THE TIMES THEY ARE A-CHANGIN’: UFC Head, Trump Ally Dana White Joins Meta Board of Directors.

Dana White, CEO of Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) and ally of President-elect Donald Trump, has joined the board of directors for Meta, the parent company of Facebook.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the inclusion of Dana White in a Facebook post on Monday, hailing his work as an entrepreneur and business leader.

“Dana is the President and CEO of UFC, and he has built it into one of the most valuable, fastest growing, and most popular sports enterprises in the world. I’ve admired him as an entrepreneur and his ability to build such a beloved brand,” noted Zuckerberg.

This would have been unimaginable in 2017, and it’s noteworthy how the “Literally Hitler!” narrative has collapsed since November.

In other Meta news — broken on X, naturally:

Also unimaginable just a short while ago.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: China launches Shijian-25 satellite to test on-orbit refueling and mission extension technologies. “The mission will also be carefully followed by other space actors as the mission — especially if carried out with low levels of transparency — could be perceived as dual-purpose. While the mission may be focused on extending the lifetime of a civilian satellite, the capabilities could, for example, be used in the future to support military satellites through on-orbit servicing. The People’s Liberation Army is known to be working on the technology and training tools for on-orbit satellite refueling for both peacetime and wartime scenarios.”

THE ARTIST AS TYRANT. “Modern art declared war on tradition, on convention, on morality, on historical Western notions about the place of beauty and human dignity in artistic production. Styles were invented or imported from alien cultures, never consciously evolved from the European masters. Modernism, like Leninism, wished to bully rather than seduce the community into a better future.”

I’ve had some thoughts of my own on the tyrant as artist.

BUT HOW WILL DEMOCRATS “FIND” ENOUGH VOTES TO SWING ELECTIONS?

MAYBE REAL UBI HAS NEVER BEEN TRIED: UBI Hurts Recipients. “But mere historical failure has never deterred the radical left from pursuing their utopian schemes (‘And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire’), so they tried to test UBI, yet again, and the result, yet again, was discouraging failure.”

IT’S ALL BULLSHIT AND EVERYONE KNOWS IT NOW:

QUESTION ASKED: Who Needs Communists When You Have Home-Grown Progressives?

Last week Victor Davis Hanson noted that Germany’s current de-industrialization, born of its fanatical “Net-Zero” climate mania that has resulted in ruinously high energy prices, resembles a self-imposed “Morgenthau Plan” from World War II.

* * * * * * * *

Realize that the Morgenthau Plan would have ruled out post-war Germany as potent ally against the Soviet Union, especially significant after NATO was formed later. It was designed to ensure that Germany was poor and weak—easy pickings, perhaps, for the Soviet Union after the war.

Just how did such a punitive plan come about in the first place? It turns out that Morgenthau’s senior staff was highly penetrated by Soviet agents and Communist sympathizers. Most of the names of his staff have been forgotten, with the partial exception of Harry Dexter White, who committed suicide in the late 1940s right after both Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers named White as a Soviet agent. But M. Stanton Evans (my first mentor) and Herbert Rommerstein, long time senior staff member of the House Intelligence Committee, identified the others from corroborating testimony and the decrypted VENONA documents that came to light in the late 1990s. In addition to White, other Morgenthau staffers who were Communist sympathizers or perhaps even paid agents included Solomon Adler, Josiah Dubois, Sonia Gold, Harold Glasser, William Taylor, V. Frank Coe (who defected to Communist China after the war), and Irving Kaplan. Many of these figures were involved in developing the Morgenthau Plan.

Why, it’s as, “in a global sense McCarthy was on to something. McCarthy may have exaggerated the scope of the problem but not by much… The Age of McCarthyism, it turns out, was not the simple witch hunt of the innocent by the malevolent as two generations of high school and college students have been taught.”

ED MORRISSEY: EU Leaders to Musk: How Dare You Interfere With Our Interference!

So let’s get this straight. British national security is more dependent on keeping silent about the Pakistani rape gangs than it is on a military alliance with the United States? Is that what Starmer seriously wants to argue? Is that what voters in the UK believe, too? Because we can take our ball and go home any time, and leave Starmer and Macron to deal with Vladimir Putin on their own. Have fun storming that castle.

However, I’d bet that Starmer went way over his political skis with that suggestion. Trump will not just call Starmer’s bluff, but now he and Musk can raise Starmer a Zuckerberg, too. (How very Meta!) The EU Left is already in retreat over its refusal to enforce laws and control migration, as well as their economic policies and arrogant elitism. Starmer and Macron are political dead men walking at this point, and they know it. That’s why they are desperately trying to quash Twitter/X in the EU, only now that Zuckerberg has foresworn progressive “fact checking,” the EU will have to play Whack-a-Mole on several popular social-media platforms rather than just focus on Musk.

Much more like this, please.

SOME? McDonald’s is ending some of its DEI practices.

McDonald’s is the latest US corporation – and among the largest – to back off some of its diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) practices, as a Supreme Court ruling against affirmative action and conservative backlash to those programs continues to lead businesses to reevaluate their diversity pledges.

The company in a statement Monday said it is sunsetting its specific diversity goals, including requiring its suppliers to commit to certain DEI targets. And it will stop participating in external surveys that measure corporate diversity.

McDonald’s is also changing the name of its diversity team to the Global Inclusion Team – a common practice for many other companies that have rolled back diversity pledges.

“This name change is more fitting for McDonald’s in light of our inclusion value and better aligns with this team’s work,” McDonald’s said in the statement.

McDonald’s would be wise to eliminate the team instead of renaming it — before it metastasizes and they go Full Jaguar.