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TIL The US army once played a $250 million war game - a lone general defeated the US army in one day. Subsequently the rules were changed to make it impossible for the US to lose.

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kGGm TIL When billions of dollars in aid flowed to Afghanistan, the money was used to commission an airline to shuttle around UN officials and hire chauffeurs, rather than build local infrastructure or public services
65kY TIL in 1992, a Lawyer and a Judge were looking for files on a former prisoner in a police station near Paraguay. Instead, they stumbled upon archives documenting an international conspiracy involving the torture, murder, and imprisonment of 480,000 people, now known as the Archives of Terror.
nWRY TIL that if the Earth stopped spinning, the oceans would migrate to the poles, creating one equatorial megacontinent and two polar oceans, submerging nearly all of the northern U.S., Europe, Canada and Russia.
mXlo TIL that Ronald Reagan, suffering from Alzheimers, would rake leaves for hours, not realizing that they were being constantly replenished by his Secret Service men
xVpak TIL Botticelli's art was never fully committed to naturalism. He seldom gave weight and volume to his figures, rarely used a deep perspectival space and never painted landscape backgrounds with great detail or realism.