“In 1914, warring states France, Germany, and Italy were the first to make passports mandatory, a measure rapidly followed by others, including the neutral states of Spain, Denmark and Switzerland.
At the end of the war, the regime of obligatory passports was widespread. The 1919 Treaty of Versailles, which established the League of Nations, stipulated that member states commit to ‘secure and maintain freedom of communications and of transit’.”
…
“World leaders were still talking about banning passports as late as 1963, when the UN Conference on International Travel and Tourism recognised 'the desirability, from both an economic and social point, of progressively freer international travel’.”
they were literally supposed to be a temporary war measure, and it’s not like there wasn’t anti-immigrant sentiment or paranoia about terrorism before world war i. they’re totally pointless even if you use those garbage arguments
“You’re going to miss out on all this media because of the strikes!”
Y'all shot a whole-ass Batgirl movie and refused to release it so you could get a tax break, constantly cancel popular shows after a single season, and remove stuff from streaming while refusing to sell it on physical media, so maybe shut the fuck up.
I hope every major studio and streaming service crashes, all your executives end up permanently unemployed, and that all we’re left with is indie media produced by people who can see beyond the dollar sign.
having your first name in your handle is the worst thing you can do online because people WILL make a point of mentioning it when dunking on you “hey Sam it’s time to put the phone down bud” “i’m so embarrassed for you David” “Barbara this reads like your carbon monoxide detector might need checking” i could never
I’m not sure why I feel this way, but imo this is the most cursed marine mammal fact I have ever heard
THAT’S RIGHT AND THANK YOU FOR REMINDING ME SO I CAN INFLICT THIS ON EVERYONE AT 1AM!
Mammals normally shed their skin in small flakes all the time when their skin cells die off, but because whales are living in the ocean -AKA, Bacteria Stew- flaking off like that would cause microabrasions (really tiny cuts) that would mean the whale is continually fighting off infections. So, when a whale needs to replace it’s dead skin cells, it preps it’s new skin underneath, then sheds all it’s dead skin cells at once, like a lizard:
but not having hands makes it hard to remove this gross film, so molting brings many whales clsoe to shore where they can roll around on rocky/sandy coastal seabeds to scratch it off. Here’s a bunch of Beluga coming in for a mass scratch:
And THIS is what a chunk of Sperm Whale Molt looks like, floating in the water before it’s devoured by pelagic microfauna, because you take what calories you can get in the open ocean:
Nature is Amazing!
wish it still held in one big piece like a snake though. Wish you could be swimming in the ocean and you see a huge empty whale billowing like a balloon. like a latex glove a hundred feet long. imagine getting tangled in that. what if you died cause you got caught in an empty whale like it’s a big blanket