Jake Parenti

[Jake Parenti @JakeParenti]

@penguins Absolute bargain!! Welcome back, Chino!

[Merriam-Webster @MerriamWebster]

Why is it ‘cancelled’ in the U.K. but ‘canceled’ in the U.S.?

Because we gave them that L in 1776.

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

🇺🇸

[Jake Parenti @JakeParenti]

im skipping the line for Polymarket. if you care about being early, use my link: https://t.co/40iSzgUIe7

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

California legislators are trying to make investigating fraud illegal

[Pittsburgh Steelers @steelers]

Best city in the world 😍

[Jake Parenti @JakeParenti]

@ShawnRyan762 Beyond disappointed with @ShawnRyan762 content lately. I understand he’s trying to do what’s right, hold folks accountable, and he SHOULD. But, he must also do the same. When he makes egregious errors in judgment, like this retweet, he must apologize and own up. Be the example!

[nhlpens @nhlpens]

Holy shit they absolutely cooked with this.

I love the "they doubted us" motto that they're pushing heading into the playoffs.

LET'S GO.

[Jake Parenti @JakeParenti]

I’d love to see POTUS make a speech like this from the Oval Office. @grok and I talked about this situation earlier today and came up with this:

“””
My fellow Americans,

To the leaders of Iran: Your demands are not a proposal—they are a delusion. Binding guarantees? Full sanctions relief? War reparations? Sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz? A shield for Hezbollah and your proxies? Rejected. Every last one.

We are not negotiating. We are not bargaining. We are going to pummel your regime until you capitulate. Your nuclear program ends. Your threats end. Your disruption of the world’s oil lifeline ends. Starting tonight, American energy production will surge to levels the world has never seen. We will drill, we will refine, we will export—until the price of defiance becomes unbearable for you alone.

To the American people: This is America First, restored. For decades, we subsidized global security while others freeloaded. No more. Our wells, our workers, our reserves will power this nation and reward our true friends. You will see lower prices at the pump, stronger jobs, and unbreakable energy dominance. Stand tall. This country is done apologizing for its strength.

To our allies in the Middle East who stood with us from the first day—Israel and every partner who fought beside us: You will receive American oil at zero tariff. Full access. No exceptions. You defended freedom when others hid. We will never forget it.

To the United Nations and to NATO: Listen closely. We have carried your defense burden for seventy-seven years. The United States has shouldered the overwhelming share of this alliance’s spending—more than any calculation of fairness can justify—while too many of you slashed budgets and lectured us from the sidelines. That era is finished.

We are no longer the world’s unpaid policeman. If you want the Strait of Hormuz open, go open it. If you want stable energy, pay the price of partnership. Real allies contribute. Real allies fight. Those who do not will face standing negotiations—and the full cost of their choices.

Our goal has never changed: a non-nuclear Iran. We will not cease until it is met. Through sanctions, through pressure, through unyielding resolve—through hell or high water—we will see it done.

The world may tremble at American strength reborn. Good. Let it.

May God bless our troops, may God bless our allies who earn it, and may God bless the United States of America.
“””

[Jake Parenti @JakeParenti]

@grok and I had an awesome discussion about the Iranians counter proposal. The thread below is a vision of what a 3 minute response from the Oval Office could look like:

My fellow Americans,

To the leaders of Iran: Your demands are not a proposal—they are a delusion. Binding guarantees? Full sanctions relief? War reparations? Sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz? A shield for Hezbollah and your proxies? Rejected. Every last one.

We are not negotiating. We are not bargaining. We are going to pummel your regime until you capitulate. Your nuclear program ends. Your threats end. Your disruption of the world’s oil lifeline ends. Starting tonight, American energy production will surge to levels the world has never seen. We will drill, we will refine, we will export—until the price of defiance becomes unbearable for you alone.

To the American people: This is America First, restored. For decades, we subsidized global security while others freeloaded. No more. Our wells, our workers, our reserves will power this nation and reward our true friends. You will see lower prices at the pump, stronger jobs, and unbreakable energy dominance. Stand tall. This country is done apologizing for its strength.

To our allies in the Middle East who stood with us from the first day—Israel and every partner who fought beside us: You will receive American oil at zero tariff. Full access. No exceptions. You defended freedom when others hid. We will never forget it.

To the United Nations and to NATO: Listen closely. We have carried your defense burden for seventy-seven years. The United States has shouldered the overwhelming share of this alliance’s spending—more than any calculation of fairness can justify—while too many of you slashed budgets and lectured us from the sidelines. That era is finished.

We are no longer the world’s unpaid policeman. If you want the Strait of Hormuz open, go open it. If you want stable energy, pay the price of partnership. Real allies contribute. Real allies fight. Those who do not will face standing negotiations—and the full cost of their choices.

Our goal has never changed: a non-nuclear Iran. We will not cease until it is met. Through sanctions, through pressure, through unyielding resolve—through hell or high water—we will see it done.

The world may tremble at American strength reborn. Good. Let it.

May God bless our troops, may God bless our allies who earn it, and may God bless the United States of America.

[Penguins Jesus @PenguinsJesus]

When you try to take a run at Sidney Crosby and realize why Sid has to have custom tailored pants

[LHGrey™️ @Grey_0G]

You Polish fucking idiot...

you absolute mouth-breathing, historically illiterate simpleton who wouldn’t recognize genuine warrior ethos if it curb-stomped your fragile national ego into the dirt where it belongs.

You sit there, sneering at the spectacle of America committing every asset, every operator, every ounce of kinetic fury from the most lethal military machine ever forged...just to yank one downed pilot out of the fire....and you sneer.

That’s doctrine. That’s identity.

And your limp-dicked dismissal proves exactly why your military culture treats its people like disposable serfs while ours forges legends who fight like they have a nation that will burn the world down to get them home.

“Leave no man behind” isn’t some sentimental bumper-sticker slogan for the U.S. military.

It is the sacred, blood-oath covenant that has defined American warfighting since the Revolution, through Belleau Wood, Iwo Jima, the Chosin Reservoir, Vietnam’s endless Combat Search and Rescue missions that diverted entire air wings to extract one airman, Mogadishu where Task Force Ranger bled rivers to recover every last brother, and every black-op Delta, DEVGRU, or Ranger stack has ever run since.

It is codified in the Ranger Creed, the SEAL Ethos, the Marine Corps’ every-man-a-rifleman creed, and the Army’s Warrior Ethos:

“I will never leave a fallen comrade.”

We enforce it with lethal precision because we understand something your culture apparently never grasped:

the individual American fighter is not expendable cannon fodder. He is the irreducible unit of national power.

This policy is pure predatory genius. It weaponizes trust. Every pilot, every operator, every grunt steps into the breach knowing...bone-deep, soul-deep...that if the worst happens, his brothers and his nation will expend whatever it takes, risk whatever it costs, to drag him back alive or bring him home in a box.

That knowledge annihilates the paralyzing fear of abandonment that has broken lesser armies across history.

It transforms hesitation into ferocious, calculated aggression. It creates men who fight like cornered lions because they trust their tribe implicitly.

Betray that covenant and you erode the very foundation of combat effectiveness.

Armies that treat their soldiers as interchangeable meat...look at the meat-grinder doctrines of the Soviets, the Chinese, or certain Eastern European “allies” who’ve spent centuries getting partitioned and occupied...crumble from within.

Morale collapses. Initiative dies.

You end up with conscripts who surrender at the first real contact because they know nobody’s coming for them.

We don’t do that. We never will.

That’s why our warriors are qualitatively superior.

It projects unassailable resolve that deters enemies and cements alliances.

It raises the cost of engaging us exponentially. It tells the world that American lives have infinite value while theirs are negotiable.

That message is worth every asset, every round, every risk...because it sustains the dominance you now resent from the sidelines.

History is littered with the corpses of empires that forgot this lesson.

We studied those failures. We weaponized the opposite.

So when we lose “all this” to rescue one pilot and still call it a triumph, it isn’t delusion...it’s affirmation of the spiritual steel that makes us the superpower and leaves you polishing participation trophies from other people’s wars.

Your sneering exposes a profound cultural weakness:

you don’t value the individual fighter with this ferocious, unrelenting loyalty, so you can’t comprehend why we do.

That’s why your military produces cannon fodder and ours produces predators.

We don’t leave our own to rot in some foreign shithole.

Period.
That isn’t weakness.

That is what makes us lethally, unapologetically superior.

And that, you clueless Polish prick, is why we win.

💀🗡️🦅🇺🇸🪖

[Pittsburgh Penguins @penguins]

Greatness personified.

More on Sid's historic weekend: https://t.co/A7hw2mUoDQ

[NHL @NHL]

Players with 21 point-per-game seasons: Sidney Crosby.

End of list.

[James E. Thorne @DrJStrategy]

Food for thought.

Trump, Hormuz and the End of the Free Ride

For half a century, Western strategists have known that the Strait of Hormuz is the acute point where energy, sea power and political will intersect. That knowledge is not in dispute. What is new in this war with Iran is that the United States, under Donald Trump, has chosen not to rush to “solve” the problem. In Hegelian terms, he is refusing an easy synthesis in order to force the underlying contradiction to the surface.

The old thesis was simple: the US guarantees open sea lanes in the Gulf, and everyone else structures their economies and politics around that free insurance. Europe and the UK embraced ambitious green policies, ran down hard‑power capabilities and lectured Washington on multilateral virtue, secure in the assumption that American carriers would always appear off Hormuz. The political class behaved as if the American security guarantee were a law of nature, not a contingent choice. Their conduct today is closer to Chamberlain than Churchill: temporising, issuing statements, hoping the storm will pass without a fundamental reordering of their responsibilities.

Trump’s antithesis is to withhold the automatic guarantee at the moment of maximum stress. Militarily, the US can break Iran’s residual ability to contest the Strait; that is not the binding constraint. The point is to delay that act. By allowing a closure or semi‑closure to bite, Trump ensures that the immediate pain is concentrated in exactly the jurisdictions that have most conspicuously free‑ridden on US power: the EU and the UK. Their industries, consumers and energy‑transition assumptions are exposed.

In that context, his reported blunt message to European and British leaders, you need the oil out of the Strait more than we do; why don’t you go and take it? Is not a throwaway line. It is the verbalisation of the antithesis. It openly reverses the traditional presumption that America will carry the burden while its allies emote from the sidelines.

In this dialectic, the prize is not simply the reopening of a chokepoint. The prize is a reordered system in which the United States effectively arbitrages and controls the global flow of oil. A world in which US‑aligned production in the Americas plus a discretionary capability to secure,or not secure, Hormuz places Washington at the centre of the hydrocarbon chessboard. For that strategic end, a rapid restoration of the old status quo would be counterproductive.

A quick, surgical “fix” of Hormuz would short‑circuit the dialectic. If Trump rapidly crushed Iran’s remaining coastal capabilities, swept the mines and escorted tankers back through the Strait, Europe and the UK would heave a sigh of relief and return to business as usual: underfunded militaries, maximalist green posturing and performative disdain for US power, all underwritten by that same power. The contradiction between their dependence and their posture would remain latent.

By declining to supply the synthesis on demand, and by explicitly telling London and Brussels to “go and take it” themselves, Trump forces a reckoning. European and British leaders must confront the fact that their energy systems, their industrial bases and their geopolitical sermons all rest on an American hard‑power foundation they neither finance nor politically respect. The longer the contradiction is allowed to unfold, the stronger the eventual synthesis can be: a new order in which access to secure flows, Hormuz, Venezuela and beyond, is explicitly conditional on real contributions, not assumed as a right.

In that sense, the delay in “taking” the Strait, and the challenge issued to US allies to do it themselves, is not indecision. It is the negative moment Hegel insisted was necessary for history to move. Only by withholding the old guarantee, and by saying so out loud to those who depended on it, can Trump hope to end the free ride.

[SportsCenter @SportsCenter]

Erik Karlsson was visibly frustrated that there was no penalty called after Lian Bichsel took his stick and scored.

[Jake Parenti @JakeParenti]

I think a lot of the coverage has to do with expectations. Worldwide, the US and Israel were expected to pummel Iran. That’s exactly what has happened. When there’s an asymmetric strike, especially one with strategic relevance, of course that will get covered. It’s shocking in the same way as when Iran managed to —allegedly— hit the F-35 with the missile (which you also covered, brilliantly).

The point is, when the greatest military force in the world goes in with absolute professionalism and does exactly what they’re supposed to do with precision and lethality, it’s not a shock. That’s the expectation of the US military. When Iran gets their shots in and they’re of strategic value, the media acts surprised because it’s atypical. We’re used to seeing them fund terror, not directly attacking military assets.

[Jake Parenti @JakeParenti]

@therealrayra @AlexHollings52 Most outrageous Iran war comment yet. Saying "we're not trying hard" is flat out stupid. US Military’s airpower rate striking ~10k targets/mo under constant missile attacks can't be overstated. No other nation could do this. Our guys/girls are giving 110%.

[Open Source Intel @Osint613]

I want to make a very important point:

The world needed to deal with the threat of the Islamic regime, the question was; to deal with them before they become nuclear or after.

Before they have 10,000 missiles that can strike Europe or after.

Before they can strike US mainland or after.

We are in a much better situation now.

[CBS News @CBSNews]

A pilot paid tribute to the three Ohio Air National Guardsmen who were among the six killed in a refueling aircraft crash in western Iraq.