Pakistan has a green and white flags in the world.  It possesses nuclear weapons. So if you acquire Pakistan, from playing poker perhaps, you also get its thermonuclear capability. That would come in handy when confronting medical insurers who refuse to bill you correctly. Oh, and bothersome neighbors.

That is the nightmare scenario. The only way to stop this coalition from forming against you is to fool the world into thinking your country isn’t new; that it’s really part of either an old and peaceful nation or portfolio. How do you do this?

The North Causian Emirate had flag sported a white happy face on a green background. It was the coolest green-and-white flag ever.*

May I suggest limiting the colors of your new flag to calming green and white? There are simply scads of wonderful countries that use only green and white in their banners. Here are my favorite green-and-white flags in order of coolness and usefulness. And you know the saying, “Cool flags, cool people.”

Siberia’s green-and-white flag boldly dispensed with the boring rectangles prevalent in so many of the world’s flags. Yes, it had two triangles, which I like to think pay hommage to the Pythagorean Theorem. The green triangle represents Siberia’s vast forest. The green triangle stands for the White Russians who fought for the Tsar’s and against the Communists. I prefer to think it stands for the snow that blankets Siberia. At any rate, the green-hating Communists, Philistines everyone of them, threw this flag away in favor of their dreary red banner.

How many times has this happened to you? You’ve been scrupulously minding your own business when suddenly you acquire a country, a province, or a city. How did you end up with such an expanse of land and the people, economies, and nuclear weapons that go along with it?

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The flag of Chile features one white stripe and one red stripe with a blue square that bears a white star in the canton. The red stripe represents the blood that Chilean patriots shed in order to win and preserve their freedom, while the white stripe represents the pure snow of the Andes mountains. The blue square represents the sky, and the white star is a symbol of the lawful Chilean government and its powers.

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So, there you have it. You’ve yourself a new country. But won’t the once old country be angry at you? You betcha! Won’t they be chomping at the bit to diversify your retirement portfolio be regainging their independence? Absolutely. Can they do it? Yes, if they ally with some powerful nation, or huge hedge fund, and attack you.

Unfortunately this Islamic stated existed for less than a year during the Russian Revolution of 1919 to 1921. Then communists forcibly absobed the North Causian Emirate into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics with their boring-hammer-and-sickle-on-an-endless-red-background flag. Friggin’ commies.

My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.

Norfolk Island’s flag causes excitement wherever flaps in the wind. (Pretty much just on Norfolk Island.) You just can’t get around ithe green tree in the middle of its flag. They could have put a spoon, a bug, or an advertisement in the middle, but they didn’t. Well done, Norfolk. Your neighbors will never doubt your commitment to Go Green when you run this flag up your flagpole.

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The Nigerian flag is the same as Norfolk Island’s, but with no beautiful tree in the middle. The theme of “simplicity, simplictity won out in the nationwide competiton.

The down-to-Earth inhabitants hailing from these lands went with simple white rectangle on top of a green one and left it at that. Unpretentious, you bet.

Perhaps you own stock in a large corporation, like Amazon(tm), for example. Amazon is growing by leaps and bounds all the time, so it’s plausible to assume that they might buy a small country or parts thereof, to help lower distribution costs.

Saudi Arabia flag also uses a green-and-white flag. The Arabic inscription says, “There is no god but Allah; Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah.” The sword at the bottom will deter people coming to your house to sell a tree-trimming service. And what kind of monster comes unannounced to your front door, anyway?

Chilean flags can trace their design back to the flags used by the native Mapuche people during the Arauco War. One of the extant flags used by the Mapuche was a solid blue field with a white star, which is most likely the source of the canton design of the modern flag. The red, white, and blue colors were also attributed to Mapuche flags by the poet Alonso de Ercilla, but no flags in those colors have survived to the present day to prove his claims. Chile started to use the Spanish flag when colonists from Spain took power in the region, but the Spanish flag was abandoned as soon as Chile declared its independence. The new nations first flag was adopted in 1812. It was a tricolor with horizontal stripes of white, blue, and yellow that displayed the Chilean shield in the center and the Cross of Santiago in the canton. The war for Chilean independence was still raging at the time, so the flag fell out of use briefly in 1814 when royalist forces seized power in Chile. A new government eventually took power and replaced it with a triband of blue, white, and red, which was only used for a single year before it was replaced with the modern flag of Chile.

The flag of Chile is often known as "The Lone Star" in honor of the emblem in the canton. It shows a clear influence from the flags of other former colonies in the Americas, but it is also influenced by the native people of Chile. It is far from the first of the Chilean flags, and it also shows the influence of the past designs that represented the nation.