The Night of the Crazy Maps

After class on Thursday evening, I found myself in the SOC with CN Warden and CN Ness, CN Sister and CN Homeboy having vacated the place earlier. We found ourselves looking up a variety of interesting and/or hilarious maps. Here were some of the highlights.

Ralph Peters' Proposed Solution to the Middle East: Visible to the right (and originally found on Wikipedia while researching Ralph Peters a couple of years ago), we all found this one quite interesting. It's fairly Wilsonian, in that it seeks to divide the countries in the Middle East and South Asia into sovereign states delineated along ethnic and/or religious lines. Ralph Peters is a retired Army officer and writer who now works as a novelist and foreign policy pundit.

The World According to Reagan: I'm sure that this political cartoon on steroids bears no resemblance to President Reagan's actual views, but it's pretty entertaining nonetheless. It was especially fun to watch CN Warden and CN Ness seeing it for the first time.

Maurice Gomberg's Outline of the Post-War New World Map: The Gomberg map (see here) is pure lunacy, apparently assembled in 1942 by some private citizen and/or State Department employee. To look at his plans for how he expected the post-World War II world to be divvied up is hysterical and tragic, and betrays a complete and total ignorance of the way the world works and worked.

Frank Jacobs' Big Think: The Great European Shouting Match: And finally, from Frank Jacobs' Big Think blog, which has many, many, many maps. One of his posts is a series of comedic maps based on how individual nations and groups in Europe (and America) view the rest of the countries in Europe. For example, the Italy map labels Romania as "thieves". It's pretty entertaining.

I love maps, and I really enjoy our cadre of Strategists, so it was fun to spend an hour or two combining them. After that, the lads left to attend a lecture on Scottish independence, and I got back to work blogging... Well, in my defense, I did some actual work after that.