Laleh Khalili

@lalehkhalili

Politics, poetry, ports, pottymouth. She/her. Typos and dropped words in every post, because sharing is caring. Find me at l.khalili@exeter.ac.uk

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Laleh Khalili@lalehkhalili· 3h

Someone had a sieve where I live.

Laleh Khalili@lalehkhalili· 2d

This might be, without a scintilla of a doubt, the most terrifying and fascinating piece of art I have ever seen. Can you guess what it is?

Laleh Khalili@lalehkhalili· 2d

For the first time in 41 years (1985!!), the US imports of Saudi oil for a whole month was down to 0: www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Laleh Khalili@lalehkhalili· 3d

This is definitely the first time the NY Times crossword clue mentions Ghassan Kanafani.

Laleh Khalili@lalehkhalili· 7d

Climate change affecting Europe's key inland waterways:

Laleh Khalili@lalehkhalili· 7d

Holy moly www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

Laleh Khalili@lalehkhalili· 11d

FT features Exeter's attack on humanities: www.ft.com/content/e14d...

Laleh Khalili@lalehkhalili· 13d

Wall Street just knows how to rip people off including investors (i.e. your pension fund). Banks are offering new financial products that work like below. If the market crashes & SpaceX loses more than 50% of its value, investors are fucked but banks make out. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

At Morgan Stanley, a note is designed to offer a fixed payout of 40% as long as SpaceX shares are flat or up at maturity in early 2028. That payout also applies when the stock is down by less than 50%, but for any drop beyond that threshold, note holders are fully exposed to the downside.

Laleh Khalili@lalehkhalili· 13d

US Strategic Petroleum Reserves are precariously low: www.ft.com/content/86f3...

The US government is continuing to release oil from its strategic petroleum reserve, which saw a drawdown of 3.8mn barrels to 307.7mn barrels — the lowest level in more than 40 years. Its operational minimum, below which further withdrawals risk damaging infrastructure and disrupting pipeline operations, is estimated at 180mn to 200mn barrels, according to industry analysts.

Government data published on Wednesday showed US refineries were running at 97 per cent of capacity, with those in some parts of the Midwest operating at 100 per cent, as US energy companies increase exports to supply energy-hungry markets in Asia and Europe.

Laleh Khalili@lalehkhalili· 14d

Matt Kaminsky channels the collective fantasy in his photo.

Laleh Khalili@lalehkhalili· 14d

bubble bubble toil and trouble www.ft.com/content/5c8a...

The collateral demands highlight the mounting fears on Wall Street about the scale and speed of the sell-off in AI stocks over the past fortnight, which has upended a rally in a sector favoured by many funds.

The Nasdaq 100 briefly veered into correction territory on Tuesday, falling 10 per cent from its record high in early June. Stocks that had surged earlier in 2026 have fallen sharply, with Sandisk and Intel down 53 per cent and 39 per cent from their peaks, respectively. The wider Philadelphia semiconductor index has lost a quarter of its value since late June.

Laleh Khalili@lalehkhalili· 14d

Worth noting about Ortagus. And Sahnawi is a crook and an embezzler who owns a tonne of media outlets in Lebanon.

Laleh Khalili@lalehkhalili· 15d

Fewer! www.wsj.com/world/middle...

That report covered the seven key munitions that had been used in the war with Iran. Cancian and Park, who have updated their April assessment, said in an interview Sunday that they now estimate that at least 1,500 Patriot interceptors have been expended since the war with Iran began. That would leave a U.S. inventory of less than 1,000 Patriot interceptors, they added.

Laleh Khalili@lalehkhalili· 15d

Lol they deleted this tweet.

Laleh Khalili@lalehkhalili· 16d

French banks dominating this list really surprised me.

Laleh Khalili@lalehkhalili· 16d

This is utterly brilliant: "This is a moment in which what we most need is the humane intelligence of free human minds. It is a time for academics and faith leaders to maintain a fierce independence from the AI industry." www.ft.com/content/bdb3...

Instead of thinking about AI itself, we should be thinking about its effects. It concentrates power; it obfuscates accountability; it further despoils nature and climate; it is a means of the wholesale expropriation of cultures, languages and lands for massive profit; and it will probably make us lonelier and stupider.

Laleh Khalili@lalehkhalili· 16d

The cost of the US war on Iran (not counting the cost to Iran nor of human lives) nor of long-term damage to the environment.

Laleh Khalili@lalehkhalili· 16d

Shipments of oil from Yanbu (on Saudi Arabia's Red Sea Coast) since March.

Laleh Khalili@lalehkhalili· 22d

Pop pop pop (21 July) "Financial engineering" is such a quaint word for speculative chicanery... www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...

It’s easy to dismiss comparisons between finance today and the build up to the 2008 meltdown as exaggerated or overwrought. But right now, it’s hard to ignore evidence that we’ve entered a fresh golden age of financial engineering — and it should be impossible to forget that the products of this alchemy can tarnish easily or, worse, turn out to be iron pyrite.

The most recent example is almost too perfect: An insurance company, Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co., has been tapped to protect investors against losses from bonds linked to private credit funds, according to Bloomberg News. Back in the global crisis, bond insurers that had promised to cover defaults of mortgage-linked bonds became super-spreaders of the sickness that nearly took down the world’s financial system.

Laleh Khalili@lalehkhalili· 23d

Shaykh Tahnun of Abu Dhabi invested half a billion in Trump's crypto company and in return received the Nvidia chip to develop its own AI. CIA station chief in the UAE and Bret McGurk facilitated this. www.wsj.com/world/middle...

The fruits of Tahnoon’s push are visible in the form of a massive construction site on a sandy patch of land miles from central Abu Dhabi, where thousands of laborers are working day and night. They are building the nerve center of Abu Dhabi’s AI efforts, set to be packed with the latest U.S. chips.
Gannon, who left the CIA last year, has maintained his relationships in the U.A.E, travelling there frequently to make introductions between American executives and Emirati security officials. He has helped national security contractors win consulting contracts with Emirati security services and court another prospective client: G42.
McGurk, too, has turned into something of a rainmaker for business deals in the U.A.E. He’s an adviser to Cisco, whose chief executive publicly thanked McGurk for his help in landing a deal on G42’s massive Stargate project. At a conference hosted by the tech company in February, McGurk said the debate around Emirati access to U.S. tech was an intense one during the Biden years.

Laleh Khalili@lalehkhalili· 23d

The daily fail has doctored an image from a queer positive book to do transphobic and homophobic fear-mongering: Daily Fail. Vs Original

Laleh Khalili@lalehkhalili· 26d

Ha Ha Bloody Ha www.ft.com/content/9495...

SpaceX three weeks ago raised about $25bn in debt. It has since been among the worst performers in the high-grade bond market.

About 20 per cent of June’s $75bn offering went to Musk’s army of retail traders, an unusually high share for a large-cap offering.

Hedge funds were limited to about 10 per cent of the deal, with the remainder going to long-only managers, sovereign wealth funds and allies of Musk. Several pre-IPO investors are sitting on billions of dollars in unrealised gains.

Insiders are limited from selling shares by the post-IPO lock-up but will be free to offload a huge slug of their shares after SpaceX reports its first quarterly earnings in August.

Laleh Khalili@lalehkhalili· 26d

Pop pop pop www.ft.com/content/c92a...

The Nasdaq Composite dropped 1.5 per cent on Thursday as a fresh wave of volatility ricocheted across markets. Memory and computer storage makers faced heavy losses with Sandisk, Western Digital and Seagate all down more than 9 per cent, while chipmakers Intel and Micron slid about 6 per cent.

The losses extended to Asia, where Japanese memory chipmaker Kioxia fell 16 per cent on Friday. The Nikkei 225 index declined 5 per cent. Markets in South Korea, which have faced the most volatility from the AI trade, were closed.

Futures pointed to the Nasdaq 100 and S&P 500 indices opening down 1.3 per cent and 0.8 per cent on Friday.

The tech sell-off is the latest sign of how investors are questioning the lofty valuations assigned to companies at the centre of the AI boom. It also shows how some traders have begun unwinding leveraged bets that are magnified by using substantial amounts of debt.

Laleh Khalili@lalehkhalili· 27d

Every single paragraph of this peace is deeply lacerating, and incredibly insightful. An extraordinary essay by Abdaljawad Omar about the structure of feeling of Palestinianness: www.equator.org/articles/mor...

Entering the Western public square required that you suppress your own grief and fury. Palestinian suffering was admissible only when abstracted from its own content – drained of the names of villages, the mechanics of land seizure, the grammar of permit and curfew and demolition order – and repackaged in the universalist idiom of human rights, the vocabulary of the very order that had sanctioned the dispossession in the first place.

To show too much of the actual thing was to be dismissed as irrational, partisan, too emotional to be heard. Composure was the condition of entry. And composure, sustained indefinitely in the face of an ongoing catastrophe, produces its own specific damage: it slowly erodes your capacity to speak from within the Palestinian experience.

What made this condition distinctive was that there was no escaping it; there was no way to make yourself heard. An intellectual labouring over an argument already knew, before speaking, that the institutional defences were firmly in place. If your words were not met with deliberate indifference, they faced the strategic distortion that rendered historical catastrophe as “a complex, two-sided situation”.

Palestinian meaning was intercepted before it could land. Grief was required to perform continuously before an audience immunised against its claims. Cruellest of all was not the hostility – hostility can be opposed – but the expectation of gratitude. Access to the Western public square was treated as a gift, shadowing the expression of Palestinian experience with the implicit debt of being permitted to speak at all.

Ultimately the problem lies entirely outside of documentation or argument. For Western institutions, the excess of evidence has produced the opposite of a crisis of conscience. Instead there is a saturation that enables the desire to put this all behind us. Bearing witness to everything, registering the horror as it passes through the digital feed, creates a comforting illusion of a debt discharged, of a crisis already dealt with. This is why more evidence fails to move the needle. The Western subject already has the facts; what they require is a disruption that prevents this sense of closure. Even when the evidence compels an admission that genocide is taking place, what follows is too often a passive resignation: an assumption that nothing can be done about this truth, or that naming it is all that is required, while Israel carries on killing and dispossessing. The structure of moral stupidity functions by converting raw evidence into the mere performance of its own absorption. Witnessing is revealed to be an insufficient means of preventing a genocide.

This stupidity is politically effective because it appears with the grammar of intelligence. It speaks fluently, cites carefully, and reasons in complete sentences. This is the stupidity of the conference paper and the op-ed – dressed in the vocabulary of critical thought and fluent in the idiom of nuance and complexity. It bypasses the raw animus of the loudmouthed bigot entirely.

Laleh Khalili@lalehkhalili· 28d

World Cup Final 2026

Laleh Khalili@lalehkhalili· 29d

These numbers (taken from HESA) pertain to Exeter, but would pretty much be similar in other universities in the Anglophone world, and frankly it is the reason higher ed is having a crisis (because given that they have let go of professionarl services colleagues, these admins are all managers):

Laleh Khalili@lalehkhalili· Jul 13

Laleh Khalili@lalehkhalili· Jul 10

The Pentagon is "running out of money" lol. www.rollingstone.com/politics/pol...

After initially claiming that the war with Iran would cost roughly $25 billion, the total estimated cost of the war — which Trump put back in active gear on Wednesday — has ballooned to over an estimated $132 billion.
While the outright cost of operations is one thing, the DOD is also broadcasting to Congress that it will need additional funds to restock arms stockpiles and weapons systems that have been depleted.
We may need to start “parking jets and turning off exercises,” one former Pentagon official told NBC News.
In the background, Trump is demanding another 44-percent increase in annual Pentagon funds from Congress — on top of the $150 billion already authorized by the “Big Beautiful Bill” in July of last year. The move would balloon the budget of America’s military apparatus to over $1.5 trillion in annual spending. The DOD itself is requesting $67 billion in emergency supplemental funding from Congress.

Laleh Khalili@lalehkhalili· Jul 9

This is the dirtiest type of research. Princeton scientists took $15 million from BP and shaped their research on carbon capture in consultation with the oil company: www.propublica.org/article/wedg...