St. Urho's Day isn't quite over yet!

Watch Jade Warrior to celebrate. It'll tell you everything you need to know about St. Urho.

[My wife's Grandfather would have said, in response to my foolishness, "Just watch the movie! Never mind the St. Urho!" That's good advice.]

Ides of March, People!

Got your daggers sharpened?

Bill Buckley never read this:

Liberty is not, as the German precursors of Nazism asserted, a negative ideal. Whether a concept is presented in an affirmative or in a negative form is merely a question of idiom. Freedom from want is tantamount to the expression striving after a state of affairs under which people are better supplied with necessities. Freedom of speech is tantamount to a state of affairs under which everybody can say what he wants to say.

At the bottom of all totalitarian doctrines lies the belief that the rulers are wiser and loftier than their subjects and that they therefore know better what benefits those ruled than they themselves. Werner Sombart, for many years a fanatical champion of Marxism and later a no less fanatical advocate of Nazism, was bold enough to assert frankly that the Führer gets his orders from God, the supreme Führer of the universe, and that Führertum is a permanent revelation.1 Whoever admits this, must, of course, stop questioning the expediency of government omnipotence.

Those disagreeing with this theocratical justification of dictatorship claim for themselves the right to discuss freely the problems involved. They do not write state with a capital S. They do not shrink from analyzing the metaphysical notions of Hegelianism and Marxism. They reduce all this high-sounding oratory to the simple question: are the means suggested suitable to attain the ends sought? In answering this question, they hope to render a service to the great majority of their fellow men.

--Ludwig von Mises, preface to Omnipotent Government, 1944

Actually, that's not the part that made me think of Bill Buckley (see the last third of this article). This is:

The distinctive mark of Nazism is not socialism or totalitarianism or nationalism. In all nations today the “progressives” are eager
to substitute socialism for capitalism. While fighting the German
aggressors Great Britain and the United States are, step by step,
adopting the German paern of socialism. Public opinion in both
countries is fully convinced that government all-round control of
business is inevitable in time of war, and many eminent politicians
and millions of voters are firmly resolved to keep socialism aer the
war as a permanent new social order. Neither are dictatorship and
violent oppression of dissenters peculiar features of Nazism. ey
are the Soviet mode of government, and as such advocated all over
the world by the numerous friends of present-day Russia. Nationalism—
an outcome of government interference with business, as will
be shown in this book—determines in our age the foreign policy of
every nation. What characterizes the Nazis as such is their special
kind of nationalism, the striving for Lebensraum.