Maybe I'll have to rethink my diet
Funny World
Last month we published a funny-looking world map that depicted each country according to its commitment to wind energy: those with lots of wind power generation looked hugely bloated, those with little of it looked pinched to nonexistence. That got us thinking. What would some maps look like if we apply this idea with regard to other concepts?
Let’s start with Europe and support for the Out-of-Mandate Transactions – wait, wasn’t it Out-of-Mandate Financing? Outrageous Monetary Transactions? Whatever, this OMT thingy espoused by the ECB, the most successful psy-op ever. Why, France then blooms like a cabbage in the middle of the Europe map, with Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece also distended like Zeppelins. Germany, in contrast, shrinks to nothingness, Karlsruhe in particular compressed to the size of a singularity. All of northern Europe in fact shrinks into itself like the tentacles of a snail when touched, with only that island west of the Channel inflating and deflating itself by turns, unsure whether to cheer this so… [hand waving] European crisis-busting shenanigan. As to the rest of the world, well, definitely cheering (and sporting correspondingly bloated geographies) since the OMT provides free-of-charge CDS-like insurance to investors far and wide. So, the EU map would look something like this:
How about citizen resistance to infrastructure projects? Well, now we see Germany dominating the world, dwarfing just about every other country: the nightmare of everyone else if the issue were, say, military might. In Germany, the attitude seems to be that the country is already complete, nothing needs to be added to it, thank you very much. In contrast, the United Arab Emirates, merrily adding a couple thousand kilometers of runways and skyscrapers every year, would simply become microscopic. China, well, China would have to be rather large, because while it creates a lot of infrastructure very quickly, there is a lot of citizen-grumbling as a result—only that it is seldom allowed to express itself fully. The picture is equally mixed in the US, where they happily frack away but at the same time hyperventilate regarding the Keystone pipeline, making the country sort of stay the same size in any map. The Europe bit would be more or less like this:
Now let’s turn to support for gay rights. Macho places like Russia and the Arab world would simply recede into infinity, completely disappearing from the map. Africa, ditto. Latin America would be on its way to inflating its geography by the minute, but still sort of minute. Europe would more or less occupy the place that Putin has already bestowed upon it in this regard, dominating the world map by a wide margin. The US, with its hodge-podge of laws respecting or denying gay rights among the many federal states, would look like it is full of warts. Asia would look like a diet version of itself. A very strict diet.
Now, if you want to see a wealth of maps distorted to reflect certain features but done with a far more scientific method than here, check the original website for the idea.