Today, surveillance doesn’t come with sirens—it comes with step counters and heart rate monitors. Don’t worry, it’s “for your health.” Your body is now your ID, your credit score, your job application. Decline to share? You must be a threat.

But hey, who needs autonomy when you’ve got convenience? Just remember: the wellness tracker you bought to optimize your life may soon be used to optimize your compliance.

As anyone with a shred of critical thinking can see, the so-called green energy revolution may well be one of the greatest Ponzi schemes ever unleashed upon humanity.

Far from delivering prosperity, the rise in renewable energy correlates ominously with economic stagnation. The evidence is damning: the higher the share of renewables in electricity production, the more energy consumption growth grinds to a halt—crippled by soaring costs and economic inefficiencies.

Once the renewable share crosses the critical 30% threshold—where it can no longer be masked by idle backup capacity—energy consumption doesn’t just slow. It collapses. This isn’t transition. It’s regression masquerading as progress.

In a move that surprises no one paying attention, the world’s most aggressively greenwashed government—the Dutch—has quietly admitted defeat. Citing spiraling costs and waning industry appetite, they’re scaling back their once-trumpeted offshore wind ambitions. The original 50GW target by 2040? Now deemed “unrealistic.” The new plan: a humbler 30 to 40GW.

Even the climate minister conceded the obvious: “Costs have risen, while industrial electrification lags,” leaving demand for “sustainable” electricity in doubt. Translation? The fantasy has hit a wall of economic reality.

https://www.bairdmaritime.com/offshore/renewables/offshore-wind/rising-costs-lower-demand-prompt-netherlands-to-scale-back-2040-offshore-wind-goals

Prosperity comes from giving people access to abundant, affordable energy—so they can produce, innovate, and raise living standards. Forcing costly, inefficient, and misleadingly labeled "green energy" does the opposite: it spreads poverty and empowers bloated bureaucracies, not people.

https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/abundant-and-cheap-energy-time-to

US Retail sales bounced back in June with a 0.6% gain (after May’s sorry -0.9% faceplant), thanks mostly to autos getting back in gear.

Strip out cars and gas, and sales still crept up 0.6%, while the control group (fancy speak for “everything else”) nudged up 0.5%, beating their usual snoozy pace. Even food and drink spots perked up, though they’re still not quite living the high life. Overall, June’s spending looks like a modest 0.4% rise—better than May’s dip, but don’t pop the champagne yet; second-quarter growth might still underperform expectations.

Retail sales may look strong on the surface, but that’s just nominal growth ignoring inflation. Adjusted for prices, June barely nudged above last February and still lags behind the April 2022 peak. Historically, real retail sales peaks often align with S&P 500-to-Oil ratio highs, which then fall below their 7-year average—signaling rising recession risks. In other words, trouble’s brewing, even if Wall Street is still in denial.

In a nutshell, US retail sales bounced back in June, but beneath the nominal gains lurks inflation-adjusted weakness signaling rising recession risks—even if Wall Street isn’t ready to admit it.

The University of Michigan’s early-July survey showed a slight uptick in consumer sentiment, largely thanks to a buoyant stock market—not rising wages. But the usual partisan split deepened: Republicans are riding high, while Democrats saw their optimism fade after Trump’s tariffs and his flashy One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Inflation expectations dipped, but the Fed is more interested in Wall Street's calmer signals than what average consumers think. Buying conditions held steady, housing sentiment remains split between hopeful buyers and grumpy sellers.

In a nutshell, consumer sentiment rose on Wall Street gains, but Trump’s tariffs, partisan whiplash, and sticky #inflation fears kept the optimism in check.

🤵 The Macro Butler Weekly Digest 🤵

🌐 Tariffs, Sanctions, & Green Myths have turned Germany’s economic miracle into a slow-motion crash, and with debt piling up like red tape files, the sovereign crisis is just waiting for its cue. 🌐

Read more here: https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/deutschland-unter-allen

You can now also listen to a summary of The Macro Butler weekly newsletter via podcast on Substack; YouTube; Rumble & TikTok.

https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/deutschland-unter-allen-podcast

Former BlackRock banker turned German Chancellor Friedrich Merz just handed Russia yet another reason to drag out the war. With a straight face, he blamed Russia for Europe’s energy mess, economic slump, and overloaded welfare systems—because apparently, none of that existed before the war. And in a heroic display of tone-deaf optimism, he insisted that Ukraine’s daily survival is thanks to Europe’s endless aid. Oh, and Russia should cough up €500 billion in reparations—declared at the same summit where von der Leyen proudly unveiled a fantasy €2 trillion fund for Ukraine’s “reconstruction.”

https://kyivindependent.com/russia-must-pay-ukraine-500-billion-euros-in-damages-germanys-merz-says-06-2025/

The G7 has already looted $300 billion in Russian assets, and now Merz, the BlackRock bishop of global finance, demands €500 billion more in blood money. As if Versailles never happened. Back then, they crushed Germany with shame, starvation, and debt so brutal it conjured a demon—Adolf Hitler. Now they’re casting the same curse on Russia, fueling the flames with every arrogant speech and “reconstruction” fund promise.

Putin, for all his faults, has reached for peace—but peace was never part of the plan. The Western priesthood of war wants chaos, not compromise. And behind Putin stand far darker forces, hardliners with no patience for diplomacy, only vengeance.

Keep pushing, and the West won’t just wake the bear—they’ll summon something far worse.

According to Eurostat’s ever-reliable Stalinist-style propaganda, Europe’s renewable electricity prices have now plummeted to just three times the cost of conventional power—what a bargain!

Of course, once you strip out carbon taxes on fossil fuels and factor in the generous subsidies (like the UK’s recent top-up), the true cost of renewables is probably still over five times higher. Meanwhile, the more renewables are added, the worse their capacity factor becomes—dropping 20% since 2015. Funny how that works. Once renewables exceed 16% of the mix, capacity starts falling off a cliff. And when output regularly exceeds demand, as it already does 10% of the time in Germany, each shiny new windmill just makes the whole system less efficient.

Result? Higher unit costs, shrinking energy use, and good old-fashioned deindustrialisation. All in the name of progress.

Meanwhile, across the pond, the electricity component of the U.S. CPI rose 0.97% month-over-month in June—more than triple the headline CPI increase of 0.3%. On a year-over-year basis, electricity prices surged 5.8%, marking the third consecutive month of outpacing broad inflation.

So much for the promise of cheaper energy, while “Drill, Baby, Drill” remains a devout campaign promise.

While Donald Copperfield chanted #MAHA to seduce the #MAGA flock, and the theatrically devout ‘Anti-Vax-in-Chief’ performed his righteous duet—all in a bid for a throne in the bureaucratic inferno—the truth slithers beneath: the FDA continues to anoint mRNA concoctions with its unholy seal.

The ritual approvals march on, as promised in this grand pharmaco-theocratic farce.

https://www.vaccineadvisor.com/news/fda-fully-approves-modernas-covid-19-vaccine-for-some-young-children/

While its vaccine continues to receive tacit backing from a government increasingly weary of maintaining its election-fuelled illusions, Moderna has now joined forces with IBM.

The aim? To harness quantum computing in the development of the next generation of mRNA vaccines—an innovation hailed as progress by its architects but seen by many as yet another calculated stride in a broader agenda of population control, cloaked in the language of science and salvation.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ibm-moderna-partnership-could-lead-181500263.html