Brexiteers lurch from “reason” to “reason” as they try to justify a course of action that is clearly insane by any measure. In so doing they are merely doing what many of us do when confronted with facts that contradict our simple-minded opinions: we ignore the facts and double-down on our beliefs. “Taking back control” is the latest sound-bite meme to use in the defense of unreason, as meaningless as it is stupid. Brexit won because it was largely the old and uneducated who queued up at the booths, while the intelligent and educated often failed to show up because they falsely believed few would be stupid enough to vote for what was obviously a pack of lies told by self-promoting blaggards and egoists. Well, guess what? A significant portion of the population was indeed stupid enough and Brexit was the result. After that the phrase “the will of the people” (a totally meaningless conceit used only by those too intellectually indolent to be embarrassed by its fatuousness) took over. Now Boris the Clown, former Court Jester to the UK Conservative Party, is busy drilling holes in an already-sinking ship and the end approaches. A once respectable nation has succumbed to the wave of populism that is drowning our civilization. But that’s what you get when you think representative democracy is even remotely close to being fit for purpose in a complex and globally-interconnected world.