{"id":319,"date":"2003-12-19T20:13:32","date_gmt":"2003-12-19T20:13:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=319"},"modified":"2003-12-19T20:13:32","modified_gmt":"2003-12-19T20:13:32","slug":"delusions_of_gr","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=319","title":{"rendered":"Delusions of Grandeur"},"content":{"rendered":"

So you’re the tyrannical leader of a Mideast nation. A vastly superior foreign military is preparing to invade and force you from power. What do you do? Why, write a novel<\/a>, of course! Is there some kind of rule requiring bloodthirsty dictators to have a somewhat tenuous grip on reality? How do people like this rise to power and then stay there for decades? I’m not trying to sound naive, but couldn’t some muckety-mucks in the Iraqi Army have gotten together and said, “Okay, the old man has clearly lost it. Time to retire him.” Are people in general really such sheep? Under the right circumstances, would Americans allow themselves to be ruled by a psychotic?
\nMy apologies to those who came to this site earlier only to see an error message. My hosting company made another billing error that had to be rectified. Everything should be back to normal now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So you’re the tyrannical leader of a Mideast nation. A vastly superior foreign military is preparing to invade and force you from power. What do you do? Why, write a novel, of course! Is there some kind of rule requiring bloodthirsty dictators to have a somewhat tenuous grip on reality? How do people like this […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-319","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-1-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9Iwau-59","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/319","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=319"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/319\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=319"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=319"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=319"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}