Stovepiping (also stove piping) is a metaphorical term which recalls a stovepipe‘s function as an isolated vertical conduit, and has been used, in the context of intelligence, to describe several ways in which raw intelligence information may be presented without proper context.. Seymour Hersh described John Bolton’s role in convincing George W. Bush that Saddam (more…)
I heard the expression “hologram government” for the first and only time listening today to Tim Kelly interviewing Lance deHaven-Smith. They both laughed and got the reference but I didn’t, and in googling it, all I could come up with was this: Ahmed Patel Ridicules PM Narendra Modi’s Rule as ‘Hologram Government’ Mr Patel cited (more…)
Going Galt Expression for undergoing a voluntary financial strike or decrease in income. An individual might choose to do this in order to protest the amount of money going to the government, or to protest what they feel are unfair taxes (if they earn less, they will be taxed less, therefore hurting the government). The (more…)
In psychology, cognitive dissonance is the mental stress or discomfort experienced by an individual who holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values at the same time; performs an action that is contradictory to their beliefs, ideas, or values; or is confronted by new information that conflicts with existing beliefs, ideas or values.[1][2] Leon (more…)
I hate it when I think I’ve coined a term only to discover someone beat me to it – and I must really be late to the game if there’s a wikipedia entry! But alas, I was not the first to label post-Millenials Generation Snowflake. Obviously I didn’t think I coined the term snowflake, but (more…)
A term I coined meaning the opposite of subsidiarity. Moving responsibility for something up and out of local or individual control to a higher level of government. For example, medical care for the aging was “upsourced” by LBJ in the 60s with the enactment of Medicare. Similarly, the GOP with Bill Clinton’s help, “upsourced” regulation (more…)
As so often happens, a meme is popping up all over at once. (Is that the very definition of a meme?) The same day I wrote “McCarthyism” along the margins of an article in my Wall Street Journal, I also saw the expression “new McCarthyism” in an excellent post I read, The Orwellian War on (more…)
I always search a new term I coin to see if someone else coined it first, usually by going to google images, typing in my term and hoping that anyone who’s gone before had a juicy picture that I could borrow.
Well, you can imagine what happened when I did that for my latest term:
I have always found that President Eisenhower’s expression “military-industrial complex,” which he coined in his farewell address (originally drafted as the military-industrial-congressional complex, but changed so as not to freak people out too much), seemed to over-emphasize the military aspect and under-emphasize the industrial aspect, which has morphed into a broader corporate aspect in any (more…)
Parallel construction is a law enforcement process of building a parallel—or separate—evidentiary basis for a criminal investigation in order to conceal how the investigation actually began. In August 2013, a report by Reuters revealed that the Special Operations Division (SOD) of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration advises DEA agents to practice parallel construction when creating (more…)