Stack the Week

Welcome everyone to the Stack the Week experiment for May 11th through the 15th. It is available here in text and audio and available in your podcast player.

Thank you to Annie Cohen and Laura Doan for help preparing this delicious offering.

A summit with two leaders claiming two outcomes. A war with no outcome, a UK administration with ministers coming out, Cuba is just plain out. The battle of prices vs. wages, tech bro vs. tech bro and ICE against the judiciary. Hey, Neanderthals are smarter than we thought but smart cars are dumber. All things you can talk about with your neighbor.

Let’s take it day by day.

Monday May 11

Which will collapse faster? The ceasefire in Iran or the UK Prime Minister? Or will it be citizens melting on the streets of India? Gas prices are making the president sweaty so he’s offering the equivalent of a paddle fan. Young Americans are glum about jobs. Maybe they should go outside and play. We all should.

Iran

Day 73 of the war.

Twenty-nine days since the president said Iran was desperate to make a deal.

Twenty-five days since he told CBS News that Iran had “agreed to everything.” On Monday, the president called Iran’s actual response “garbage” and said he hadn’t finished reading it.

He did, however, finish describing the ceasefire. “I would say the ceasefire is on massive life support,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, adding that it was “unbelievably weak.”

Iran’s formal response to the administration’s one-page peace proposal is not materially different than Iran’s position before the bombs started falling. Indeed, Iran is asking for reparations for the bombs, so Iran is asking for more that it would have before the war.

The rest of the list: a regional ceasefire — including no Israeli strikes in Lebanon. Sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz, requiring all commercial vessels to coordinate with the Iranian Navy. Lifting of all U.S. sanctions, removal of the naval blockade, and an end to the ban on Iranian oil sales.

On the nuclear question — the most often stated reason in the carousel of justifications the US has put forward for the war — Iran reportedly proposed a moratorium on enrichment far shorter than the 20 years the U.S. demanded, offered to export only a portion of its highly enriched uranium while diluting the rest, and refused to dismantle its nuclear facilities.

Iranian leaders also demanded a formal guarantee of non-aggression. In other words, you can’t hit us if we don’t comply.

There’s also a third player in this discussion of an Iranian end state. In an interview with Major Garret on 60 minutes, the Israeli Prime Minister said the war would not be over until all enriched uranium was removed from Iran, its enrichment sites dismantled, its proxy networks dissolved, and its ballistic missile production curtailed. Tall order.

Gas Tax

On Monday the president said he plans to suspend the federal gas tax “for a period of time.” “I think it’s a great idea,” he said. Several Democratic lawmakers have already introduced legislation to either pause or lower the tax.

But suspending the excise taxes — 18.4 cents off a $4.52 gallon on gas and 24.4 cents on diesel — requires an act of Congress and would cost the federal government roughly half a billion dollars a week.

The lost revenue would land on a federal debt that crossed 100 percent of GDP mark this spring for the first time outside of an emergency like a pandemic or war.

Hantavirus cruise

The cruise brochures don’t usually highlight the biocontainment units.

On Monday, two of the 17 Americans airlifted from the MV Hondius cruise ship— that’s the one bristling with clouds of virus whipped up from rodent droppings— arrived sealed inside portable isolation pods — negative-pressure units where the air inside is kept lower than the air outside, so nothing contaminated can leak out through a seam or tear. Everything passes through HEPA filters that trap 99.97 percent of particles.

The Andes variant of hantavirus is far less communicable than Covid-19, but three passengers on the cruise ship Hondius have died from the hantavirus, which WHO has linked to rodent exposure during the voyage. It starts with flu-like symptoms and then floods the lungs with fluid until the patient drowns from the inside.

The Americans were transported to the National Quarantine Unit in Nebraska — one of the few facilities in the country built for exactly this.

Since patients exposed may not develop symptoms for over a month, their quarantine period could last up to 42 days, according to the Times. This presents psychological challenges. The NQU is windowless and high-containment, which creates its own problem: patients in strict isolation lose track of time, and losing track of time makes people lose their minds.

The facility counters this with a circadian lighting system that shifts the color temperature throughout the day — warm ambers at night, vivid greens and blues during daylight hours. The green light suppresses melatonin more effectively than other wavelengths, resetting the body’s clock when the body has no other cues. It’s a small, strange detail: a building designed to keep the deadliest diseases from getting out, engineered down to the color of the light to keep the people inside from falling apart.

This is Nuts

This all sounds very complicated, but nothing as complicated as the operation to deliver medical supplies to one of the passengers quarantined on the remote volcanic island of Tristan da Cunha, a British territory in the south Atlantic. If you’ve ever looked at a globe and wondered about those little flecks in the middle of the vast ocean, this is one of those flecks.

Tristan da Cunha is Britain’s most remote inhabited overseas territory. It is accessible only by boat, has no airstrip, and has a population of 221 inhabitants.

Oxygen supplies on the island were at a critical level, so there was no time for delay getting care to the patient who had disembarked from the plague ship and was quarantined in the hospital on the island. A two‑bed facility with a two‑person medical team.

So British soldiers dropped out of the sky to help. First, they flew almost 7,000 km to the closest airbase and then 3,000 more km to waddle to the end of the back bay of their lumbering plane and parachute down on to Tristan carrying oxygen canisters and 3 tons of medical equipment. (or I guess they pronounce it tonnes; at least that is how it’s spelled here.)

Oh and the plane had to refuel in mid-air because the island is just so damn remote. And the average wind speed is 25 MPH so you can imagine what a joy that was to drop down into. The mission was a success. But the soldiers had to wait for a boat since you can’t parachute up and out.

Keir Starmer

That is a story of extraordinary achievement from the good people of Great Britain.

Less smooth-running Monday, was the operation of the British government. Things were extraordinary there, but not for the same good reasons.

On Monday it appeared that the British Prime Minister was about to Keir over. Keir Starmer gave a speech to an audience of Labour party lawmakers and activists in an attempt to save his political life.

Now, before we go too much further on this, I’d like to take a tiny little detour (which, when you add them together, will add up to an hour and forty five minute podcast.) All week long, you probably have been hearing about the predicament of Keir Starmer. But what’s been totally absent, and the reason I find Stack the Week meaningful, if you’ll pardon this personal interlude, is that it forces intentional thinking about what’s really going on here.

What’s happening in Britain is a version of what’s happening in the United States. Both are liberal democracies. Liberal democracies find it difficult to adapt quickly to changing circumstances. The situations faced by the governments in the UK and the United States include managing immigration, inequality, the high cost of the routes to prosperity, misinformation, the distracting appeal of the attention economy.

All that we experience in the United States, they also face in the UK. And just as in the United States, populist leaders are making big promises to the voters who are fed up with the collapse of the institutions that have promised them so much and that seem full of elites out of touch with their lives.

So, I don’t think it’s too much to say that all of these stories about Keir Starmer falling down the stairs of his prime ministership are an echo of what we experience here in the United States. It would have been so useful if, during the week, in all of the reporting about what’s happening to Starmer, that kind of context could have been given to people, so they could see it in their own lives instead of as some distant circus with hard to pronounce players like Plaid Cymru.

The proximate cause of Starmer’s predicament was a disastrous showing by Starmer’s labour party in council elections. They lost over 1,500 councilors. Councils are the local government, but whereas in the United States, a city council falls under State power, in the UK they are creatures of Parliament. So in the UK, local councils and the national Parliament are like two floors of the same house, whereas in the US, they are more like separate buildings on the same street.

So the “fortunes” of a British council are almost entirely tethered to the national party’s brand. Hence, a bad result ther