Contrasts: champagne and a death toll

There is a contrast between the two characters in this photo, but mainly the one that shocks me today is the fact that, while our CEO was wishing us a good and productive year as we shared a few bottles of champagne, twelve human beings were being slaughtered while working in French satirical weekly paper Charlie Hebdo's offices.

Among the victims are four distinguished political cartoonists, of which maybe some of you will know some of the names. Cabu, Wolinski, Charb and Tignous are dead. I feel like I'm losing friends. I don't know how the paper will survive this. They were under constant police guard after their offices had been burnt down a few years ago, and they were also under constant threats. But I'd never imagined that three maniacs would enter the premises and start shooting people down.

It's the most violent action to have taken place in France since 1835 - even the sadly remembered 1995 bombings had not killed as many people.

I'm gutted.

Edit: even more gutted since I learnt that Bernard Maris, an economist working on the fringes, anticapitalist extraordinaire, is counted among the dead. His chronicles in Charlie Hebdo and his weekly debate against Les Echos editorialists are what have made my "classical economics" classes bearable, showing me orthodoxy was maybe not the answer to everything, adding a bit of humanity to what seems like a humans-crunching machine. I loved his two-volume "Economics Anti-textbooks", in which he concentrated on human value, rather than capitalistic value.

I'll miss him sorely. Goodbye, Oncle Bernard.