The malignant narcissists share the same hidden misery in their fear of public humiliation and shame. Never give in, never give up, never back down? In modern life, cooperation, dignity, and freedom win for independent, modern, responsible, and responsive mentalities–cognizance, consciousness, emotion, and empathy comprising human virtues and nothing like the “mind viruses” of feudal-medieval mafia, all of them damaged goods made callous and deadened by their earliest experiences and adult excesses. Call them what they have been always: criminals and political criminals.

Ali the Thief

The 82-year-old Iranian woman keeps the documents that upended her life in an old suitcase near her bed. She removes them carefully and peers at the tiny Persian script.

There’s the court order authorizing the takeover of her children’s three Tehran apartments in a multi-story building the family had owned for years. There’s the letter announcing the sale of one of the units. And there’s the notice demanding she pay rent on her own apartment on the top floor.

Pari Vahdat-e-Hagh ultimately lost her property. It was taken by an organization that is controlled by the most powerful man in Iran: Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. She now lives alone in a cramped, three-room apartment in Europe, thousands of miles from Tehran.

Stecklow, Steve, Babak Dehghanpisheh, and Yeganeh Torbati. “Khamenei controls massive financial empire built on property seizures.” Series: Assets of the Ayatollah: The economic empire behind Iran’s supreme leader. Reuters, November 11, 2013.

*

For Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the image and power of his most pious religious position covers, in fact, an immensely ruthless callousness, greed, and self-aggrandizing and entirely self-serving madness. Man of God? Man of Peace? Thief, evidently, and murderer in his own feudal-medieval political and religious mode: see NCRI, “Iran: Khamenei’s New Record in Execution and Crimes, January 2, 2025.

Vladolph Putler

Putin’s pretext for his 2014 invasion of Crimea along with Donetsk and Luhansk–the Donbas–had been his duty to save a surrounded Russian culture in Ukraine–and never mind the comfortability of complacent Russian enclaves in Ukraine–from the bogey of Ukrainian tyranny, a thought as faked up and self-serving as his hallucinated Ukrainian Nazis. As a delusional and surreal malignant narcissist, the not-so-great Russian leader and mediocre mafia, secret police, and political thug had intended to make himself look like a hero. Instead, he provoked Russians in Ukraine to fight with Ukraine, and not a few of them as Russian partisans for Ukraine in Russia.

Today by way of Putin’s petulant lunacy, Russia has suffered more than a million military casualties of war. Financial losses appear immeasurable for their being multiple dimensions involved but staggering in the region of $100 billion and up (query AI on “Russia’s financial losses related to invasions of Ukraine”), and the direct losses to its defense appear in the Odessa Journal (June 18, 2025) approximately as follows — note: I’ve made the list alpha, adjusted typography for this blog, and edited with, I hope, experienced judgment:

Estimated total Russian combat losses from 24.02.22 to 18.06.25

Russian Military Casualties of War: about 1007160 (+1040) persons. Note: more than one thousand Russian soldiers have been dying per day in Ukraine. The numbers in parentheses indicate expected additional losses at the time of initial publication.

• aircraft: 416 (+0)tanks: 10947 (+7)
• anti-aircraft systems: 1187 (+0)
• artillery systems: 29265 (+37)
• boats: 28 (+0)
• cruise missiles: 3369 (+23)
• helicopters: 337 (+0)
• MLRS: 1420 (+1)
• special equipment: 3916 (+0)
• submarines: 1 (+0)
• troop-carrying AFVs:22845 (+31)
• UAV operational-tactical level: 41165 (+184)
• vehicles and fuel tanks: 52312 (+137)
• warships: 28 (+0)

What kind of crazy drives a dictator? And what might turn him off?

From January 20, 2023 on this blog: “FTAC: Why Putin Won’t Stop Until Stopped.”

Vladolph has yet to do anything that would refute the psychology involved. In his own head, his posture appears courageous, heroic, and unassailable, and that’s what he believes he must project. There is no reasoning with his mentality.

Donald Trump has turned out the same way.

Mafia Don

I’ve published this bloc a time or two on X:

https://money.cnn.com/2016/03/28/news/trump-apartment-tenants/; https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/trump-tenants-lawsuit/2020/12/04/db4a82e6-367a-11eb-8d38-6aea1adb3839_story.html; https://thehill.com/homenews/news/528714-tenants-sue-trump-over-scheme-that-increased-their-rent-report/; https://www.newsweek.com/2016/10/28/donald-trump-business-busts-victims-511034.html.

A glance a the CNN URL cited tells just how greedy, ruthless, self-serving, and sideways ol’ Mafia Don has been in his unbridled ambitions and related methods of getting his way:

It began in 1981. Trump bought a 14-story building on prime real estate facing New York City’s Central Park.

His plan was to tear down the building and replace it with luxury condos. But first he needed a small band of rent-stabilized tenants out of there.

To succeed, Trump played rough, according to lawsuits filed by the tenants. Renters said he cut heat and hot water, and he imposed tough building rules. Trump even proposed sheltering homeless people in the building.

It went on for five years as Trump fought tenants, real estate lawyers, New York state regulators and city officials.

Pagliery, Jose. “Donald Trump was a nightmare landlord in the 1980s.” CNN Money, March 28, 2016.

When Winston Churchill delivered his resounding speech advocating a stubborn resistance to Hitler’s aggression and purpose–“Never give in, never give in, never give in . . . .“–he spoke for all of Great Britain against barbarous aggression of a mass-murdering tyrant; when Donald Trump repeats his admonishment to never give up, never give in, and never quit, he repeats basically his own cheerleading formed in the process of his own embattlement. He has lived through and with a process today well known to psychologists–here’s my distillation of it: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2022/07/10/malignant-narcissistic-process-distilled/ –and as with his fellows of similar class, he must appear always courageous-heroic and unassailable before the public and those who would otherwise humiliate and shame him. His own image creates his politics, not a nation’s more authentic challenges and predicaments.

The grim phantoms of history–whatever was thought to have been left behind in the many ways of the dreaded horsemen–Pestilence, War, Famine, and Death–have ways of appearing before us just when we think we have beaten them. So here are the three insults to modern humanity, each one callous and crude, greedy as sin, without boundaries or limits, an sickeningly delusional with criminal and messianic intents, and the authentic among those good and noble must wonder how they are to be met. That they will be “met” we may be certain for time evolves communities more than it resigns any to again living in caves and by tooth and claw, arrow or spear, or sword and shield, but for the living cohort subject to the will of evil leaders, all pay a price in the producing of better and more secure and permanent good circumstance.

For Americans, I believe it appears the “American Experiment” has taken its one giant step backward with Donald Trump as well as the “tech-bro threat” of a degrading and dehumanizing AI future, so perhaps we must all look forward to envisioning the character of our best possible “two steps forward” and then find ways of joining together and in irresistible force to get that next and better world.

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