surviving and even thriving..........

 

It's true that we can never be in total control of our fate.  Just because we're having some good luck doesn't mean we earned it, and just because we're having some bad luck doesn't mean we deserve it.  We can't outrun the chaos of life.  But the more we nurture positive relationships, the better our chances of surviving and even thriving on this bumpy ride.

-Waldinger and Schulz, The Good Life:  Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness

getting comfortable............................

 

...........................................with chaos.

The birth of anything—stars and galaxies as well as people and animals—takes place amid disorder, confusion, and chaos.

-Steven Pressfield

Certainly feels like it....................

 

.......................if you pay more attention to the news instead of the history books.

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choices................

 

Human cooperation under the system of the social division of labor is possible only in the market economy.  Socialism is not a realizable system of society's economic organization because it lacks any method of economic calculation. . . .

Socialism cannot be realized because it is beyond human power to establish it as a social system.  The choice is between capitalism and chaos.  A man who chooses between drinking a glass of milk and a glass of a solution of potassium cyanide does not choose between two beverages; he chooses between life and death.  A society that chooses between capitalism and socialism does not choose between two social systems; it chooses between social cooperation and the disintegration of society.  Socialism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is an alternative to any system under which men can live as human beings.

-Ludwig Von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics

Feels about right.........................

 Whether Trump is an authentic carrier of radical change is absolutely the central question to any analysis of his administration. But how do we judge? Taibbi isn’t exactly wrong. The financial fortunes of the 70 million who voted for the president belong in that discussion—but in a minor way. Why so? Because a true revolution is an almost spiritual event. Ordinary persons in large numbers will seize on some ideal devoid of immediate economic benefit—liberty, equality, salvation—and mobilize under that flag.

-Martin Gurri, from here

Pretty good question................

 

How much priority do your investors, clients and employees put on building processes that do well in chaos?

-Seth Godin

Entropy..............................

 Despite all the high-level concepts consultants advertise, the bread and butter of every consultant's business is undoing entropy—cleaning up the debris and weeds that grow in every organizational garden.

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One of the clearest examples of entropy in business was the gradual decay of the order imposed on the early General Motors by Alfred Sloan.  In this decay, one can see the value of competent management by its absence.  Indeed, you cannot fully understand the value of the daily work of managers unless one accepts the general tendency of unmanaged human structures to become less ordered, less focused, and more blurred around the edges.

-Richard P. Rumelt, Good Strategy Bad Strategy:  The Difference and Why It Matters

Interesting paragraphs.........................

     Lucas shook his head;  he disagreed.  The disagreement was fundamental, and generally divided cops everywhere.  Some believed in underlying social order, in which messages got relayed and people kept an eye out, and bosses reigned and buttonmen were ready to take orders, and a network connected them.  And some cops believed in social chaos, in which most events occurred through accident, coincidence, stupidity, cupidity, and luck, both good and bad.  Lucas fell into the chaos camp, while Mallard and Malone believed in the underlying order.

-John Sandford, Mortal Prey

Needing just the right amount of chaos.......

     But if the government itself is a chaos and an absurdity, if it rules without helping, and commands without leading,—how can we persuade the individual, in such a state, to obey the laws and confine his self-seeking within the circle of the total good?  No wonder an Alcibiades turns against a state that distrusts ability, and reverences number more than knowledge.  No wonder there is chaos where there is no thought, and the crowd decides in haste and ignorance, to repent at leisure and in desolation.  Is it not a base superstition that mere numbers will give wisdom?  On the contrary is it not universally seen that men in crowds are more foolish and more violent and more cruel than men separate and alone?

-Will Durant,  The Story of Philosophy

Mesmerising............................

With the right perspective, there is very little difference between chaos and order:

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Instincts...........................

     Unless, of course, one continued one's own education by watching the sometimes disorienting spectacle of youth in flight from the past.  Roosevelt's Energetik, his dirigible ability to change course at a moment's notice, his tendency to write exuberant Os in the air, made [Henry] Adams doubt his own trail across "the darkening prairie of education."  To a historian born in 1838, "always and everywhere the Complex has been true and the Contradiction certain."  Here was Roosevelt trumpeting either-or banalities, lecturing intellectuals as though they were children, and yet repeatedly prevailing in the most intricate political situations.  Might the President's simplicity be that of an idiot savant who instinctively understood how Complexity worked, even to the point of using Contradiction to generate extra energy?  If so, he was certainly not simplistic.  He was, on the contrary, formidable: twentieth-century in his eager embrace of Chaos, eighteenth-century in his utter self-certainty.  To Roosevelt, as to Kant, "Truth was the essence of the 'I'."

-Edmund Morris,  Theodore Rex

Look Deeper.....................

Look deeper through
the telescope
and
do not be afraid when the stars
collide towards the darkness,
because sometimes,
the most beautiful things
begin in chaos.

Crash and burn.
Let it all fuse into one.

Let it all collide
the way two people exchange
eyes
when they meet for the
very first time.

-Robert M. Drake

Chaos............................

KwangHo Shin           untitled        oil           2013

via gapingvoid.com

Good to know..................

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Dancing to a different tune.............

     Don't confuse creativity and imagination with "thinking" either.  Ray Bradbury said that thinking is the enemy of creativity because it is self-conscious.  When you think you sit calmly and try to reason through something in a structured, logical way.  Creativity dances to a different tune.  Once you flip that switch, things get a bit chaotic.  Ideas start buzzing.  Images start popping into your head.  Fragments of all kinds of data find their way into orbit.  We're pulled in one direction, then suddenly our instincts send us flying in another.  Material collides and fuses, disappears and reappears.  This chaos is essential to the creative process.  A breakthrough comes when pieces happen to come together in unique and harmonic ways.

-Sean Patrick,  Nikola Tesla:  Imagination and the Man That Invented the 20th Century

Some one has been reading their Sun Tzu....

.........................................or, mischief making via the Intertunnel.

For those not familiar with Sun Tzu (shame on you), here are a couple of nuggets from the first chapter of his The Art of War:

All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when we are able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must appear inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near.  

If your enemy is secure at all points, be prepared for him. If he is in superior strength, evade him. If your opponent is temperamental, seek to irritate him. Pretend to be weak, that he may grow arrogant. If he is taking his ease, give him no rest. If his forces are united, separate them. Attack him where he is unprepared, appear where you are not expected.

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Awe.............................................

"The aforementioned Paul Pearsall, inventor of 'openture,' spent a large part of his life waging a lonely battle of which John Keats would surely have approved:  to get the concept of 'awe' accepted by the psychological establishment as one of the primary human emotions, alongside such standards as love, joy, anger, fear, sadness.  'Unlike all the other emotions,' he argued, awe 'is all of our feelings rolled up into one intense one.  You can't peg it just happy, sad, afraid, angry, or hopeful.  Instead, it's a matter of experiencing all these feelings and yet, paradoxically, experiencing no clearly identifiable, or at least any easily describable, emotion.'  Awe, he writes, 'is like trying to assemble a complex jigsaw puzzle with pieces missing.  There's never any closure in an awe-inspiring life, only constant acceptance of the mysteries of life.  We're never allowed to know when this fantastic voyage might end ... but that's part of the life-disorienting chaos that makes this choice so thrillingly difficult.'"
-Oliver Burkeman,  The Antidote:  Happiness For People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking

... the wild diversity .................................

The philosopher and Web pundit David Weinberger makes a particularly eloquent case for preserving the ontological chaos, arguing that human knowledge is inherently fluid and that attempts at orchestrating it are doomed to failure.  Celebrating the "new principles of digital disorder,"  Weinberger argues that "we have to get rid of the idea that there's a best way of organizing the world."  He further argues in favor of making as much information as possible freely available, without trying to exert quality controls.  Instead, users should have open access to everything and choose whatever seems useful.  "Filter on the way out, not on the way in,"  he writes, predicting the emergence of what he calls a "third order" of knowledge, one not constrained by the physical limitations of paper, nor encumbered by layers of institutional gatekeepers.  Instead, he argues for a maximalist approach:  collect everything and sort it out later, since the online world provides "an abundance of access to an abundance of resources."  Pointing to examples like Wikipedia and Flickr, Weinberger argues that the old order of knowledge - the Aristotelian notion that knowledge was shaped like a tree - has fallen by the wayside and that the free-form structure of today's Web provides a more accurate description of culture, on that "better represents the wild diversity of human interests and thought.
-Alex Wright, as excerpted from Cataloging the World:  Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age

Careful what you wish for ....

Too much scheduling makes Jack a dull boy.  Balance please.

More about the chaos theory..............

From our Wiki friends:
Small differences in initial conditions (such as those due to rounding errors in numerical computation) yield widely diverging outcomes for such dynamical systems, rendering long-term prediction impossible in general.

Chaos: When the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future.

From 30-Second Theories:
You leave the house five minutes late - and miss your train to the airport.  Then when you reach the airport, you have missed your flight and discover the next flight is not until tomorrow.  A five-minute overrun has ballooned into a whole day's delay.  This is an everyday example of what mathematicians  call a non-linear phenomenon, where small effects do not necessarily have small consequences.  Chaos Theory focuses on such situations, the outcomes of which are often neither totally random, not totally predictable.

'Nuff said.

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