Eulogy for the CIA Factbook: The free standard for world facts is gone

April 05, 2026 - 14:23 UTC

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Get Kiwix and download it onto your system.
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Wait, the CIA World Factbook is *gone*? That was my go-to rabbit hole for "quick" geography checks that somehow always ended in 3am deep-dives about obscure territorial disputes and population mysteries.
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Same.
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Why informing people when they can be kept much more safely in ignorance?
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It's the post factual world now. The winner is the one who has the best lies.
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In a democracy, how can we allow unilateral attacks on knowledge?
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I say, let them burn. Let them have communism. It would actually help our family business and eliminate competition for a hundred years.
Let the hooplehead middle class pay for illegal immigrants welfare cutting my labor cost!
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Forgive me, I hope you will, but sitting here in Europe jaw-dropped that the CIA had something called the fact book, which States-Americans accepted.
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You know the CIA is a government department, right? So, they publish informative snippets not unlike NASA.
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The Factbook is quite innocuous. In fact, one of the main jobs of the CIA is simply to provide useful information. Naturally people don't generally write movies about things like "Tell me who is the agricultural minister for Kyrgyzstan & how much wheat they grew last year."
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Indeed. Facts in the US administration have been replaced by flatulence.
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