CIA Has Killed Off The World Factbook After Six Decades (cia.gov) 111
The CIA has shut down The World Factbook, one of its oldest and most recognizable public-facing intelligence publications, ending a run that began as a classified reference document in 1962 and evolved into a freely accessible digital resource that drew millions of views each year.
The agency offered no explanation for the decision. Originally titled The National Basic Intelligence Factbook, the publication first went unclassified in 1971, was renamed a decade later, and moved online at CIA.gov in 1997. It served researchers, news organizations, teachers, students and international travelers. The site hosted more than 5,000 copyright-free photographs, some donated by CIA officers from their personal travel. Every page now redirects to a farewell announcement.
The agency offered no explanation for the decision. Originally titled The National Basic Intelligence Factbook, the publication first went unclassified in 1971, was renamed a decade later, and moved online at CIA.gov in 1997. It served researchers, news organizations, teachers, students and international travelers. The site hosted more than 5,000 copyright-free photographs, some donated by CIA officers from their personal travel. Every page now redirects to a farewell announcement.
Obscurantism (Score:5, Insightful)
Straight from the dictatorship handbook.
Re:Obscurantism (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Obscurantism (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed. How more respected can you get in a community than publishing the universally recognized frigging reference for all of the world?
Also remember that all conflicts have a major component of perception. This move will make the US less safe.
This stuff worries me... (Score:5, Insightful)
This stuff worries me. The US, since WWII, has provided a starting point for the rest of the world in many areas. From the Internet to GPS, to electricity, to roads... many things that we use today were paved and made available by the US government.
I'm not happy seeing this shift. IMHO, this shows the US is retreating. This also shows to allies that the US is not interested in world affairs as much, while China and India are wooing them to join BRICS and dump the dollar, to join their trade bloc.
IMHO, these decisions seem to be made by people who don't understand basic agriculture. If you want a harvest, you have to plant something. Not bothering to plant, or cutting off seed corn means that there won't be much to bring in.
What would be ideal is the US to maintain some type of library or encyclopedia, not on just countries, but other items. At least it means there is a vetted [1] source of information which can be cross-checked.
[1]: It is relative, but at least one can point a finger to a nation-state as a source of truth, or point out it is a bald-faced lie, with the buck stopping there.
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I planned ahead, buying one of the last 10 Britannica's every printed.
I'm ready for the EMP, zombie apocalypse or JD.
Re: This stuff worries me... (Score:4, Insightful)
You can tell the loonies because there can't hear something critical about the republican administration without instantly trying to drag other people into it
You know this shit is bad otherwise your wouldn't be trying to kick up dust about whatever straw leftist you dreamed about last night. So why not just admit it and be honest without kicking up dust. You're favoured side won't stop sound the things you don't like while you keep acting like a useful idiot and ruining interference for them.
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If he was worth investigating for credibility, then he would probably be in one of three buckets.
(1) He is paid to think that way.
(2) He is senile.
(3) He is not an actual human being. Considering that it's an old UID, then that would suggest the AI pwned an old identity, but this bucket also meshes well with the first two buckets.
I have a new formulation for the crisis. Previous changes have created many problems that call for corrective changes. An increasing number of the problems have even risen to exist
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Sure... But wait what roads?
The great North American stroad is a terrible invention that no one should be copying. It is an almost unique combination of high cost, dangerous to use and prone to traffic jams.
You need to sort out your political system (Score:2)
For a start have a system whereby a potential president doesn't either need to be stinking rich to campaign and/or has to beg for donor money and then owes huge favours to said donors. Make a law that broadcast and online media have to represent all candidates equally and give them free airtime for some agreed length of time and have government moneyt pay for a certain number of campaign visits around your country which if they lose they have to pay back.
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Re:You need to sort out your political system (Score:5, Insightful)
Citizens United basically made it impossible. Without a constitutional amendment to rein it in, it's going to cost ever-increasing amounts of money every election cycle to make a meaningful bid for the White House. I mean, what's it going to be in thirty years? A hundred billion in donations to make a bid?
The oligarchy has been here for a long time, the Supreme Court's job is to make sure the oligarchy can never be threatened. And honestly, that's pretty much what the Framers of the Constitution, all propertied men who wanted to make sure the government never interfered with their ability to make money off the backs of others (sometimes literally). The Trump Administration is simply the purest expression of the greed masquerading as ideals that is at the very heart of the US Constitution.
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I know little of US law, but what this former secretary of labour writes seems logical.
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There's one problem: the rights granted a corporation will be determined by the state in incorporates in, but they apply everywhere. This means that it has to be done in *all* the states, or it's meaningless. If the rights of corporation are restricted in only some states, the only thing that will be achieved is that all the corporations will register in the states that don't restrict their rights.
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Yeah, I have no more confidence in the states, or sufficient numbers of states, to solve the problem than an amendment.
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You can only pass an amendment with the agreement of the majority of the states, along with congress (both sides) passing it.
So, yes, Reich is correct, the more states that follow what he's written, the more likely it will cascade. There are already several states (some rather right-wing ones, too, funny enough) who have already passed such laws. I want to say it's like Wyoming, Idaho or one of the Dakotas.
Re: You need to sort out your political system (Score:2)
Re: You need to sort out your political system (Score:2)
We already have such a law: the electoral college. If we go back to unbound electors (meaning we vote for electors not candidates), the EC then is supposed to vet a wide range of candidates and elect a president. It was meant to avoid a candidate having to campaign across the whole Eastern seaboard so that non-rich people could run.
Re: You need to sort out your political system (Score:5, Informative)
I'll let James Madison say it, because he did it best.
The people at large was in his opinion the fittest in itself. It would be as likely as any that could be devised to produce an Executive Magistrate of distinguished Character. The people generally could only know & vote for some Citizen whose merits had rendered him an object of general attention & esteem. There was one difficulty however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of the Negroes. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to fewest objections.
A direct election would have nullified the 3/5ths compromise for Presidential elections. The Electoral College restored it.
Additionally, since southern states had less eligible voters (first few elections, New Hampshire fielded more popular votes than Virginia), so it was also a way to make sure a State had its share of representation, no matter how repressive its voting laws were.
Electors were informally bound to a party by 1796, and rarely faithless.
Legal binding is a new invention, but it didn't really change things.
The idea that the EC came into being to serve a democratic purpose is silly, as is the idea that they ever existed unbound after the advent of the first political parties in the US.
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Or let's get rid of the President completely and replace the head of the executive with a triumvirate, each member having rotating responsibilities, and with at least one up for election every two years.
The massive advantage of such a system is that it'll be less of a target for the kinds of egomaniacs that think to themselves "Wow that job has a lot of power associated with it, I want it." Working with two others would force each member to think of themselves as members of a team working for others, rather
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> Make a law that broadcast and online media have to represent all candidates equally and give them free airtime for some agreed length of time and have government moneyt pay for a certain number of campaign visits around your country which if they lose they have to pay back.
No.
If you want a British like system where *broadcast* TV is required to allow each party to show a 10 minute ad for themselves before the election, then sure. But both-sideisms is what has gotten us to a national crisis. Truth shoul
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... to roads... many things that we use today were paved and made available by the US government.
Reg: All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans^H^H^H^H^H^H Americans ever done for us?
(I'm afraid HTML strike doesn't work here)
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The internet destroyed X.25 and drove the then larger Fidonet into obsurity. It is dominant now, thanks mostly to Unix, but it wasn't really a starting point, it started as a copy of a French project.
Na.
ARPANET predated X.25 (and funny enough, was even considered by the ITU alongside X.25).
The ITU famously... Chose poorly. But then again- it's got a long and storied fucking history of that, continuing right up to the present day.
"The Internet" destroyed X.25, but only because "The Internet" is what you call the technologies that were grafted onto ARPANET, the precedent to X.25.
Fidonet wasn't really comparable to X.25 or the internet. It wasn't packet-switched. It was certainly a "network" in a sens
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The Internet didn't destroy X.25, X.25 just didn't take off. Had the Internet not happened X.25 would still not have taken off. Universities, sure, experimented with it, and probably a business or two, but a metered, high latency, data network is just plain dumb on every level.
Re: This stuff worries me... (Score:2)
Re: This stuff worries me... (Score:5, Insightful)
As a Canadian, I can tell you that your problems are far greater than Trumpism, or whatever Vance and the GOP have in mind for a somewhat less erratic but no less autocratic successor.
Canadians, and most of the rest of the Free World, no longer trust America. Even if you put Democrats and opponents of Trump in control of Congress next year, and even if the next President spends every moment that they are in office repairing the damage and trying to make peace with allies that have been attacked, abused, and even threatened with annexation of some or all of their territory, collectively we will all simply be going "That's great, but what about the guy after this sensible fellow?"
Every Presidential election, America's allies will feel like we're just four years from another moron, maniac and/or menace. Treaties will be meaningless. Extending an olive branch or extending a missile will be impossible to tell apart.
The only way I could see America ever really convincing the rest of the world that it isn't simply another election cycle away from becoming a nuclear-tipped rogue state would be wholesale constitutional renovation; reducing or completely eliminating most presidential powers, a sane electoral system, and so forth.
But we all know none of that is going to happen. The American political system ossified decades ago, and is now just simply an oligarchy with no accountability to its citizens or to the people outside its borders that it would treat with. It is a nation of bad faith.
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As a Canadian, I can tell you that your problems are ...
Just like everyone else you offer unsolicited advice to, we already know what our problems are. We don't need you to tell us about them.
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Sorry mate, it's not getting better any time soon. My Trump-voting relatives continue to send me "patriot -oriented" emails and links. Today, I got a video of how 3 nurses were fired for talking about how to fuck with trumpist under their care. The 3 nurses were all fired and that should be the end of it. But no, 3 politically motivated nurses in a country of over 300 million souls is proof that the world is out to persecute Trump voters. I wonder what will show up in my inbox tomorrow?
Re: This stuff worries me... (Score:5, Interesting)
Thankfully we have a parliamentary form of government where a PM like Trump, if his own cabinet and caucus didn't throw him out, would likely fall in a no confidence vote, which ends his power instantaneously.
Not to mention certain reserve powers lie with the King and their vice-regal representative, and are inaccessible to the government of the day.
But thanks for the implicit threat, which rather proves my point.
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Thankfully we have a parliamentary form of government where a PM like Trump, if his own cabinet and caucus didn't throw him out, would likely fall in a no confidence vote, which ends his power instantaneously.
A no-confidence vote is only going to happen if there isn't broad support within the Government for that PM.
It's not like the opposition can kick out a fucking PM.
Not to mention certain reserve powers lie with the King and their vice-regal representative, and are inaccessible to the government of the day.
Are you really suggesting that the Governor General ore the King is going to execute reserve powers with the permission of the PM? Canada would be a Republic 5 minutes later.
But thanks for the implicit threat, which rather proves my point.
I think you might be illiterate, or at the very least severely intellectually dishonest. But given your own confusion over your own system of Government, I'm going to go with
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Re: This stuff worries me... (Score:2)
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In Canada, I think that a 51 percent no confidence vote would toss out the PM.
That is correct.
So, MightyMartians point is valid on this.
No.
Removal is perfectly possible here. There simply isn't the will within the Government to do it.
In Canada, it's even stricter since you can literally be ejected from your party for crossing the floor and voting against it in that no-confidence vote.
It's one of those systems that sounds good in paper, but in practice simply does not happen, because nobody is ready to nuke their political career over this.
In the case of actual Constitutional harm or tyranny- sure. But in that case, I ha
Re: This stuff worries me... (Score:5, Interesting)
The moment a government in a Westminster parliament loses a confidence vote, they become a caretaker government, a very constitutionally bounded creature. More importantly, their ability to advise the Sovereign/Governor General becomes extremely limited; they can't advise the GG to make new appointments, make most orders in council, or pretty much anything beyond keep basic organs of government going.
In a no confidence situation, it becomes the Governor General's job to figure out what to do next, and the government, being a caretaker, no longer can advise on the use of Royal Prerogatives such as dissolution or appointing new ministers (a new government).
A caretaker PM can certainly tell the GG what he thinks, but as happened in British Columbia in 2017, when the Premier of the province, having lost a confidence motion on the Throne Speech, tried to convince the Lieutenant-Governor to dissolve the legislature and call new elections, the vice-regal representative is under none of the obligations that a premier or PM who enjoys the confidence of Parliament has. In that case, the LG simply rejected the advice, and asked the opposition leader to form a government.
This is why the concept of confidence (and its loss) is far a better moderator of government excesses than the much older notion of impeachment. The latter evolved as Parliament in England gained more authority, but could not directly go after the King, so would often go after the King's ministers and agents through the use of impeachment. But even by the American revolution, impeachment in the Westminster constitutional order had fallen into disuse in preference to confidence. One of the first governments to fall to a loss of confidence was the Ministry of Lord North, after the defeat of the British in the War of Independence.
In general, I don't think someone of Trump's demeanor would ever be able to get away with as much in a Westminster government. Boris Johnson probably pushed the margins as much as any modern Prime Minister in the UK, and in the end he was effectively removed by his own party. It was an even swifter judgment for Liz Truss, who ended up serving the shortest amount of time as PM, beating George Canning, who died in office after 119 days in 1827.
Here in BC we've had multiple Premiers forced to resign. The closest analog to Trump was Bill Vander Zalm, who was accused of a serious conflict of interest over the sale of one his personal properties. He hung on for some time after the allegations became public, and while he ultimately resigned in disgrace, his cabinet was sufficiently worried that he might ignore all pleas to depart that they they hatched a scheme with the Lieutenant-Governor to have the government vote no confidence in itself, which would have forced Vander Zalm to resign, and then the Lieutenant-Governor would ask the designated member of cabinet to form a new government.
In short, in the Westminster system, the Sovereign and his representatives hold certain reserve powers that function as negative powers; almost never used, but the mere fact that they do not accessible by the government of the day creates a ceiling on the constitutional games that can be played. What's more, there are both visible ways to get rid of errant PMs and Premiers (leadership reviews, cabinet revolts, caucus revolts) and much quieter ones (ministers using their access to the King/GG/LG to get around a head of government).
The US put all its eggs in one basket by making a unified singular executive with powers commensurate with a Tudor-era monarch, the Westminster system created a split executive, with an Efficient part that does all the ruling, and a Dignified part that reigns.
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The moment a government in a Westminster parliament loses a confidence vote, they become a caretaker government, a very constitutionally bounded creature. More importantly, their ability to advise the Sovereign/Governor General becomes extremely limited; they can't advise the GG to make new appointments, make most orders in council, or pretty much anything beyond keep basic organs of government going.
Their job is to maintain the status quo.
Caretaker Governments aren't even strictly limited. It's literally called the "Guildeliens on the conduct of Ministers, Ministers of State, exempt staff and public servants during an election".
It's not statutory- it's parliamentary tradition.
I'll give you an example blurb from it:
For regulatory proposals that receive final approval this session, departments may take the necessary steps to implement the proposal, including communicating with stakeholders. To the extent that this work extends into the election period, engagement with stakeholders should, to the extent possible, be reactive as opposed to proactive.
The entire document is swimming in "should".
And finally it summarizes itself with:
Under the caretaker convention, the government acts with restraint during an election, confining itself to necessary public business (either routine or urgent).
Hardly some kind of bulwark from the Government continuing to operate, say, local police in a dubbed-tyra
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Sir John Kerr didn't wait for Gough Whitlam's government to ask his advice when he dismissed Kerr and his government. Quite the opposite, the minute Whitlam got a hint that the Governor General might fire him his first thought was to get a hold of the Queen to fire Kerr.
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I think that your perception of the US executive is a bit off, though. As powerful as Trump is, he doesn't get anywhere close to being a monarch. Congress still controls the laws and the purse. The judiciary still control interpretation of the laws. Trump is getting serious
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What you are missing is that after an election is called and Parliament is dissolved, the government goes into caretaker mode. No legislature to pass laws and orders in council need to be signed off by the Governor General (or Lieutenant governor for a Province). In practice, the government is neutered during an election. Even the Prime Minister becomes a simple Mr until after the election.
It's one of the weird things about the American system from my view point, that a government can lose an election and c
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They do not dissolve parliament without being asked to do so.
Only generally. Here in BC, after the 2017 election, which was 44-42-3 results, when the Legislature was finally recalled, the legislature voted down the Speech from the Throne, the Premier went to the Lieutenant governor to resign and first asked her to dissolve the Legislature, meaning another election. She said no and asked the other parties to try to form government, which they did. In these cases, the Regal executive can actually make an executive decision.
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they become a caretaker government, a very constitutionally bounded creature.
Someone needs to enforce that. When the enforcers are compromised, all bets are off.
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I imagine it would have been an even nastier one if the LNP hadn't cleaned the floor with Labor in the election?
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But it's still significant that (if I'm reading you correctly) the Premier did in fact ask the Regal executive to dissolve the legislature.
It was my reading that the person I was replying to was suggesting that the Regal executive could simply dissolve the legislature without the Government asking without really fucking dire consequences.
I'm not Canadian, but political sc
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Aye- I thought I said that was one of the "allowed" courses of action for the Regal executive (by convention/parliamentary tradition)
But it's still significant that (if I'm reading you correctly) the Premier did in fact ask the Regal executive to dissolve the legislature.
You are reading it correctly. Basically the Viceregal can make these type of decisions if there has been a recent election (somewhere between 6 months and a year). From https://www.gg.ca/en/governor-... [www.gg.ca]
It was my reading that the person I was replying to was suggesting that the Regal executive could simply dissolve the legislature without the Government asking without really fucking dire consequences.
They can and have Provincially, 3 times in BC and twice in Quebec. They have als
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IMHO, these decisions seem to be made by people who don't understand basic agriculture.
These decisions are being made by people actively trying to destroy the United States from within.
I'm not saying that the orange idiot and majority of his cabinet are Russian stooges taking orders from Putin to destroy our country. But if we knew for a fact that he was, what exactly would he be doing differently than he is doing now?
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IMHO, these decisions seem to be made by people who don't understand basic agriculture.
These decisions are being made by people actively trying to destroy the United States from within.
I'm not saying that the orange idiot and majority of his cabinet are Russian stooges taking orders from Putin to destroy our country. But if we knew for a fact that he was, what exactly would he be doing differently than he is doing now?
I can only think of two thing:
And even those things are A. very recent and B. unavoidable. After all, if he doesn't find a way to turn around the damage to his party's reputation, they will lose the House and Senate at the end of the year. Trying to buy the respect of Hispanics probably won't make up for what's happening with ICE, but presumably that was the intent; they just unde
Re:This stuff worries me... (Score:4, Insightful)
That's part of what people call the US soft power. It's what politicians stoked over decades since WWII to turn the US until 2025 into a "desirable place to live". And yes, you end up with a lot of the world's problem at your doorstep, because everyone's dream suddenly is the American Dream - to get into a US company or US school and to raise your family on US soil.
Sure you can't have the good without the bad, which is people trying to take advantage of your generosity and cause problems.
But that's what the US allowed - the students learning at US colleges and universities and then planting their families and starting businesses and innovation.
It's also why most politicians moved slowly because they did not want to upset the apple cart - you push too hard on immigrants and you might send a chill down that pathway - those foreign students who establish roots and create innovative companies.
The world is more nuanced and attempts at hammering every nail has side effects. It's why immigration was something lightly touched upon by everyone up to Trump - you can't hammer the door closed or you run into problems you never knew about. Like say, how many companies and farmers use immigrants (often illegal) to work cheaply (but considerably better than at home) to provide cheap products to Americans. Could Americans do it? Probably. Are they? Probably not, because you can't work them 18 hours a day, or pay them $3/hr. They'll demand at least 4 times as much money and work 8 hours before they'll demand overtime. (Which the farmers could afford, but it means giving up massive profits).
It's also why you don't run government like a business - because soft power doesn't have a tangible value. Providing food to starving nations has no return on investment other than goodwill - boxes of food stamped with the US flag on them has no financial returns. Lots of things don't have monetary value - politeness doesn't. Yet simply being polite can get you things you might not have believed possible. (we've all encountered the person who's rude to you, and who you don't want to do more than the absolute minimum to satisfy, versus the person who's police and asks nicely, who you probably will try to do extra for).
I remember my school opening up the CIA World Factbook. The first time we saw it, with the CIA logo on it, we were confused. Is this the CIA you hear about on TV? What is this book we're now looking through? You come to learn it actually makes complete sense when you think about it, and it's a form of soft power because you control what goes into it and what lots of people use as a reference book.
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Soft power is important. Those people that are fed by food and aid mean fewer terrorists that are recruited. The ability to offer services that people can use gets organizations and nations to not completely shut the US out.
This is why basic services being removed is a concern. Without it, OPFOR's persuasion becomes louder and easier to listen to.
As for immigration, this has been a major kick the can thing. Even Reagan, just gave in and did amnesty. Had we kept a solid stance of immigration, even if th
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Re: This stuff worries me... (Score:2)
We have an official encyclopedia in Norway run by the universities. https://snl.no/ [snl.no]
Re:Obscurantism (Score:5, Interesting)
No you didn't, don't lie.
Your head is so far up your own ass that you can't have a simple story about the republican administration doing something short without bleating about teh libruhls.
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No you didn't, don't lie.
Your head is so far up your own ass that you can't have a simple story about the republican administration doing something short without bleating about teh libruhls.
Perhaps the audience here could dare to label this move as nothing more than cost cutting for a glorified photo roll instead of TDS-infected libtards here bleating on about "dictatorships".
Besides, the last fucking government entity I would trust to deliver facts, is the CIA. In any decade, under any President. Ever.
Re:Obscurantism (Score:4, Interesting)
Besides, the last fucking government entity I would trust to deliver facts, is the CIA. In any decade, under any President. Ever.
That's because you're stupid.
The Factbook [wikipedia.org] was the US Government's source of information for the fucking US Government, and its agencies with academic involvement.
It wasn't a fucking propaganda source.
Re: Obscurantism (Score:2)
How cute, you think they are shutting it down when they are shutting down public access to it, and also that you think the public version wasn't edited to serve as propaganda
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How cute, you think they are shutting it down when they are shutting down public access to it
I mean, I know they are. Because they said so.
and also that you think the public version wasn't edited to serve as propaganda
There was no public/private difference, nutball.
This kind of documentation is public domain unless classified. If they kept it classified, the entire fucking Government would need security clearance to see it.
Don't be stupid. Right now- you're being stupid.
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Don't be stupid. Right now- you're being stupid.
No, I don't think that's a "right now" thing. In the Army, we used the term "stuck on stupid" to describe people like him.
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How cute, you think there is a private version and that version is also not propaganda.
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> Besides, the last fucking government entity I would trust to deliver facts, is the CIA. In any decade, under any President. Ever.
If you actually ever bothered to access the thing, you'd see it was about stats like population figures. There was no reason whatsoever to assume they'd lie about any of the information they were posting. The CIA's primary audience for it were decision makers in the US, from the US government itself to larger businesses, organizations the CIA had no interest in misleading.
You
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No you didn't, don't lie.
You know those usual suspects I referred to? Here's one of them:
https://news.slashdot.org/comm... [slashdot.org]
So no, I didn't lie about anything, rather you're just a dumbshit moron, and in fact, you lied about me twice in this one post. It's actually funny, because people like you say exactly this to me often, and it takes very little effort to prove them wrong. Here's another classic example:
https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org]
So congratulations, you're just as dumb as the rest of them.
Your head is so far up your own ass that you can't have a simple story about the republican administration doing something short without
Rather, your head is up your ass. W
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I can't remember the last time I used that site. I can't remember much about it TBH - what did it offer that I can't get conveniently from Wikipedia?
Re:Obscurantism (Score:5, Insightful)
what did it offer that I can't get conveniently from Wikipedia?
A source you can cite.
Re: Obscurantism (Score:2)
THIS
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You might not have used it directly, but I'm willing to bet many publications you trust did.
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What a weird thing to say, given that Wikipedia cites The World Factbook constantly; so much so that it even has its own template for usage.
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what did it offer that I can't get conveniently from Wikipedia
Oh man is your mind going to be blown when you click that little number next to whatever Wikipedia throws up.
I mean pick literally any country article on Wikipedia and read the references. Like how big is America? Wikipedia gives us this link as the reference for its number. https://www.cia.gov/library/pu... [cia.gov] The Wikipedia article on a typical country cites the world factbook multiple times (11 times in the case of the page on the USA).
Re: Obscurantism (Score:2)
Right because the CIA is some fucking Enlightenment Renaissance organization with nothing but good will.
This site is full of emotionally stunted adult children who hoard endless storage capacity for essentially useless purposes.
Here we have an opportunity for you to host all the CIA factbook or contribute financially for someone else to do it.
Or realize it's not a unique source of information and move on, and not worship the FUCKING CIA of all things!!
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Nobody assumes the CIA doesn't have an agenda, but it's still a well researched publication with lots of data that simply cannot be found elsewhere. Of course legitimate researchers should't use it acritically, but that's a different discourse.
Hosting it elsewhere is not really useful if nobody with the means of the CIA will bother to update it anymore.
Also, ask yourself why it was removed in the first place.
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Straight from the dictatorship handbook.
I would have thought that it could serve as distraction fodder.
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Six decades? (Score:5, Funny)
Those are obviously old and stale facts. The most transparent administration in history will provide you with completely new and fresh facts to justify fucking over whichever country is next on the list.
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And it will be alternate facts, which are much better!
palm pilot (Score:5, Informative)
I remember before smart phones/mobile internet/Wikipedia I could download/install the CIA world Factbook to my visor handspring.
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Heck, back in the very early days, our university had a handful of computers that were "online" (gopher portals, basically). I remember one of the available resources listed - from a very short list - was access to the CIA Factbook.
The origin of many jokes (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The origin of many jokes (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The origin of many jokes (Score:4)
I read it a few times over the years. One of the things it mentioned were the relations between and United States. For most European countries it was usually "Relations between US and are warm. Collaboration and cooperation are common in areas of....".
I guess they would have to chill all those entries shutting things down instead...
Re: (Score:2)
Typing 'United Kingdom' into a search box would always bring back the CIA page as the top entry, with a brief text description of 'Size : Slightly smaller than Oregon'.
"And roughly as damp."
It will be missed. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
I was a big fan back in the day. But to be honest I've never used it since Wikipedia arrived.
The last fact... (Score:2)
The last fact...but not added to the fact book, so now fiction. ??? :)
--JoshK.
Trump screws the world again (Score:2)
Good (Score:2)
Facts (Score:2)
Assassinated
Re: (Score:3)
Assassinated
Just like Voice of America, and don't get me started on USAID.
they simply couldn't up with the edits (Score:3)
Not the worst possible outcome (Score:1)
The current administration's sockpuppets in the CIA could've just "updated" it with "facts" they wanted to be able to cite as official, without checking if they were true.
Wonder if they killed the classified version too? (Score:1)
I remember helping put this on-line the first time in '97. At that time the unclassified version was a subset of the much larger classified version
CIA Factbook Archives? (Score:2)
All editions - https://www.gutenberg.org/eboo... [gutenberg.org]
2010 edition https://www.gutenberg.org/eboo... [gutenberg.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Check the torrents.
Or maybe Anne's Archive?
moritorium for 3 more yeas (Score:2, Insightful)
Do not be surprised if this comes back once the anti-science idiot in charge is gone.
Mirror on GitHub (Score:4, Informative)
Making space for... (Score:1)
I wasn't wearing my glasses (Score:2)
I read it as the CIA killed off the Facebook. Woulda made my f-king day.
No big loss... (Score:2)
Cost vs. decreased benefit? (Score:1)
All of the posts I see nearly universally mourn its loss, most of them condemn the decision, and most of those assign it nefarious motivation. While any of it might be true, and the lack of comment by the agency begs for theories to be invented, I'm surprised that I've seen nobody raise the obvious motivation. I don't see it as much different than the old Encyclopedia Britannica set that I used to go to when I needed information: It's expensive to maintain and few people use it these days.
During the Factbo
Oh look someone actually thinking (Score:2)
Yes, that seems reasonable. It seems a pity the latest version isn't directly hosted anywhere.
This is not good (Score:1)