The same kinds of tangles can easily occur in industry, too, as well-meaning bureaucrats take something with a proven record of success and improve it into oblivion.
For example, our legal system is largely based on belief in free will, which leads us into all kinds of tangles.
Philosophical problems are typically occasioned by some kind of theoretical tangle.
What seems to identify these as philosophical issues is that our thinking is in some kind of theoretical tangle, supporting different lines of thought that lead to conflicting conclusions.
Fassel, in the kind of typically tangled statement of a coach caught in between praising his team and keeping it grounded, said: "It's a compliment to be thought of as a top team, and to that I say, 'Thank you.' I also ignore it".
Now they have a Lost World kind of grandeur, a tangle of shrubs and trees and litter.
In each of Dooling's three novels -- "Critical Care," "White Man's Grave" and "Brain Storm" -- an American naïf, a kind of yuppie Huck, tangles with a system of spectacular corruption.
Leaders of the Arab world are deeply divided over a potential Western airstrike against Syria in retaliation for the use of chemical weapons, caught between deep public hostility to any kind of intervention and a tangle of shifting rivalries and allegiances.
The search turned into a whodunit worthy of Superman, because Mr. Saunders figured the prime suspect was Harry Donenfeld himself, who was the kind of guy Superman loved to tangle with.
It comes to the table, sumptuously oily, in a heaping green tangle: some kind of reedy, oniony chives shot through with the white, the green and the bulb end of scallions all separate.
