Bright sunshine and clear skies this Wednesday afternoon on California’s north coast, and really warm — right now the NWS claims it’s 71 degrees, nearly summertime weather. Windows are open to a soft breeze that feels nice.

Not nice is extreme fear. In the shadow of that Paris terror attack today, was this bit of a totally-fucked situation in Raqqa, Syria, where a street magician loved by children didn’t meet standards (via the UK’s Mirror):

He was later beheaded in a public square after his harmless stunts, similar to those of Bradford-born superstar Dynamo, were deemed to insult Islam.

(Illustration: Ghassan Ghaib’s ‘My Shadow on Paper,’ found here).

A comment on the incident says a lot: ‘A local who fled to safety in Turkey called his murder “barbarism and butchery.”‘

In this warm sense of a cocoon around me with a warm afternoon waning, no sense of immediate terror — except earthquakes, way-of course — an exploding world seems faraway, yet close to the brain, and in appearance is indeed screaming of  ‘barbarism and butchery‘ in an age of technology, and knowledge. Hallucinogenic-flashback to medieval times, maybe?

Or maybe some home-grown Americana terror from not-so-far back — via the Denver Post:

An improvised explosive device was detonated against the exterior wall of a building housing the Colorado Springs chapter of the NAACP on Tuesday, officials said.
The explosion knocked items off the office walls but no one was injured.
…
Henry Allen Jr., the NAACP chapter president, told The Gazette the explosion was strong enough to knock items off the walls and that volunteers who looked outside to see what happened saw what they described as a gas can rigged with some kind of incendiary device, such as a flare.
“We’ll move on,” Allen told the newspaper. “This won’t deter us from doing the job we want to do in the community.”

An IED still an IED.

And in a related item, via the BBC yesterday:

Terror attacks on schools and colleges around the world have risen to higher levels than at any point in more than 40 years, according to a long-term analysis of global terrorism.
The figures, from researchers based at the University of Maryland, do not include last month’s massacre of school pupils in Peshawar in Pakistan.
The Global Terrorism Database shows a sharp increase in attacks since 2004.

Maybe, George Jr.’s Iraqi adventure the prick point?
Coincidentally, and another related point (via Newsweek):

Former UK prime minister Tony Blair could face war crimes charges as a result of the long-anticipated Chilcot report into the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a Liberal Democrat peer told the House of Lords on Tuesday.
Speaking in the wake of the decision that private conversations between Blair and former US president George W Bush should be included in the report, Lord Dykes of Harrow Weald claimed that the delay of its publication was a deliberate attempt to “prolong the agony” of the former Labour prime minister.
…
Lord Hurd, who was the Conservative foreign secretary from 1989 to 1995, also addressed the House saying: “This has dragged on beyond the questions of mere negligence and forgivable delay – it is becoming a scandal.
“This is not something which is of trivial importance, it is something which a large number of people in this country look anxiously for truth.”

Hard to collect the ‘truth‘ in a shit-pile of lies.