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Bessie isn’t dead, but I think she came pretty close to dying in the last few days — right under my nose. Actually, right under my bed.

The sad and confused cat you see on the right isn’t some stray I just found. She’s one of my own cats. Here’s what she normally looks like. Thursday evening, she looked nothing like the beautiful young cat she is. She seemed like a dehydrated and emaciated little girl who was dying.

As many of you know, I’m a sucker for homeless animals, so I have a houseful of “fur people.” (I have another purring cat in my lap as I write this.) So there are enough of them running around as though they own the place — which they do — that I sometimes don’t pay attention if I haven’t noticed one of them for a couple of days.

Bessie was one of a couple of sisters who I took in about four years ago. Neither ended up being adoptable, so I kept them. (Here’s Bessie’s story from last year, and here’s the story of her sister, Molly.) They were feral, and they still have a lot of fear in them. They rarely even let me touch them, which is why it didn’t seem odd when I didn’t see Bessie for a couple of days.

I had realized vaguely that I hadn’t seen her for days, but I didn’t worry about it. By Wednesday night, I was concerned enough to at least search for her. When I saw her looking back at me from under the bed, though, I wasn’t concerned. I figured she was just hiding again.

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The United States is the only country in world history (so far) to use nuclear weapons. In bombing two Japanese cities, the U.S. government killed close to a quarter of a million people — the vast majority of them innocent civilians. At the time, almost all Americans were thrilled at the slaughter and heartily approved. Today, a lot of us believe that what happened was unjustified murder of innocents. Which view is best?

When I was growing up, I believed the atomic bombings were justified. I know all the standard arguments in favor of them, because I used to agree with them completely. (Here’s a sampling of arguments on both sides of the issue.) I came to see the bombings in a very different way, though, as I started questioning the legitimacy of coercive governments.

Before I started seeing the world in a different way, I saw every person living in a land as part of the organism of a nation-state, so they were collectively guilty for their government’s actions. Now, I see those people as individuals, most of whom couldn’t change “their” government’s actions if they wanted to. (And I realize now that many of them would have wanted to.)

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What if police were warned that James Holmes might be dangerous at some point before he took guns to a Colorado theater and started shooting people? Surely he would have been arrested and many lives would have been saved. Right?

That’s the standard sort of thing we tend to assume, but it appears that police were warned about Holmes ahead of time and did nothing to stop him. Does this mean police are indirectly to blame for the shootings? This article from The Atlantic certainly implies something like that. It says the latest revelation is “bound to elicit even more frustration and anger.” The writer then says “it’d be infuriating” to learn that police had a warning and didn’t act on it.

What kind of world does that writer want to live in?

According to ABC News, a psychiatrist at the University of Colorado was worried about her patient weeks before the shooting occurred. So she talked to a university police officer, but we don’t know what (if anything) the officer did with the warning. What should police have done?

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