Welcome to Stack the Week for July 6th. Wait, it’s not Friday. No, it’s not. This is a new turn on the experiment. So, let’s give this Monday a nudge and see if it can walk on its halting legs out of the haybed in the barn and into the sunlight.
Maybe this is the theme of every day, but if you look at today’s ledger, a repeated theme is that the old speed bumps built to keep the world stable are melting away. For generations, we counted on institutional rulebooks, legal processes, and treaties to slow raw power and keep things fair. Monday you see that changing:
A sixty-four-year-old soccer rule vanishes the moment a president makes a personal phone call.
A humanitarian law built to protect solo immigrant children is stripped down just to move bodies out of the country faster.
What happens when the National Guard is on the crime beat.
A president trying to redefine economic success.
A rising political star is forced out of a crucial Senate race because voters don’t want a peacemaker anymore—they want a street-fighter.
When you tear out the joists that keep a society steady, you lose the protections against chaos. The world stops operating by tradition or fairness and collapses into a raw game of tug-of-war, where the only rule left is who has the muscle to pull the hardest. But at least the sun is weaker than we thought.
Thank you to Laura Doan for helping with this iteration of the experiment.
1. Ukraine/Russia/NATO
Every missile hit. Russia fired 29 ballistic missiles at Kyiv overnight and Ukraine intercepted none.
Normally the Patriot missiles would have answered — the American-made system is the only thing Ukraine has that can stop a ballistic missile. But the Patriot missiles from the US that would have resupplied Kyiv were spent months ago defending Israel and American bases across the Middle East against Iran, and new ones can’t be built fast enough. Ukraine had been stretching what remained — one missile per incoming warhead when the manual says two to four. Sunday night the medicine cabinet was empty.
The total Russian barrage — 419 weapons in all, 351 drones and 68 missiles — killed at least 12 and wounded 60, four days after a strike that killed 31.
The strike was called in by Putin, whose other phone use this weekend was a nearly 90-minute call to Donald Trump — the Kremlin readout says Trump offered to help find a solution to the war, and Putin reminded him of his open invitation to Moscow. We are coming up on the one year anniversary of the Alaska summit that was heralded by the president and his men as a huge success. Nothing much came of it.
The U.S. calls battlefield progress “frozen”; the more accurate assessment is asymmetric stalemate — Ukraine’s long-range strikes onto Russian territory are causing fuel shortages inside Russia while Russia empties ballistic inventory into a capital that can’t stop them as they once could.
Tuesday, Trump meets Zelenskyy in Ankara, at a NATO summit with one question under every agenda item: Europe promised Trump it would pay for more of its own defense, but money takes years to become weapons and soldiers — can the allies show him enough, fast enough, to keep America in the alliance? They doubt it themselves: for months they’ve been meeting in secret to plan a NATO without the United States.
2. Iran mourns its leader
The flag-draped casket of Ali Khamenei moved by truck through Tehran Monday morning. Organizers actually had to shorten the ten-kilometer route from Revolution Square to Freedom Square because the mourning crowds were simply too massive. The eighty-six-year-old Supreme Leader—who ruled for thirty-seven years—was killed alongside his family in a joint U.S.-Israeli strike. Behind his casket came four more coffins: his daughter, his son-in-law, his daughter-in-law, and his fourteen-month-old granddaughter.
Along the route, the state prominently displayed a photograph of Khamenei holding the baby. It is a deliberate piece of propaganda—an attempt to reframe a ruler responsible for decades of massacres and state terror into a grieving grandfather. By spotlighting that one small coffin, the regime hopes the world will focus on the bloody imprecision of an American and Israeli strike, rather than the thousands of Iranians Khamenei sent to the gallows.
Mourners chanted death to America, hanged a Trump effigy, chalked grief messages onto a black, concrete wall by the thousands. Organizers misted water over the crowd to fight the heat. Revolutionary Guard men, who never talk to reporters, talked to reporters: the war is not over until he’s avenged, they said.
The late Henry Kissinger asked whether Iran wanted to be a country or a cause.The funeral asks Kissinger’s question all over again, and Iran has to answer fast. The new supreme leader is Khamenei’s son Mojtaba — badly burned in the same strike that killed his father, and he hasn’t appeared in public since. He takes over a country pulled two ways: the crowds in the street are demanding revenge on America, while his government is negotiating peace with America. Those talks are paused for the mourning. They will start again Thursday, once his father is buried.
3. The quickened pace of removing migrant children
Migrant children were never guaranteed a place in America. They were guaranteed a process — a hearing, a lawyer’s help, a humane exit if the answer was no. ProPublica reported Monday that the administration has whittled that system down into a sliver of its former self in an energetic effort to get children out of the country as fast as possible. “Unaccompanied minor,” the designation for the children we’re talking about, means anyone under 18 with no legal status and no parent at the crossing. Most were sent alone toward a relative already in America. Their legal claims run from asylum from persecution in their home countries to visas for children abused, abandoned, or trafficked. Children with applications pending have lost the legal counsel and the shield from deportation that let them wait for an answer. Another new wrinkle: the kids are bait. To claim a child from federal custody, an adult must come forward — and the child-welfare agency now hands that adult’s name, address, and fingerprints to the deportation agency. A government document recovered in litigation this year warns children that an undocumented sponsor faces “arrest and removal.” The parent’s choice: step up and risk deportation, or stay hidden and leave the child in custody.
Since the start of Trump’s second term, immigration courts have issued more than 10,000 removal orders against minors a month, nearly quadrupling the old pace. The vast majority removed last year had no criminal record. When federal legal services ended in March 2025, some 26,000 children lost their lawyers; children as young as two have since faced judges alone.
What we’re talking about here is not whether children hear no, but the process for delivering that news. The door was never open to these migrant children. A 2008 statute, passed unanimously and signed by George W. Bush, accepted deportation as an outcome and civilized the path to it: a hearing, a screening for trafficking, placement with relatives while waiting, and — for the children who lose — a handoff to a named adult in the home country, not a minor deposited at a border crossing at night. Last fall, the administration pulled Guatemalan children from shelter beds and loaded them onto overnight deportation flights before a court order stopped the planes.
The process used to take years, which itself became a magnet. Word traveled that a child who crossed alone got a long runway before any judge said no, and parents made rational decisions on that basis. The administration’s actions demagnetize the attraction.
The article tells the story of Elder Chavez, 18, who wears braces. His parents abandoned him as a toddler in Honduras — a fact proven in family court, which earned him the legal status Congress built for children with no parent to return to. At 14 he crossed alone to reach his older sister in Alabama, who took him in and paid for the braces. Now, he sits awake most nights in an adult detention center in Louisiana, finally falling asleep near 4 a.m., the hour guards call detainees to breakfast. He was brought there after a traffic stop. Before last year, he’d have gotten a ticket and gone home to his sister.
4. National Guard Shooting
Early Sunday morning in downtown Memphis, National Guard soldiers shot and killed Tyrin Johnson, 20. His is the third death tied to the federal task force Trump has deployed across six Democrat-run cities. Johnson lived in Nashville, worked construction, took university classes, and had his first child earlier this year. Police responding to shots-fired calls just before 4 a.m. say they spotted him carrying a handgun; he ran; Guard soldiers joined the foot chase. What happened next, the state investigators’ statement renders in the passive voice: “for reasons under investigation, the situation escalated.” Police say Johnson turned toward the soldiers with his weapon. His family says he was shot twice in the chest. “I just want to know, how they shot a 20-year-old twice in the chest, he hadn’t harmed anyone,” said his cousin, who called him “as good a boy as can be.” Two Guard medics knelt to treat the wounds. A Tennessee judge blocked this deployment as unconstitutional; an appeals court overturned the injunction in April, and the troops stayed. They patrol a city where crime was already falling before they arrived, part of an operation projected to cost taxpayers more than $1 billion this year. The shooting came during the most violent stretch of the American calendar. At least 52 people were shot in nine states over the holiday weekend, eight of them at Coney Island, four of those children.
5. China pops off
While Russia was reminding NATO what it could do, China staged a flex of its own: a rare ballistic missile test across the Pacific, launched from a nuclear-powered submarine, the first such test China has ever publicly acknowledged. The medium is the message. China’s land-based missiles sit in silos that American satellites watch around the clock. A submarine hides. A missile fired from one arrives without warning from a launch point no one has found, which means China’s ability to strike back could survive even if everything on Chinese soil is destroyed first.
For years that threat was more theory than fact because China’s missile submarines were easy for the U.S. Navy to hear coming. Analysts believe the missile was the new JL-3, with the range to hit the continental United States from Chinese coastal waters. The choreography carried its own messages. China notified Japan, Australia and New Zealand hours in advance. It did not notify the United States, the audience the test was for.
The Pentagon counts roughly 600 Chinese warheads today and expects more than 1,000 by 2030. That is double what China had five years ago, and still a fraction of the American and Russian arsenals, which hold several thousand warheads each. The timing lands on an American vulnerability. The Iran war consumed more than half of the U.S. supply of Patriot interceptors and large shares of its Tomahawks and other key missiles, and defense analysts estimate the stockpiles will not return to prewar levels until 2029 or 2030.
6. The president rings the bell
On Monday, there was somehow more gold in the Oval Office—a feat that hadn’t seemed possible given the globules already affixed to the walls and the gold statues holding up gold statues on every available surface. The newest addition was a gold bell. The president rang it to open the day’s trading—the first joint NYSE-Nasdaq bell ever rung from the White House—to launch Trump Accounts, a tax vehicle that deposited $1,000 into index-fund accounts for 500,000 newborns on the Fourth of July. The accounts are designed to make every American child a shareholder from birth; the ceremony was designed to make the stock market the ultimate barometer of the nation. It isn’t. The market only prices the projected profits of major corporations—a narrow slice of reality—and lately, it’s narrower than advertised. Ten stocks currently hold roughly 38 percent of the S&P 500’s value, a top-heavy concentration that Treasury’s own internal reporting likens to a bubble. When a tiny handful of massive tech companies drives nearly all the market’s growth, it acts like a false front: if those few giants stumble, the whole index collapses, even if thousands of ordinary businesses on the ground are doing perfectly fine.
If the economy were truly healthy, a boasting president would cite real median income, wage growth, or the jobs numbers. Instead, real median household income has stalled at $80,610—effectively flat since its pre-pandemic high—while consumer prices continue to outpace weekly wage growth so that real earnings are actually falling. Furthermore, the economy added just 115,000 jobs last month, a sluggish pace that lands well below the administration’s public boasts of an historic labor boom. Because the broader economic indicators offer no cover, the president turned the theatrical setting into a transactional playground for allies. Mid-ceremony, Trump gestured to billionaire tech executive Michael Dell—a major financial contributor to the newborn accounts who was standing in the room—and told the crowd to “go out and buy a Dell computer.” Dell shares immediately jumped 7 percent. The president’s own financial disclosures reveal 24 Dell trades last year, predominantly buys.
7. Muscle on the pitch
One of the other pieces of gold in the Oval Office Monday was the FIFA Club World Cup trophy—the original, which Gianni Infantino, the FIFA president, handed Trump last year and told him to keep while the actual champions play for a replica. This weekend, that relationship paid out. After U.S. striker Folarin Balogun drew a red card on Wednesday against Bosnia, the White House mobilized a high-level pressure campaign. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and World Cup task force director Andrew Giuliani engaged lawyers to exploit gaps in FIFA’s vague disciplinary code, while a billionaire hedge-fund donor dug up unproven match-fixing allegations against the Brazilian referee to arm the president for a personal phone call to Infantino.
The transaction cleared just over 30 hours before kickoff. Citing a rarely used probation clause called Article 27, FIFA’s disciplinary committee suspended Balogun’s mandatory one-match ban, making him eligible for Monday night’s knockout match against Belgium. An automatic suspension following a World Cup red card has been ironclad law for as long as anyone currently playing has been alive; FIFA has not nullified one since the Brazilian government successfully lobbied for it in 1962.
Fewer than eight hours before kickoff, a FIFA judge dismissed a furious legal challenge from the Belgian federation, while European soccer’s governing body, UEFA, blasted the turnabout as “incomprehensible and unjustifiable” with its integrity in tatters. Balogun plays tonight in Seattle, where the U.S. chases its first World Cup quarterfinal in 24 years. The golden trophy on the shelf in the Oval Office turned out to be a receipt. And no one had to bring out the horse head.
8. Obamacare shrinkage
New federal data reveals that the expiration of enhanced subsidies caused Obamacare rolls to collapse over the past year, stripping coverage from 2.6 million Americans and slashing enrollment by nearly a third in states like Ohio and Oklahoma. The drop—a 13 percent decline nationwide that brought total effectuated enrollment down to 19.2 million in February—represents the first major contraction for the health exchanges after four consecutive years of record growth. Independent analysts at KFF note that the expiration of the COVID-era premium tax credits caused monthly fees to double or triple for many low-income families, forcing them to drop coverage entirely.
The Trump administration, however, frames the shrinkage as a victory for program integrity, claiming a full-scale crackdown by the Department of Health and Human Services successfully rooted out 2.9 million “phantom or improper enrollments” driven by commission-seeking insurance brokers.
A recent HHS report defends this claim with data showing that 40 percent of individuals in zero-premium plans had zero health claims, confirming that unscrupulous brokers were indeed quietly signing up millions of oblivious citizens to pocket the commissions. Yet independent health economists point out that the administration is using this genuine fraud to clean up a messy economic reality: when the enhanced subsidies expired, average monthly out-of-pocket premiums spiked by 58 percent, causing millions of real, low-income people to simply stop paying. The administration is framing that entire drop as a deliberate anti-fraud purge. Health economists say it’s basic economics: when you double the price of a service, millions of real people simply stop buying it.
9. McMorrow and McMorrow and McMorrow not tomorrow
Eighty percent of Democratic voters say the political and economic system needs to be torn down entirely or heavily renovated, according to a New York Times/Siena poll, which is why so many of the party’s most engaging characters are fighters from outside the establishment. On Sunday, this debate claimed a casualty. State Senator Mallory McMorrow quit the primary for Michigan’s open Senate seat 30 days before the vote. McMorrow had been considered a rising national star who could bridge the party’s deep ideological divisions. The field is now comprised of Representative Haley Stevens, the establishment’s choice, who is a four-term congresswoman, and Abdul El-Sayed, the insurgent progressive whose combative style defines the restive mood: “When they go low,” he once said, “we take them to the mud and choke them out.”
McMorrow became famous in 2022 for giving a fierce, viral speech that blasted a Republican lawmaker’s personal attacks. But when she actually ran for the Senate, she tried to act like a moderate peacemaker—even though her own famous speech had helped supercharge the aggressive, angry tone voters now wanted from a candidate. Running on grassroots donations against a $32 million onslaught of outside establishment spending backing Stevens, she discovered the race the fighting built had no lane left for her.
Also, as we were going to press this Monday night the following story was developing: Platner’s campaign in Maine might be going down the drain. Just weeks after Graham Platner secured the party’s nomination to challenge incumbent Republican Susan Collins, he said Monday he was reflecting on his “path forward.” Politico printed the latest bombshell about his private life. It alleged he committed sexual assault five years ago. This latest misconduct accusation joins a mountain of existing vulnerabilities—including past misogynistic Reddit commentary and a controversial chest tattoo—leaving party leadership scrambling to figure out how to salvage a must-win seat now that their nominee is an undeniable political liability. The meltdown exposes the hidden tax of the outsider era: when voters bypass traditional institutional gatekeepers in search of raw, anti-establishment energy, they also bypass the screening filters that keep a campaign from self-destructing on the launchpad. There are few models that show Democrats winning back the Senate without winning Maine.
10. Sparkle: Sun won’t swallow the earth.
We try to keep things in perspective. Take the 30,000-foot view. But even we here at Dickerson Industrial Enterprises and Plumbing Supplies, we don’t take the 5-billion-year view. Scientists do, however, and so it was comforting to learn that in five billion years, the sun will not swallow the earth as it explodes.
A study published in Astronomy & Astrophysics by researchers at Belgium’s University of Leuven has overturned decades of cosmic doom by rewriting the math on stellar death. The fate of our planet comes down to a colossal tug-of-war between two opposing forces. As the dying sun expands into a red giant, its blistering surface will kick up massive internal tidal waves that create a gravitational drag, trying to pull Earth inward.
At the same time, the sun will be violently shedding its own weight via powerful stellar winds; as the star gets lighter, its gravitational grip weakens, allowing Earth to drift outward.
Until now, astrophysicists assumed the inward tidal drag would easily win, spiraling Earth into a fiery engulfment. But by utilizing advanced modeling and examining a nearby aging star named L2 Puppis—a glimpse into our sun’s future—the researchers discovered that these inward tidal forces are actually much weaker than previously calculated. If the sun sheds mass fast enough, Earth will successfully migrate to a wider, safer orbit. The revised cosmic eviction notice is not entirely a victory: Mercury and Venus are still scheduled for total vaporization, and the sun’s escalating heat will boil our oceans and sterilize all life on Earth within two billion years anyway. But the physical rock itself will pull through, surviving as a scorched, barren monument orbiting a cooling white dwarf.
Have a good dinner!
