Happy transparent bullshit day

The Brits are in the midst of the most epic self-immolation in modern history. David Cameron only held the Brexit referendum because he assumed it would lose. Almost no-one who campaigned for it did so in good faith. As soon as it passed everybody knew it would be impossible and disastrous, but Theresa May and her cabinet kept pretending there was a solution and kicking the can down the road.

For those of you who either haven't been paying attention or never really grocked it, Brexit was a bad idea in any event because the British economy is completely inter-dependent with Europe. In due course trade arrangements could probably have been worked out, although at a substantial long-term cost to the British economy. However, there is an intractable problem. The Republic of Ireland is part of the EU and fully intends to remain so, thank you very much. Northern Ireland is part of the UK and ditto. There is a land border between them which is now an open border, as required by the Good Friday agreement that ended the Troubles and as required by what is now a fully integrated economy and society. But if that border remains open, there is no border between the EU and Britain.

So Theresa May negotiated a Brexit deal which consists of Britain remaining within the European customs union, and obeying its regulations, but not having a vote. Instead of gaining sovereignty, as Brexiteers insisted they were doing, their losing it. So it will never pass Parliament. So there won't be a deal. Which means that in March, the border between Britain and the EU will slam shut. Britain imports half of its food and most of its medicine, its factories depend on supply chains on the continent -- you get the idea. So does Charlie Stross:

I expect the government will collapse within 1-4 weeks. There will be a state of emergency, managed under the Civil Contingencies Act (2004) (which replaced earlier civil defense emergency legislation). Emergency airlifts of medicines, food, and fuel may take place—but it's hard to see the current US administration lending a hand.
Most likely the crisis will end with the UK crashing back into the EU, or at least into Customs Union and statutory convergence—but on EU maximalist terms with none of the opt-outs negotiated by previous British governments from Thatcher onwards. The negotiating position will most likely resemble that of Greece in 2011-2015, i.e. a vastly weaker supplicant in a state of crisis and near-collapse, and the British economy will take a generation to recover—if it ever manages to.
(This is, by the way, not the worst scenario I can envisage. The worst case is that the catastrophic collapse of the world's sixth largest trading economy, combined with a POTUS whose understanding of economics is approximately as deep as that of Louis XVI, will lead to a global financial crisis on the scale of 2007-08—but without leadership as credible as, say, George W. Bush and/or Gordon Brown to pull our collective nuts out of the fire. In which case we're looking at a global banking collapse, widespread famine due to those crop shortages, and a wave of revolutions the like of which the planet hasn't seen since 1917-18. But hopefully that won't happen, right? Because only a maniac would want to burn everything down in order to provide elbow room for a new white supremacist ethnostate world order. Oops, that would be Steve Bannon.)

Meanwhile, having ordered his boys to wack Jamal Khashoggi, Jared Kushner's BFF Mohammed bin-Salman is now proposing to execute them for following his orders. Evidently his tyranny is sufficiently entrenched that he can actually do that.

Of course there's no need to point out the 17 lies told by the president of the United States today because that's just background noise.