This business will get out of control. It will get out of control and we’ll be lucky to live through it. – Admiral Josh Painter, The Hunt for Red October

• Polls: who voted for Brexit and why.
• What happens next? If I read this correctly, once the Article 50 notification is made, there is no provision for it be withdrawn, and withdrawal is automatic after 2 years. And it’s not at all clear what leverage the UK has to extract trade agreements, ability of its citizens abroad like expats in France, retired citizens in e.g. Spain to remain. This suggests that once notification is made, bargaining power shifts to the EU. If the popular winds shift and a majority has cold feet, that notification will never be made, and the referendum will have as much impact as the infamous Boaty McBoatface contest.
• But as far as the EU is concerned, the UK has already left, and don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
• Another read. A really detailed read. Suffice it to say, a lot of lawyers and bureaucrats will be REALLY busy remaking laws, regs, trade, customs and immigration treaties.
• The People Have Spoken, The Bastards.
• It will take an age to recover from this victory for the exit fantasists.
• Brexit won’t shield Britain from the horror of a disintegrating EU – Yanis Varoufakis
• Summers: Why Brexit is worse for Europe than Britain.
• View from Northern Ireland. A referendum on Ulster joining Ireland, and renewed clashes between Irish Catholics and Protestants, do not seem out of the question.
• View from Scotland. SNP will take another crack at exiting UK, as EU membership was a key factor in defeating their own independence referendum. UK was punching above its weight by being e.g. among 5 permanent members of UN Security Council… not sure how that works if Scotland and Northern Ireland decide they’d rather cast their lot with the EU, and England falls to the neighborhood of Italy and Mexico, well below Brazil, India, Indonesia.
• A look at immigration’s impact on the UK. Wonky (maybe in more than one sense of the word)
• Calls for a referendum do-over are trending.
• In May, Farage said he would seek a second referendum if Leave lost.
• Leavers walk back on key campaign pledges. Farage: Never mind what we said about £350m a week for NHS.
• Is a referendum really the best way to do this? So much misinformation and downright BS going about, it’s not really clear the people knew what they were voting for. There’s no way for them to even know what deal can be made with the EU and other nations, the knock-on effects. The referendum tends to become a vote of confidence in whoever is proposing the policy, on immigration, on establishment vs. the have-nots. I’m not sure the Brits are that anti-EU, or how Brexit is in their economic interest… It may be just a momentary nationalistic impulse by < 40% of eligible voters. It just seems like a historic unforced error. Cameron didn't want it, Labour didn't want it, only a small minority in the establishment did. Cameron thought he could use it to extract EU concessions, keep his right wing in his coalition, keep them busy and maybe shut them up for a while when they lost.
• Is this the end of globalization? Democracy, national sovereignty and global economic integration: pick any two.
• Nick Clegg more or less nailed it.
• Comic relief. More comic relief. And one more.

Bottom line … big mess. As the world gets smaller there are increasingly issues that need get resolved across old borders…environmental, labor, industry standards, financial systems, national security. And ad-hoc treaties and arrangements aren’t always adequate. The EU has done a pretty amazing job with free movement of people and goods and binding the entire continent. But the EU institutions and decision-making can be unwieldy, it has a democratic legitimacy issue. Free flow of people from Bulgaria, Romania and Poland all the way to the UK can arouse resentment. And of course the euro is a total disaster. You can’t have a currency union without fiscal and political union and labor mobility.

I question the wisdom of extending the EU and Nato up to the borders of Russia and former Soviet republics, and starting a shooting war in the Ukraine.

One feels there should have been a reasonable way to sort this out, the alternative will be a huge mess, and in the words of George W. Bush, this sucker could go down.

(more all the time at StreetEYE, natch)