blue badger
n.— «As the Los Angeles Times first reported last October, more than half the workforce in two key CIA stations in the fight against terrorism—Baghdad and Islamabad, Pakistan—is made up of industrial contractors, or “green badgers,” in CIA parlance. Intelligence insiders say that entire branches of the NCS have been outsourced to private industry. These branches are still managed by U.S. government employees (“blue badgers”) who are accountable to the agency’s chain of command. But beneath them, insiders say, is a supervisory structure that’s controlled entirely by contractors; in some cases, green badgers are managing green badgers from other corporations.» —“Who Runs the CIA? Outsiders for Hire” by R.J. Hillhouse Washington Post July 8, 2007. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
A Los Angeles, California, listener shares the following pangram, a succinct but understandable statement that contains all 26 letters of the alphabet: A quick fox jumps high / Vexing birds, zigzag winds fly / Haikus trap words, why? This is part of...
Many of us struggled with the Old English poem “Beowulf” in high school. But what if you could actually hear “Beowulf” in the English of today? There’s a new translation by Maria Dahvana Headley that uses contemporary...