someone near you is being pulled toward a breach, do not maintain an ironic distance. Grab and hold! The initial suction fades within seconds as pressure equalizes, so surviving the first moments is most of the battle. Oh, and put your own oxygen mask on first; at cruising altitude you have perhaps 15–30 seconds of useful consciousness without it, and you can’t hold anyone’s legs while blacking out. Stay belted — the seatbelt is what keeps the hole from getting you in the first place. Then wait: pilots train for exactly this, and the plane will descend fast to thicker air where everyone can breathe.

That Air Force One News

In other plane news, you might have heard that President Trump flew home from the NATO summit on the old Air Force One instead of the new Boeing 747 donated by Qatar. Apparently, it lacks some of the sophisticated missile countermeasures found on the older presidential aircraft. This is just a temporary presidential aircraft. The permanent replacement planes, still under construction by Boeing, are expected to include the full suite of defensive systems.

Wait. How can another country give the president an airplane? Doesn’t the Constitution prohibit that?

The Constitution’s Foreign Emoluments Clause bars federal officeholders from accepting gifts from foreign governments without Congress’s consent. The Trump administration argues the aircraft was accepted by the U.S. government—not by Donald Trump personally—and that it is being used as government property during his presidency before eventually being transferred to his presidential library after he leaves office. This feels a little like putting your hands over your eyes and thinking no one can see you. It’s a gift, called one thing while Trump is in office and then another when he keeps it upon leaving.

Farage Bin Challenge

On Monday we told you about Nigel Farage’s decision to resign his seat in Parliament and force a special election, arguing that voters—not Parliament’s ethics watchdog—should judge the questions surrounding the gifts and cash he received from interested parties.

Labour, the Conservatives, and the Liberal Democrats have refused to give in to his stunt and field candidates. So, one of Farage’s highest-profile opponents is now Count Binface, a candidate who campaigns dressed as a giant trash can (or bin as the Brits call it when they’re not saying alluminium). Binface describes himself as an intergalactic warrior from the planet Sigma IX. His platform includes moving a badly placed hand dryer in a local pub, capping the price of croissants, bringing back the old BBC teletext service, and, for reasons known only to Count Binface, nationalizing Adele.

Binface is in the tradition of UK novelty candidates—including Screaming Lord Sutch of the Monster Raving Loony Party. In 2002, a man dressed as a monkey was elected mayor of Hartlepool.

Now, nobody likes a good laugh more than I do... except, perhaps, my wife... and some of her friends. Oh, yes, and Captain Johnson. Come to think of it, most people like a good laugh more than I do, but that’s beside the point.

It falls upon me to remind you that the reason Farage has so many people up in arms is that his platform—and the platform of his Reform UK party—isn’t a joke. It calls for Britain to leave the European Convention on Human Rights, sharply reduce immigration, detain and deport people arriving illegally, abandon Net Zero policies, expand domestic oil and gas production, cut taxes, and take a harder line on crime.

The Bayeux Tapestry’s Secret Journey

Just before three o’clock Friday morning, a yellow truck backed through the gates of the British Museum under police escort. Inside the truck was a cage. Inside the cage was a crate. Inside the crate was another crate. Inside that was a metal shell containing a 950-year-old, 225-foot-long piece of embroidery, folded back and forth 28 times like the world’s most valuable accordion.

The Bayeux Tapestry had arrived in England, on loan while the museum housing it—which John Dickerson failed to visit while he was on a shoot and staying in Bayeux because he was just too tired and had a really long day ahead of him—undergoes a 2 year renovation.

The tapestry is one of the great survivors of Western civilization: an embroidered eyewitness account of William the Conqueror’s invasion of England in 1066—the Battle of Hastings, Halley’s Comet, warships crossing the English Channel, cavalry charges, and the death of King Harold. Think of it as Europe’s oldest graphic novel.

Moving it was an engineering project worthy of NASA, according to Chris Heath’s remarkable reporting in National Geographic. The tapestry was cushioned by giant vibration-dampening springs, monitored by sensors measuring every bump, and driven under police escort through the Channel Tunnel after multiple full-scale rehearsal trips.

All this for an object that, during the French Revolution, was nearly used to cover a wagon, was once almost cut into strips to decorate a parade float, survived Napoleon, and later survived Hitler.

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