The European Commission (EC) has submitted a proposal to require data centers across Europe to disclose their energy and water efficiency metrics.
The European Union (EU) aims to triple its data center capacity over the next five to seven years.
This has raised concerns about the build-out’s potential impact on the power grid and natural resource use.
The proposed rules would create a common rating scheme covering data centers with a capacity exceeding 500kW. The scheme would also cover data centers’ support for grid balancing services, contributions to waste heat recovery, and use of renewable energy generation.
In support of the proposal, the EC has also launched a call for evidence and public consultation on minimum performance standards for data centers in Europe. The consultation will close in December.
The proposal is now subject to a two-month scrutiny period by the European Parliament and the Council before entering into force. This gives co-legislators the opportunity to object to the proposal, but not to propose amendments.
The first ratings from the scheme are expected sometime in 2027.
A first review is expected to follow by the end of 2028.
European officials have launched several projects to support the bloc’s energy system in meeting the demands from the data center sector. In June, the EU launched two initiatives to that effect. The first seeks to bring together a range of stakeholders, including data center developers, energy companies, and public authorities, to integrate data centers into the EU energy system. The second, dubbed the AI grids project, seeks to develop the first pan-European AI foundation model for electricity grids.
The rules came shortly after reports emerged that several of the largest data center operators were accused of using a secrecy provision in EU law to block public access to crucial information about the environmental impact of their data centers.
Data centers are projected to grow exponentially across the European market, forecast to rise from approximately 9.2GW at present to more than 17GW in 2030, much of which is driven by AI. As a result, emissions emanating from the sector are also expected to skyrocket, especially with the data center size also increasing significantly.
The lack of reporting regarding the impact of individual data centers could seriously curtail the ability of independent bodies to scrutinize their impact, potentially impacting the EU’s capacity to meet carbon reduction targets.
This graphic, via Visual Capitalist’s Bruno Venditti, ranks participating countries and economies by the average mathematics scores of 15-year-old students in the most recent PISA 2025 study, published in September 2026.
PISA assesses students in mathematics, reading, and science. Its mathematics assessment goes beyond memorizing formulas or procedures, measuring whether students can apply mathematical knowledge and reasoning to real-world problems.
More than 760,000 students took part in PISA 2025 across 91 countries and economies, representing roughly 33 million 15-year-olds worldwide.
China in this ranking represents the participating jurisdictions of Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang. Uzbekistan is excluded because a comparable mathematics score was not reported.
Why East Asia Stands Out in Math Scores
China leads Singapore by 49 points, while Macao and Taiwan rank third and fourth with scores of 549 and 546, respectively.
Rank
Country
Average PISA score
1
🇨🇳 China
612
2
🇸🇬 Singapore
563
3
🇲🇴 Macao
549
4
🇹🇼 Taiwan
546
5
🇯🇵 Japan
525
6
🇰🇷 Korea
522
6
🇭🇰 Hong Kong
522
8
🇪🇪 Estonia
508
9
🇨🇭 Switzerland
499
10
🇬🇧 UK
488
11
🇨🇦 Canada
485
12
🇵🇱 Poland
484
13
🇳🇱 Netherlands
483
14
🇳🇿 New Zealand
480
14
🇮🇪 Ireland
480
14
🇧🇪 Belgium
480
17
🇦🇺 Australia
478
18
🇦🇹 Austria
477
18
🇨🇿 Czechia
477
20
🇩🇰 Denmark
471
21
🇱🇹 Lithuania
470
22
🇫🇮 Finland
469
22
🇸🇰 Slovakia
469
24
🇮🇹 Italy
468
25
🇩🇪 Germany
464
25
🇸🇪 Sweden
464
27
OECD average
463
27
🇺🇸 United States
463
28
🇹🇷 Türkiye
462
29
🇸🇮 Slovenia
460
29
🇵🇹 Portugal
460
29
🇱🇻 Latvia
460
32
🇭🇺 Hungary
459
33
🇫🇷 France
458
33
🇱🇺 Luxembourg
458
35
🇪🇸 Spain
457
36
🇭🇷 Croatia
455
37
🇦🇪 UAE
453
38
🇳🇴 Norway
452
39
🇮🇸 Iceland
450
40
🇻🇳 Vietnam
443
Japan ranks fifth with 525 points, while Korea and Hong Kong are tied at 522. Estonia breaks up the concentration of East Asian education systems at the top, ranking eighth globally with a score of 508 and placing highest among European countries.
Where the U.S. and Canada Rank
The United States ranks 27th with a score of 463, exactly matching the OECD average.
Canada ranks 11th overall with an average mathematics score of 485, putting it 22 points above the OECD average. It also places ahead of several major European economies, including Germany, France, Spain, and Italy.
The United Kingdom ranks 10th with a score of 488. Australia comes in 17th at 478, while New Zealand ties for 14th at 480.
Math Scores Have Fallen Across the OECD
Across OECD countries, average mathematics scores fell by 22 points between 2015 and 2025, equivalent to just over one year of learning. Declines were also recorded among non-OECD participants.
PISA also found an association between heavy digital leisure use and student outcomes. Students spending more than four hours a day on digital leisure activities outside school tended to have lower mathematics scores and a weaker sense of belonging.
By contrast, moderate digital use was associated with better outcomes on both measures than either no use or very high use.
The BBC has completely cut multiple sketches from 2006 comedy skit show That Mitchell and Webb Look after dumping the Bafta-winning series back onto its streaming service for its twentieth anniversary.
The official line is that some of the old material no longer “works today.” What no longer works, it turns out, is comedy that satirised and mocked the very mindset of racism.
A BBC spokesman said: “This is a 20-year-old sketch show; in consultation with the programme makers, we have included the ones that still work today and not the ones that don’t.” David Mitchell and Robert Webb have not publicly replied at time of writing.
The sketches were not random gags that aged badly. They were built as self-aware send-ups of the people doing the offending. Yet in 2026, not even this is acceptable.
Eleven sketches have been stripped out, including a skit named ‘How Not What To Look Like / Behind the Scenes: Burqa’, a makeover-show parody in which Mitchell plays a contestant in a burqa.
The scene then cuts to Mitchell and Webb as themselves. Webb asks whether they are “just taking the piss out of people’s sincerely held beliefs.” Mitchell replies: “I think you can worry too much about this kind of thing. I mean, what’s offensive to one person is just good, clean fun to another.” He then pulls off the burqa and is in blackface.
The entire foundation of the joke is predicated on the fact that putting blackface on a TV show is NOT acceptable. But any clever or nuanced factors just don’t matter anymore, because LOOK BLACKFACE IS BAD.
It’s the exact point the joke is making. Yet it still got cut because thinking and considering why something is funny isn’t permitted in 2026.
Another sketch that was erased from history was called ‘Racist War Re-enactment’. Mitchell and Webb play bored English Civil War re-enactors who have had enough of Roundheads and Cavaliers.
They then black up to stage a clash between government forces and rebels in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Webb asks: “Are you absolutely sure that this isn’t racist?” Mitchell insists it is “a historically accurate recreation of a landmark global conflict.”
After a machete comes out and the accent arrives, they stop and admit it is “very, very racist.”
In another cut sketch, Webb encounters an apparently indigenous “tribe” living among the ornamental grasses of a garden centre. It parodies the earnest documentary encounter with “uncontacted” peoples, complete with jokes about the expanding home-and-gift aisle.
In another sketch titled ‘The War On Bill Oddie’, the United Nations, having decided the war on terror is too difficult, launches a war on the birdwatching BBC presenter instead. This was apparently cut because Bill Oddie has since died.
In another sketch, Webb impersonates a TV chef, who has also since died, and delivers ‘homophobic’ lines as part of the character.
Another sketch titled Rude Gandhi was binned. You can guess why.
Another three skits titled ‘Gilbert & Sullivan, parts 1 to 3’ were also erased
Reporting also lists a Jimmy Savile gag among the material taken out. The BBC never removed Savile, the monstrous pedophile, from it’s decades of programming, even when it was known he was at the very least fucking creepy, yet a joke about Savile from 2006 must be purged.
The famous “Are we the baddies?” Nazi foxhole sketch, featuring the line “Have you noticed that our caps have actually got little pictures of skulls on them?” was left untouched.
That is the irony the corporation cannot see. A sketch about two Waffen-SS officers slowly realising they might be the villains remains available. Sketches in which two white comedians realise they are being racist, and stop, have to be memoryholed.
The joke was never the blackface. The joke was the idiocy and short sightedness of the people doing it.
Comedian Geoff Norcott called teh BBC’s actions “sinister”:
At least if a channel outright removes a show you can have a clearly defined debate over why, however much you disagree.
There’s something sinister about this ongoing retrospective moral pruning.
Especially when the sketches were literally satirising the thought processes… https://t.co/fjheYm07JL
“There’s something sinister about this ongoing retrospective moral pruning,” he wrote. “Especially when the sketches were literally satirising the thought processes behind racism.”
That is the crux. The comedy was not racist. It was satirising the mindset of racism. No matter. The clip has to vanish from the archive. Context is not allowed. Intent is not allowed. The image is now a crime.
Journalist Charlie Walsham noted, “I despair. The BBC has inserted harmful trans ideology into a range of programmes, from dramas to lifestyle shows to children’s programmes. It continues to promote gender ideology despite criticism that this does not reflect reality or impartiality. And yet now the BBC is getting rid of Mitchell and Webb sketches in an Orwellian scrubbing of relatively recent comedy because they apparently ‘no longer work today’. Who they no longer work for isn’t clear. Humourless lanyard wearers, presumably.”
I despair. The BBC has inserted harmful trans ideology into a range of programmes, from dramas to lifestyle shows to children’s programmes. It continues to promote gender ideology despite criticism that this does not reflect reality or impartiality.
British comedian Dom Joly, who has also been the target of such retrospective cancelation, told The Times: “I totally get it if the BBC is putting out something really racist, which is laughing at and encouraging other people to feel that it’s OK to do that. But it’s so clear that Mitchell and Webb are not doing that.”
“Their intent was not to be racist,” Joly urged, calling the move “classic BBC overkill” and “hysterical censorship.”
Jimmy Mulville, co-founder of production company Hat Trick, said producers had to be careful “that this is not the thin end of a wedge where we cut things out,” and added: “Personally … I wouldn’t censor anything.”
Another core point to all of this is that Mitchell and Webb are not some sort of right wing or anti-establishment wreckers. They are the definition of safe, left-liberal BBC talent. They’re all over Milquetoast Panel shows and ‘highbrow’ Radio 4 programming. They still appear across the corporation. They are not Tommy Robinson with a sketch show.
If even they have to have their work sanitised because a clip of blackface exists for two seconds as the punchline of an anti-racist joke, then the standard is not “harm.” The standard is discomfort.
Ideology that flatters the current staff is “representation.” Comedy that makes the same staff wince is “no longer working today.” We have covered that institutional capture before.
Little Britain was pulled in 2020 for blackface, then returned with cuts and a warning. Mitchell and Webb now get the same treatment, except the sketches being deleted are the ones that already contained the warning inside the joke. The characters stop. They call themselves racist. They walk away. That is not enough. The whole thing must now be deleted.
Licence-fee payers funded the original broadcasts. They are now being told those broadcasts exist in a lesser, safer form because a modern day committee of wet sponges decided the satire might be misunderstood by someone who will not listen to or understand the punchline.
The show that gave the culture the line “are we the baddies?” has been quietly edited so todays baddies, the new puritans, never have to ask the question of themselves.
The BBC, which once pushed boundaries with comedy programming like The Office and The Day Today has now become a platform for the most humourless, woke, leftist claptrap imaginable.
But it’s worse than that.
Parents have accused the BBC of harming children through a drip-feed of pro-trans content in kids’ programming, from Hey Duggee pronouns to medical-transition storylines treated as settled fact.
Former news director Fran Unsworth said the “progressive madness” and bullying around trans coverage drove her out.
The same machine has handed activist campaigners a seat at the table on children’s output and used flagship soaps to launder pro-migrant storylines.
It has recast 1066 with a racially ‘diverse’ lineup, pushed a furry storyline into a soap, produced a microaggressions film so alien to ordinary life that it went viral as a joke, and been accused of using soaps as a covert vaccine-compliance tool.
It will not hire people who refuse the diversity catechism. A senior employee once branded white people a “parasitical, deviant breed.” A report on Islamic child slavery in Afghanistan was framed as grimly “necessary.” News output has been deceptively edited and shaped in ways the corporation now faces lawsuits over.
After eight consecutive years of declining scores, the 2025 EIU Democracy Index showed a stabilization of democracy around the world.
In the latest edition, almost 75 percent of countries either saw their score improve or remain stable compared to 2024, as the global average score across 167 countries and territories improved slightly to 5.2 out of 10.
The index, which assesses electoral processes, governance, civil liberties, political participation and political culture classified 26 countries as full democracies, including all Scandinavian countries, several other European nations as well as Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Mauritius, Taiwan, Japan and Latin American countries Uruguay and Costa Rica.
However, as Statista’s Felix Richter reports, notably absent from the top category was the United States, which saw its score fall from 7.85 to 7.65 and was once again classified as a “flawed democracy”.
Once considered a shining example of democracy in the world, the country now ranks 35th between Poland and Botswana, as its civil liberties score deteriorated under the Trump administration and its political culture was rated badly due to the intense polarization in the country.
Globally, the three worst-rated countries remained unchanged, with Afghanistan, Myanmar and North Korea at the bottom of the table for non-existing civil liberties, electoral process and pluralism. At the other end of the scale, Norway, New Zealand and Denmark were ranked as the most democratic countries in the world, with Norway rated particularly highly for electoral process and pluralism, political participation and civil liberties.
While the decline of democracy at the global level has been stopped, the share of the world’s population living in full democracies is still remarkably low at just 6.6 percent. Meanwhile, 39 percent of the world’s population live in countries rated as authoritarian, with China and Pakistan the most populous examples.
Flash In The Pan Already Burned Out: German Economy Loses Its Hormuz Boost
Submitted by Thomas Kolbe
That Was a Short-Lived Boom.
After just a few weeks, the special economic effect of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has already evaporated, according to Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs. In its monthly report, the ministry states that energy-intensive sectors and companies in German industry benefited from a massive disruption of supply chains in Asia following the closure — a one-time opportunity to temporarily offset the competitive disadvantages at home by shutting out the competition and moving into the business vacuum that had emerged.
Companies in the chemical and metals industries in particular benefited from this special situation, which generated robust growth in the second quarter, the ministry said.
Ultimately, the effect faded faster than expected. After just a few weeks, the German economic miracle was over — and the gray reality has returned. According to the ministry, the German economy continues to lack growth impulses. The stagnation is therefore continuing.
Bad news for the German government, and even worse news for Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who is desperately hoping for economic figures he can use as campaign ammunition rather than going into the next election with completely empty hands when voters hand him another political rebuke in just a few days. Pressure on the unpopular chancellor is also growing within his own party. Merz should actually be delivering something substantial by now — after more than a year of his debt orgy. He should be spreading hope of an impending upswing. Instead, his artificial economy, bloated with ever more debt, keeps collapsing like a soufflé.
The figures from the economy show that this soufflé will not rise again anytime soon. Industrial production is currently 3.3 percent below its level a year ago. Energy-intensive industries in particular, which are falling back into their old apathy after the Iranian special boom, reported a 1.7 percent decline in July. No stimulus can be expected from German consumers — real retail sales fell by 3.4 percent from the previous month in July. Inflation is eating into household purchasing power, and the weak labor market is showing its teeth.
Given the dramatic state of German industry, no one should expect an upswing in the German labor market. A total of 144,000 industrial jobs have been lost in the past twelve months alone. In August, the number of unemployed stood at 3.06 million — although statistical manipulation involving unregistered unemployed people in job-creation programs, short-time work or early retirement conceals the true state of the labor market. The naked truth about the German economy is also hidden in basic income support and other social programs — underemployment is a far greater problem than the statistics allow us to see.
Compared with the previous year, Germany’s job centers count 226,000 fewer people employed in the German economy. The German state’s reforestation program in the public sector will do little more than provide cosmetic relief. The decline is real, and it is reflected in corporate insolvencies, which this year are at their highest level since 2013.
More than 18,500 corporate failures over the past twelve months are now on the books. They are compelling evidence of the structural problems at Germany’s economic location, which could only be eliminated through a political U-turn of 180 degrees. Yet even following a political change, returning to a path of growth would probably be difficult. The collateral damage left behind by political ideologues has simply become too great.
Germany is trapped: cut off from Russian gas, caught in the grip of the emerging diesel-price crisis caused by the Hormuz closure, and dependent on the goodwill of the Americans, who have become its main supplier of fossil fuels — the German economy is stumbling toward a price shock with almost no alternatives.
Once this energy shock works its way through the economic chain and into consumer prices, many German households will be in trouble. They have already been suffering from rising prices for years. Among supporters of degrowth ideology, this fatal combination of circumstances may be cause for celebration. Everyone, however, should be aware that Germany’s deeply divided society needs a boost in prosperity more urgently than ever. And growth is only conceivable in an environment of secure and affordable energy.
Economics is the study of relationships and scarcity. Germany is competing with giants such as China and the United States. Energy prices there are now so significantly below German levels that the bleeding of domestic industry has become inevitable, regardless of how much subsidy money is pumped into the economic body through subsidized industrial electricity prices or direct aid.
Political action in these times appears bizarre. Berlin and Brussels are responding to their own interventionism, the regulatory shackles left behind by low interest rates, climate regulation and energy policy, with further regulation and strangulation of businesses. Are we really surprised by the zombification of large parts of the economy, which now has to compensate for the significant rise in borrowing costs? This policy is dangerous to society. It is destabilizing and could only be prevented by a radical return to the market economy, to a principle of limited government while mobilizing all the forces of society. Until that realization matures, it will be a long and very dangerous road for all supporters of a free society and the market economy.
* * *
About the author: Thomas Kolbe, a graduate economist, has worked for or over 25 years as a journalist and media producer for clients from various industries and business associations. As a publicist, he focuses on economic processes and observes geopolitical events from the perspective of the capital markets. His publications follow a philosophy that focuses on the individual and their right to self-determination.
Iceland is the only country to have closed its gender gap by more than 90 percent and one of only four economies that have consistently been in the top 10 since the index’s inception in 2006.
As Statista’s Felix Richter reports, aside from Iceland, these are Finland, Norway and Sweden, with the former two making the top three for the third consecutive year.
European economies have consistently filled most of the top 10 spots over the past two decades, with Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Lithuania, Moldova, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom having each featured at least once in the past 20 years.
Several countries from Sub-Saharan Africa also made it into the top 10 over the years, including South Africa, ranked sixth in 2009, and Lesotho (2009, 2010 and 2011. Rwanda was in the top 10 for eight consecutive years between 2014 and 2022, partly due to the fact that it has achieved full parliamentary parity – a feat few nations worldwide have managed. Namibia first joined the top 10 in 2018, before it rose to sixth place in 2021 and climbed to a record fourth place this year.
New Zealand and the Philippines are the two countries in Eastern Asia and the Pacific to have appeared fairly consistently in the top 10 throughout the Gender Gap Report’s history, while in Latin America and the Caribbean, Nicaragua is the sole high performing country. Notably, the regions of Central Asia, Southern Asia, North America and the Middle East and Northern Africa are underrepresented at the top of the gender parity ranking.
The Gender Gap Index is a means to benchmark gender parity across four dimensions: economic opportunities, educational, health and political leadership. The level of progress toward gender parity is calculated as the ratio of the value of each indicator for women to the value for men, with a parity score of 1 indicating full parity. The index also expresses progress toward gender parity as a percentage.
Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi announced a June 2027 deadline for the disarmament of the country’s resistance factions in comments released on 21 September, extending a previous deadline which had been set for the end of this month.
Iraq PM sets June 2027 deadline to disarm armed militias
——
Iraq’s Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi has pledged to disarm the country’s militias by June 2027, outlining the phased plan for the first time in an interview with The New York Times in Baghdad on Saturday.
The announcement came in an interview with the New York Times (NYT), carried out on Saturday, during which Zaidi detailed the disarmament plan that Washington has been pushing so heavily for.
“This is not something that is optional. It is a necessity. Others who spoke of this then backtracked. They yielded to pressure or to other concerns. For me, this issue, along with that of corruption, is a matter of honor,” the Iraqi premier told NYT.
“We wish to build bridges and economic ties between Iraq and the countries of the world. Under this government, Iraq will be a meeting point, not a point of hostility. Arms have to be confined first so you can build a solid economy,” he added.
Zaidi had previously announced a 30 September deadline to disarm the Iraqi factions. Yet this deadline was firmly rejected by the resistance, leading to the extension.
“There would first be a 90-day period during which the militias would not launch any attacks and be assured that they would not be attacked by US forces,” Zaidi said to NYT.
“After that, the [factions] would begin handing over their weapons, with disarmament ending by 30 June, 2027.”
According to NYT, the resistance is “pushing” to have the deadline extended to the end of next year.
The newspaper refers to the new date as ambitious.
“The timeline is extremely precarious” and “impossible to meet during a time of war,” regional diplomats and Iraqi security officials are quoted as saying by the outlet.
Zaidi claims the plan will ensure the resistance factions “cease to exist as independent entities.”
“They will join the Popular Mobilization Units as individuals and integrate into them,” he went on to say.
US President Donald Trump’s administration has adopted a significantly more coercive approach than its predecessors to disarming the Iraqi resistance, stepping up pressure on Baghdad in recent months to dismantle the resistance factions swiftly.
Washington reportedly froze security programs with Baghdad and blocked dollar shipments to the country earlier this year to pressure Iraq into dismantling Iran-backed resistance groups.
Iraqi resistance groups have demanded a full US withdrawal, rather than the “transitional” pullout agreed on between the US and Iraq, which will see Washington shift from a “combat” to an “advisory” role, while still retaining a military presence in the country.
At the height of the illegal US-Israeli war on Iran, these resistance groups inflicted heavy damage on US assets in Iraq.
They have also supported Gaza militarily throughout the genocide and have carried out operations in response to Israeli war crimes in Lebanon.
Kim Jong Un Touts Hypersonic Missile Test: ‘Incurable Headache’ To Enemies
North Korea has continued to try and instill fear into Washington and Seoul, on Sunday firing two short-range ballistic missiles toward the Sea of Japan.
However, these were apparently new military toys in the arsenal, with state media touting “a new type of weapon” – which Kim Jong Un later described as capable of giving “the enemy an incurable headache and a very cruel and unavoidable blow.”
Kim further said the test, which was conducted by North Korea’s Missile Administration, showcased the armed forces’ ability to fight and that “the enemy will know better what such progress means without any explanation.”
As for what makes this a ‘new’ weapon which is special and out of the ordinary, Space.com details:
But photos suggest that it involved a short-range missile topped with a hypersonic warhead, according to NK News, a Seoul-based publication that focuses on happenings in the Hermit Kingdom.
Hypersonic vehicles travel at least five times faster than the speed of sound and are highly maneuverable. They are therefore much harder to track and intercept than ballistic missiles, which, though very fast, follow predictable trajectories.
DPRK state media
Kim further hinted at this when talking about his country’s possession of “ultra-modern defense technology.”
The pace North Korean missile tests have been steadily ticking up.
During the first Trump administration, Kim met the US president on a series of occasions. While historic, it didn’t lead to the kind of breakthrough on ‘de-nuclearization’ that Washington and Seoul were hoping for, and Pyongyang has gone back to being on the extreme defensive.
🇰🇵 “An incurable headache for adversaries”
On September 20, Pyongyang conducted tests of a new hypersonic missile under the personal supervision of Kim Jong Un.
Released footage revealed, for the first time, flight data for a missile designated “Hwasong-11B-1.” According to… pic.twitter.com/1HqDRJ0IeD
The White House has lately signaled it would like to get back on a direct diplomacy track with Pyongyang, but North Korea has been blistering angry over recent US-South Korea military drills on the peninsula.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal.
There’s a lot of controversy about Elon Musk. His reputation took a big hit, remember, right after the election, because half the country voted, roughly 48%, voted against Donald Trump. Elon Musk had flipped from a former Hillary Clinton supporter and Joe Biden supporter to a firm MAGA adherent and voted for Donald Trump in 2024.
As a result of that and his comments opposing illegal immigration, there were people who not only were demonstrating against [Immigration and Customs Enforcement], but attacking Tesla dealerships. Everybody said that Elon Musk’s brand had suffered accordingly, that Tesla was on the way down, that European and American [electric vehicle] makers, along with Chinese EV makers, would dominate the market, given the tarnishing of the Musk brand and in conjunction with the end of the federal subsidy for electric vehicles.
So, people were suggesting that the era of Elon Musk was over. He was very controversial, and he was outspoken on his own platform, X, on conservative issues such as illegal immigration, green energy, [artificial intelligence] in ways that infuriated the Left. And the Left, remember, was considered the natural consumer of electric vehicles.
So, are we watching the decline of Elon Musk? No. No, no, no. The exact opposite is happening. In the second quarter of 2026, Tesla had a rebound, and it captured 52% of all the EVs sold in the United States. It has a market capitalization of $1.2 trillion. The other “Big Three” automakers are beginning to exit the EV market.
China cannot send their EVs into the United States. Why did Tesla rebound? Was it because all of a sudden Elon Musk had a fight with Donald Trump for a while? No. Was it because he apologized to the Left? No. It’s because when you buy a Tesla and you drive it and you compare it with other brands of the Big Three in terms of distancing, acceleration, safety, appurtenances, it’s not just better, but it keeps getting better geometrically, at a geometric rate, not just an arithmetic.
It has the best program for self-driving. It’s the safest. It has the longest range. It’s the most fun to drive, and people like it regardless of their politics. If you move to SpaceX, 67% of all the satellites in low orbit around the world today are associated with Elon Musk’s SpaceX company – 67%, over 12,000 satellites.
The market capitalization of SpaceX is well over $2 trillion – $2 trillion. SpaceX, with its various rockets, has saved a morbid, calcified, ossified NASA. It alone, with its rocketry and space vehicles, has put the United States not just back into the so-called space race and return to the moon and eventually to Mars, it’s made it preeminent over the Europeans, the Japanese, and the Chinese. More importantly, it’s given the United States enormous technological advances in rocketry, ballistic missiles, which have a definite military component to them.
When Elon Musk paid an exorbitant fee for X, people felt that he had made an enormous mistake, that it was overpriced. And yet, people were saying that users would abandon him and go elsewhere. In fact, that has not happened. That has not happened. There are 560 million users of X today. BlueSky, the alternative that was supposed to break X, has 3 million users.
Three million versus 560 million users.
And remember that his Starlink satellite platform has captured 97% of all satellite internet usage.
There are 12 million people who have a Starlink receiver and are subscribers in 160 countries. Most of the U.S. military and our allied militaries, including the Ukrainians and the Israelis, count on Starlink to guide their missiles and their drones, to protect them from incoming attack.
Let’s just put all of this in some kind of perspective.
In terms of market capitalization, Elon Musk has well over $3.5 trillion in his various companies. SpaceX is the largest and it’s the most dominant, and it will either ensure that the United States is first in space exploration and satellite launching.
And, by the way, more satellites were launched on Elon Musk rockets last year than all of the satellites launched elsewhere put together. In addition to that, he created the electric vehicle market. It did not exist. He created the idea. Everyone said it would not work, that he was going to go broke, and he was finished.
He not only created the Tesla electric vehicle, he made it preeminent and dominant today. And he did it because, for the price and a cost-benefit analysis, it was unmatched. In terms of Grok, it is about third. About 16% of all AI platforms and chatbots use Grok. So, let’s just keep that in perspective.
The United States is preeminent today in social media, in artificial intelligence, in satellite launches, in the number of rocket launches in general, in electric vehicles. And all of that put together is due to one person, Elon Musk, who has been reviled and attacked by the Left as either treasonous or insane or cruel or whatever.
One man has combined the talents of Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, and Henry Ford all in one person, and he’s an American. In other words, much of the success of the United States’ current renaissance in digital media, in satellites, in electrical vehicles, in AI, in software is due to one person. One person can make a difference. In the case of Elon Musk, he made a big difference.
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.
China’s DJI Alone Dwarfs Entire US Drone Production
Two active wars across Eurasia, intensifying resource nationalism, and an energy crisis are adding urgency to US efforts to reduce dependence on China. Concerns about a potential Chinese blockade of Taiwan reinforce the supply chain decoupling theme.
The proliferation of attritable drones and interceptors is reshaping the economics of warfare. Industrial capacity, production costs, and the ability to replace cheap one-way attack drones at scale are becoming key considerations as the US military prepares for a rearmament supercycle.
The challenge for the US is that the industrial base has been hollowed out for decades, and ramping up capacity and building new supply chains will take years. On top of that, China dominates the processing of many critical minerals and will likely hold a quasi-monopoly on the space through the end of the decade. The US is actively seeking to build out new conflict-free critical material supplies, but that will take years.
Together, these dependencies on foreign supply chains could constrain the US rearmament supercycle.
Another uncomfortable reality for the West came in the form of a case study highlighted in a slide deck and shared recently on X, showing that China’s drone production is absolutely running circles around the US.
The slide highlights a massive gap between Chinese and US drone production, comparing DJI alone with the entire American industry:
DJI reported monthly production: 2.8 million drones
DJI annualized capacity: 34 million drones
Estimated annual US production: about 100,000 drones
US Drone Dominance procurement through 2028: around 340,000 drones
Using those figures, DJI’s annual capacity would be roughly 340 times current US annual output, which the slide rounds to approximately 300 times.
The only conceivable path back to parity with China in weapons production requires the development of a globally competitive American civilian electronics industry that we can turn over to war production if the need arises
The message is that, as an uncertain and volatile world heads toward greater instability, the US faces an industrial-scale challenge: developing low-cost drones is only part of the problem; manufacturing them at scale is another. Procuring the rare earths needed for motors and sensors is yet another major issue as China chokes off supplies to the West.
