The CIA World Factbook. What's its' purpose?

[Glass]

A copy, the only copy of this, lept out at me when I was at the book store this morning. It was kind of striking given what I was thinking at the time. Something about junk fantasy or personality literature.

Anyway I had to grab it as I had heard of it before. It is a summary, country by country of the geo-political situation. If I were a traveller this would be handy to know.

There is a fair bit of focus on energy, oil and gas consumption/production info. In comparison to other information, this section takes up more than any other section.

Being as it is produced by the CIA, how reliable do you think it could be? Is it a handbook for their agents? What do you think its' purpose is?

USA gets same amount of space as everyone else. Thought it might have more there for some reason.

[Apocalypto]

Crazy
Insane
Assholes

Simple as that.

[I am me, I am free]

Every bit as reliable as any other propaganda propagated by the corporate state.

[Osaka]

It's public domain. Publishers need to just print a copy and sell it. No royalties.

[Johnny Ringo]

It's just an open source World Almanac of sorts. One-stop shopping for info on any country in the world. Designed as quick overview for government folks and military who may have to travel to those places or deal with people from them. Just about every major military unit with a worldwide mission will have several copies.

It's usefulness has probably been superceded by the internet, but a hard copy is always useful. Before the internet, if SHTF in some place like Burkina Faso and your unit got a heads up that you may need to send folks there, it was helpful to know what freaking continent it was on, what kind of clothing/uniforms to tell those people to pack depending on the time of year, what currency to send them with in case they had to procure logistics on the economy, customs and courtesies of the locals, their inclination toward gringos, meds you might want to take, the need for water purification, etc.

Nothing magical or mysterious, just a wealth of general information at your fingertips.