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Brunson is 48 minutes from forever, coming off a brilliant effort in the record-setting 29-point Game 4 comeback.

US forces killed the leader of Venezuela-based gang Tren de Aragua in an airstrike, President Trump announced Friday. 

With the upstart White Sox unexpectedly in first place, there is an energy pulsing through the South Side of Chicago again.

The Celtics star is enjoying watching "good basketball" during his offseason.

The USA men’s soccer team’s 2026 World Cup hopes might hinge on star striker Folarin Balogun, who already scored multiple goals for Team USA in its opening match against Paraguay on June 12. However, Balogun was never supposed to be eligible to play for Team USA in the first place. Folarin Balogun scored two goals...

The game had shades of 2025, when Aaron Boone’s club went 1-6 here during the regular season and 0-2 in the AL Division Series.

A Villainous Blueprint For Managed Poverty

Authored by Veronique de Rugy via The Eoch Times,

Writer and philosopher Ayn Rand was often accused of inventing cartoonish villains.

Rogues like Ellsworth Toohey in “The Fountainhead” would scheme to seize the global economy’s commanding heights in pursuit of a distorted sense of justice.

But the people who hold such ideas don’t just appear in cartoons or in Rand’s novels.

Enter Thomas Piketty and company.

In early June, Piketty - the French economist whose work on inequality has made him something of a rock star even while being serially challenged for methodological errors, data imputations and cherry-picked baselines - and his large team unveiled what can only be described as a villainous plan.

It’s a comprehensive program for global managed decline dressed up in the language of climate justice and equality.

The plan is far too ambitious for most nations to accept.

But given the influence of Piketty and his circle of economists on U.S. wealth taxes and prominent global policy proposals, we should take its underlying ideas seriously.

Piketty’s plan would cap GDP per capita in wealthy countries at roughly $69,000, far less than America’s current $94,430.

The plan would also limit annual global economic growth to between 0 percent and 0.5 percent. Monsieur Piketty would allot only 0.115 percent annual growth to the U.S, whose GDP has expanded by more than 3 percent on average since 1930. This would hurt not just the billionaires but every American.

The plan would mandate an international three-day work week and reduce construction activity by 70 percent, manufacturing by 87 percent and even leisure-sector activity by 58 percent.

There would be massive and punishing trade actions against noncompliant countries.

It envisions a “Global Justice Fund” financed not by taxing carbon but by global wealth and income taxes.

This fund would be 20 times the size of current development aid and would be administered by a new international bureaucracy answerable to heaven knows who.

Don’t be fooled by Piketty’s training as an economist.

This is not economic thinking. Consider the utter inconsistency of relying on a vast stock of wealth (mostly from the U.S.) for redistribution while suffocating long-term growth to near zero. Much of the value of the assets needed to finance this scheme would be destroyed. It is also disqualifying to claim that sub-Saharan Africa will grow at 4 percent if we crush the economies that provide the capital for its investments and buy its exports.

Let’s ask the uncomfortable question: What would it require to enforce Piketty’s plan?

About this matter, he is conveniently vague.

Confiscating something on the order of 10 percent of world GDP and redirecting it through a newly created supranational body does not happen by asking nicely.

You cannot restructure the global economy at that scale without a coercive apparatus that dwarfs anything in human history.

The mechanism must be authoritarian.

It would require a world government with the power to tell billions of people which jobs they may and may not hold, what they may build, what they may eat and how many hours they are permitted to work.

And to what end?

“Climate change” is an insufficient answer when Piketty’s entire edifice is built on a discredited foundation. The report relies on a baseline from the “RCP8.5” climate scenario that projects Earth warming by as much as 4.8 degrees Celsius by 2100. But last month, the UN’s own climate panel officially retired RCP8.5 (always a high-end estimate) as “implausible.” A more central projection is around 2.7 degrees Celsius. Replies to Piketty’s X feed pointed this out immediately. His response, as far as anyone can tell, has been silence.

That leaves the inequality argument. Worldwide income inequality is nearing a 150-year low, but Piketty insists that radical redistribution of wealth is essential for the Global South. And where have billionaires and wealth been popping up fastest in recent decades? Embarrassingly, data from Piketty’s World Inequality Database confirms that it’s in South and Southeast Asia and East Asia. These are the exact Global South regions that have spent recent decades rescuing hundreds of millions of people from poverty through market-directed economic growth.

A core confusion of the degrowth ideology is its conflation of inequality and poverty, in fact two very different things. Reducing inequality by making everyone poorer is not a victory for the poor. The billions of people still lagging in the global income distribution have one realistic path out: growth. Dynamic, market-driven, property-rights-protected growth is the only proven path to prosperity. It’s also the path to environmental improvement, which costs money.

Degrowth is the ultimate luxury belief.

It’s dreamed up by tenured professors in Paris and progressive think-tank pundits in Brussels.

These are people who already have high incomes, comfortable apartments, generous health care and pensions and whose ideas would pull up the ladder on billions of poor people.

Rand’s villains always insisted they were acting for the greater good. They always had elaborate plans. They always needed just a little more power to make it work. And they thought little about the terrible burdens their plans would impose on ordinary people.

Tyler Durden Fri, 06/12/2026 - 23:25

Mike Brown has never won a championship as a head coach. Before this spring, he hadn’t won a playoff series in the role since 2012.

It’s time for some remedial education for California’s public school system.

“If the Knicks can come back from 29 down, an American can figure out how to get into Texas."

SAN FRANCISCO — In celebration of Pride Night, every Giants player wore a rainbow logo on their cap representing the LGBTQ+ community when they hosted the Cubs on Friday.  Starting pitcher Landen Roupp, however, made an alteration seen before by some big-league players, inscribing a Bible verse in silver adjacent to the rainbow logo. Giants pitcher...

The US's World Cup run got off to a smashing start.

These Are The Hardest Languages For English Speakers To Learn

For English speakers, learning Spanish or Italian can take less than a year. Reaching the same level of proficiency in Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, or Arabic may require nearly four times as much study.

This wide gap reflects how closely a language resembles English in its vocabulary, grammar, sounds, and writing system.

This visualization, created by Julie R. Peasley via Visual Capitalist, ranks languages by difficulty using categories and study-time estimates from Effective Language Learning and Rosetta Stone, which reference Foreign Service Institute-style benchmarks.

Which Languages Are Easiest to Learn for English Speakers?

Languages are generally easier to learn when they share familiar grammar, vocabulary, sounds, or writing systems. That’s why many Category I languages, including Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, and Swedish, are considered relatively approachable.

The data table below shows the difficulty rankings and estimated learning time for 70 different languages:

Language Category Time to learn 🇿🇦🇳🇦 Afrikaans I 24-30 weeks 🇩🇰 Danish I 24-30 weeks 🇳🇱🇧🇪 Dutch I 24-30 weeks 🇫🇷🇧🇪🇨🇭🇨🇦 French I 24-30 weeks 🇮🇹🇨🇭 Italian I 24-30 weeks 🇳🇴 Norwegian I 24-30 weeks 🇵🇹🇧🇷 Portuguese I 24-30 weeks 🇷🇴🇲🇩 Romanian I 24-30 weeks 🇪🇸🇲🇽🇦🇷 Spanish I 24-30 weeks 🇸🇪 Swedish I 24-30 weeks 🇩🇪🇦🇹🇨🇭 German II 36 weeks 🇭🇹 Haitian Creole II 36 weeks 🇮🇩 Indonesian II 36 weeks 🇲🇾🇧🇳 Malay II 36 weeks 🇹🇿🇰🇪 Swahili II 36 weeks 🇦🇱🇽🇰 Albanian III 44 weeks 🇪🇹 Amharic III 44 weeks 🇦🇲 Armenian III 44 weeks 🇦🇿 Azerbaijani III 44 weeks 🇧🇩🇮🇳 Bengali III 44 weeks 🇧🇬 Bulgarian III 44 weeks 🇲🇲 Burmese III 44 weeks 🇨🇿 Czech III 44 weeks 🇦🇫 Dari III 44 weeks 🇪🇪 Estonian III 44 weeks 🇮🇷 Farsi III 44 weeks 🇫🇮 Finnish III 44 weeks 🇬🇪 Georgian III 44 weeks 🇬🇷🇨🇾 Greek III 44 weeks 🇮🇱 Hebrew III 44 weeks 🇮🇳 Hindi III 44 weeks 🇭🇺 Hungarian III 44 weeks 🇮🇸 Icelandic III 44 weeks 🇰🇿 Kazakh III 44 weeks 🇰🇭 Khmer III 44 weeks Kurdish III 44 weeks 🇰🇬 Kyrgyz III 44 weeks 🇱🇦 Lao III 44 weeks 🇱🇻 Latvian III 44 weeks 🇱🇹 Lithuanian III 44 weeks 🇲🇰 Macedonian III 44 weeks 🇲🇳 Mongolian III 44 weeks 🇳🇵 Nepali III 44 weeks 🇦🇫🇵🇰 Pashto III 44 weeks 🇵🇱 Polish III 44 weeks 🇷🇺 Russian III 44 weeks 🇷🇸🇭🇷🇧🇦🇲🇪 Serbo-Croatian III 44 weeks 🇱🇰 Sinhala III 44 weeks 🇸🇰 Slovak III 44 weeks 🇸🇮 Slovenian III 44 weeks 🇸🇴 Somali III 44 weeks 🇮🇳 Telugu III 44 weeks Tibetan III 44 weeks 🇮🇳🇱🇰🇸🇬 Tamil III 44 weeks 🇹🇯 Tajiki III 44 weeks 🇵🇭 Tagalog III 44 weeks 🇹🇭 Thai III 44 weeks 🇹🇷🇨🇾 Turkish III 44 weeks 🇹🇲 Turkmen III 44 weeks 🇺🇦 Ukrainian III 44 weeks 🇵🇰🇮🇳 Urdu III 44 weeks 🇺🇿 Uzbek III 44 weeks 🇻🇳 Vietnamese III 44 weeks 🇿🇦 Xhosa III 44 weeks 🇿🇦 Zulu III 44 weeks 🇸🇦🇪🇬🇦🇪 Arabic IV 88 weeks 🇭🇰🇲🇴 Cantonese Chinese IV 88 weeks 🇨🇳🇹🇼🇸🇬 Mandarin Chinese IV 88 weeks 🇯🇵 Japanese IV 88 weeks 🇰🇷🇰🇵 Korean IV 88 weeks

One of the most striking findings is the size of the gap between the easiest and hardest languages. While Spanish or French can often be learned in 24–30 weeks, mastering Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, or Arabic may require roughly 88 weeks of study.

Many Category I languages use the Latin alphabet and share vocabulary roots with English through Germanic or Romance-language connections.

This may also help explain why European languages often rank highly in language-learning apps and why Duolingo’s most popular languages globally include several widely taught European options.

What Makes a Language Harder to Learn?

Category III languages tend to have greater linguistic distance from English. This can include unfamiliar grammar structures, new alphabets, or pronunciation patterns that require more time to master.

For example, languages like Russian, Greek, Hindi, Turkish, and Vietnamese all fall into this category. Some use different scripts, while others introduce grammatical systems that are less intuitive for native English speakers.

The “Super-Hard” Languages

Category IV languages are considered exceptionally difficult for English speakers. This group includes Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese, and Korean.

Many of these languages present multiple learning hurdles simultaneously. Mandarin and Cantonese require mastery of tones, Japanese combines several writing systems, Korean introduces a unique alphabet and grammar structure, and Arabic uses an entirely different script. Together, these differences significantly increase the time needed to reach professional proficiency.

To learn more about language use across the U.S., check out Mapped: America’s Most-Spoken Languages After English and Spanish on the Voronoi app.

Tyler Durden Fri, 06/12/2026 - 23:00

IShowSpeed's presence at Friday's USA World Cup match caused quite the headache for several security guards at Los Angeles Stadium.

Alwyn and Swift parted ways back in 2023 after six and a half years together.

Alwyn and Swift parted ways back in 2023 after six and a half years together.

LA Rams star wide receiver Puka Nacua looked happy and healthy Thursday night as he took in the Team USA World Cup match at SoFi Stadium alongside New York Giants quarterback Jaxson Dart.

Half Of Israelis Agree Deterrence 'Weakened' Following Wars In Iran, Lebanon: Poll

Via The Cradle

Israelis are raising doubts about their government and military's ability to provide security after more than three months of renewed war against Iran and Lebanon. 

According to a Maariv poll released on Friday, 50 percent of Israelis believe their country's deterrence has declined following the recent escalation with Iran and Lebanon, compared to 28 percent who say it has strengthened, while 22 percent are undecided.

via Le Monde

The US and Israel launched a renewed bombing campaign on Iran on February 28. The Islamic Republic retaliated by firing missiles and drones at Israel and US bases in Persian Gulf states until a ceasefire was reached on April 8, largely halting the fighting amid negotiations.

According to the Maariv poll, 49 percent think the Israeli army's freedom to carry out strikes in Lebanon has decreased after the latest confrontation, versus 30 percent who say it has improved and 21 percent who are unsure.

On 2 March, Hezbollah took advantage of Tel Aviv's vulnerability from the war with Iran by renewing its own missile and drone attacks on Israel. Hezbollah had refrained from retaliating to thousands of Israeli bombings of Lebanese territory that violated the previous ceasefire reached in November 2024. 

Israel responded by intensifying its airstrikes and sending ground troops to occupy additional Lebanese territory. At least 30 Israeli soldiers have since been killed and 1,302 injured, primarily by Hezbollah's newly introduced FPV drones.

On Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decided to launch an attack on Iran despite US President Donald Trump's supposed request not to do so.

In an interview with the Financial Times (FT), Trump stated, "I call the shots. I call all the shots. He [Netanyahu] doesn't call the shots."

However, Netanyahu ordered a strike on Iran just hours after Trump's comments. Iran responded by striking targets in Israel.

According to the poll, Israelis are divided in their opinion on Netanyahu's decision to ignore Trump and order the bombing. Around 29 percent said he acted correctly, 36 percent said a stronger strike should have been carried out, and 19 percent preferred to follow the US position.

Meanwhile, 62 percent of poll respondents expressed distrust in Trump, while 21 percent said they trust him regarding Israeli interests in any agreement, and 17 percent said they did not know. A poll published by Israel’s Public Broadcaster (KAN) on 28 April found that a majority of Israelis believe the state has failed to secure victory in any war since October 2023.

According to the survey, 57 percent of respondents said no victory had been achieved, while 28 percent believed success had been reached in at least one arena, and a further 15 percent said they were unsure. 

The findings came after more than two years of Israel's reported genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, during which Tel Aviv waged multiple offensive military campaigns against Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran, alongside attacks in Yemen and Syria and a campaign of destruction and displacement in the occupied West Bank. 

On Thursday, Trump warned that in the coming hours the US would hit Iran “VERY HARD TONIGHT” and take “total control” of Tehran's oil and gas industry before reversing course and claiming that a deal with Iran is expected to be “finalized” soon.

Tyler Durden Fri, 06/12/2026 - 22:35

Teen girls in bikini tops threw punches at each other in the frenzy that ensued, prompting a number of local residents to call the police.

Three Muslim men were murdered at the Islamic Center of San Diego last month. Amin Abdullah, the security guard, met the attackers with gunfire and kept them from reaching the classrooms, where roughly 140 children were learning. He saved those children with his life.