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TIL: 21 year old P.T. Barnum became a bit of a liberal celebrity after publishing an article excoriating a local church dignitary for the crime of “taking usury of an orphan boy." Which landed Barnum in jail for more than two months.

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5Vryn TIL that a german cruise ship sunk a venezuelan military vessel that tried to ram it.
WPnd TIL according to Timothy Leary, Mary Pinchot Meyer, who was romantically linked to JFK, took part in a plan to avert worldwide nuclear war by convincing powerful male members of the Washington establishment to take LSD, which would presumably lead them to conclude that the Cold War was meaningless
WkWGB TIL aid expert David Rieff argues that Live Aid donations helped fund a brutal resettlement programme that may have killed up to 100,000. Ethiopia remains one of Africa's poorest countries, and the whole of sub-Saharan Africa is worse off today than it was after Live Aid.
01lv TIL Starbucks was to be called Pequod, after a whaling ship from Moby-Dick, but this name was rejected by some of the co-founders. The company was instead named after the chief mate on the Pequod, Starbuck.
6EDr7 TIL that during "Hell Week", a five and a half day stretch during the training/application phase, US Navy SEAL candidates sleep only a total of four total hours during the week, run more than 200 miles and do physical training for more than 20 hours a day.