› added 7 months ago

22

TIL only 1 in 5 US soldiers during WW2 were 'combat forces', everyone else was in support roles.

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5Y7W9 TIL that JFK's famous "we choose to go to the moon" speech was made at Rice University, and the line immediately prior to "we choose to go to the moon" was "Why does Rice play Texas?" People were still laughing as he started that now-famous section of the speech.
7rWnX TIL George Washington mandated the creation of the Contingency Fund for Foreign Intercourse, a secret program comprising 12% of the U.S. government's budget which funded clandestine intelligence gathering missions in Europe, including spies and political subversion.
RZY4 TIL that the storm that caused the Dust Bowl of the 1930s carried twice as much dirt as was dug out of the earth to create the Panama Canal. The canal took seven years to dig; the storm lasted a single afternoon
PYvYG TIL the giraffes are dying. They are facing a silent extinction.
lolla TIL Cancer death rates are down 25% since 1991, with 2.1 million deaths averted. The cancer death rate declines by about 1.5% annually in both men and women.