Good Flag: Northern Mariana Islands (Unofficial flag, 1972–1976; Official flag, 1976–1981)

This flag for a US territory whose middle word I sometimes misread as ‘marinara’ is wonderful, make no mistake.

The NMI has gone through some different ownership of countries. It was first owned by the Spanish, then the Germans (!?), then they used the UN flag (for some reason), then they used the flag of the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands of which it was a member, then they used this wonderful flag.

But then, they decided to complicate things in the flag by switching to an extended clipart version of this flag:

Fun fact: the Apple flag emoji (🇲🇵) for the NMI uses this outdated version.

And to ruin your day once more, here is their current flag, in use since 1989:

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