Fatima Day 2026

     Many are the days on which I feel too existentially weary to write a single line. On some such days I give in: I declare a “day off” and retreat to undemanding pursuits. On others I rummage among earlier writings for something I can plausibly resurrect for reuse. And on still others, I mobilize myself by force of will, put my fingers to the keys, start typing, and “see what comes out.”

     In the afterword to her story “The Milk of Paradise” in Again, Dangerous Visions, the late Alice Sheldon, better known to the fans of her fiction as “James Tiptree, Jr,” made a comment about persons who have made writing their life’s work:

     [T]heir separate stories are in fact only nodes, local swirls in a life-flow of words.

     And every now and then I return to that seemingly offhand comment and ask, “To whom does that ‘life-flow of words’ not apply?

* * *

     Communication is life. – informal maxim of NASA astronauts

     The “life-flow of words” is a large part of what keeps us all alive. Once Mankind passed the stage of pure subsistence living, when every man had to spend nearly all of his waking hours searching for food, clothing, and shelter for himself and his dependents, that flow became the lifeblood of human society. Language and its accurate, context-appropriate use made cooperation, trade, and mutual defense possible. That opened the door to human advancement.

     But as men embraced the advantages of society and cooperation, other things were developing as well. A small minority of men chose to use the power of language to abuse others. They invented rhetorical techniques by which to perpetrate deceptions and to provoke hostility.

     One of the events of pre-classical times that receives inadequate attention is the development of written history. Several cultures did so contemporaneously. The Hebrews of the pre-Christian era did so at least a millennium before the birth of Christ. It was a vital development, for what’s been written down as having actually occurred forms a barrier to deception. While it’s not impossible to defeat, it increases the effort required from the deceiver.

     That made controlling the histories a prime goal of would-be deceivers everywhere. Rulers, in particular, had a strong interest in seeing that written history supported their preferred versions of events. As the writing of history is arduous and protracted, the usual course of events was for a king to fund a court historian and certify his product, provided it told the story the king wanted it to tell.

* * *

     There is no such thing as a tool that cannot be employed destructively. Words certainly have been used to destroy: alliances, agreements, affections, peace, faith. But words can also bolster and heal those things. That’s especially the case as regards predictions and prayers.

     One hundred nine years ago today, the Blessed Virgin Mary made her sixth of six appearances in the skies over Fatima, Portugal. It culminated with The Miracle of the Sun, which was witnessed by an estimated 70,000 onlookers. As impressive as the event was, what mattered more – and matters still today – were her predictions about the near future, all of which have been fulfilled.

     To many of our time, the circumstances surrounding the apparitions at Fatima are murky or unknown. The teaching of history having been displaced by a mélange of lies, half-truths, and irrelevancies called “social studies,” few younger Americans are well informed about them. Chalk it up to the secularization of the classroom if you like, but even children taught in Catholic schools are unaware of the tumult that gripped Portugal in 1917. In particular, a secular government rabidly hostile to the Church ruled the nation at that time. In keeping with that hostility, the State attempted to suppress reports of the apparitions.

     The Portuguese State did not succeed. The apparitions at Fatima and the Miracle of the Sun are among the best reported and best known of all miracles. As news of them spread, they fertilized a massive return to faith that swept across Europe.

     One of the things Our Lady said to the three shepherd children of Fatima was that the world, as riven as it was by war and hatred, could still be healed. The medicine it required was the Rosary:

     Our Lady: Do you wish to offer yourselves to God to endure all the sufferings that He may be pleased to send you, as both an act of reparation for the sins with which He is offended and an act of supplication for the conversion of sinners?
     Lucia dos Santos: Yes, we do.
     Our Lady: Well then, you will have much to suffer. But the grace of God will be your comfort.
     "It was upon saying these last words, 'the grace of God...' that for the first time she opened her hands, which emitted a most intense light that penetrated our breasts, reaching the innermost part of our souls and making us see ourselves in God, Who was that light, more clearly than we can see ourselves in the best of mirrors.
     Then, driven by a deep inspiration, we knelt down and repeated inwardly: 'O Most Holy Trinity, I adore Thee! My God, my God, I love Thee in the Most Blessed Sacrament.'”
     "A moment later, Our Lady added, 'Pray the rosary every day to obtain peace for the world and the end of the war.'

     Sadly, that return to faith was undermined by the political and cultural currents that followed World War I. But the mandate the Blessed Virgin gave to Lucia dos Santos, Jacinta and Francisco Marto remains as it was on May 13, 1917:

If you wish to join in the healing of the world,
Then each and every day,
From today to the end of your life,
Pray the Rosary.

     Yes, like all prayers, the Rosary is “just words in a row.” It affects nothing in the “real world.” It can seem pointless to keep repeating the Lord’s Prayer, the Hail Mary, and the Small Doxology over and over. But it quiets the mind and soothes the heart. In partaking of “the life-flow of words,” it brings peace. Where in our world can peace be so cheaply and easily purchased?

     And where is peace for our world to begin, if not our hearts – yours and mine?

     May God bless and keep you all.

Clean Dirt Versus Dirty Dirt

     I suppose this particular dichotomy had to be addressed eventually.

     It happened yesterday. Sunday is our day here at the Fortress when I empty, clean, and refill the litter box. It takes a while, as we also clean the room. I vacuum, and the C.S.O. steams the floor. Every now and then the C.S.O. pleads for a day off from steaming duties on the grounds of whatever, but it usually works out fine.

     Yesterday, when I was refilling the litter box with fresh granulated clay litter, I had a moment of inattention in which I spilled some litter onto the floor. I grabbed a broom and dustpan, swept up the spillage, and made to put it into the litter box, when the C.S.O. stopped me:

CSO: Don’t do that!
FWP: Why not?
CSO: It’s dirty!
FWP: Huh? It just came out of the bag.
CSO: But you spilled it on the dirty floor.
FWP: Sweetie, it’s cat litter.
CSO: Well, don’t you want the cats to have clean litter?
FWP: It is clean litter. For the moment, anyway.
CSO: No it isn’t. Not once it’s touched the floor.
FWP: (bemused) Just because I haven’t vacuumed yet?
CSO: Well?
FWP: Sweetie, cat litter is dirt. It’s granulated clay. What difference does being on the floor for a few seconds make?
CSO: (looks exasperated) Oh, never mind.

     Mind you, the cat room floor was pretty clean. All right, there was some dust and cat hair, and the C.S.O. did intend to steam-clean it. But the idea that the granulated clay in the freshly opened litter bag was “clean” but spilling it on the floor made it “dirty,” and therefore unfit for our cats to pee and poop on, befuddled me. I know I shouldn’t expect to understand female logic, but still!

     Anyway, “dirt” is a tough thing to define. The very same substance from the very same source would be considered “dirt” in one context and a vitally necessary resource in another. Consider potting soil: first as normally deployed around a potted plant; second after the cat knocks the pot over and scatters the contents.

     Truly, our perceptions are shaped by our definitions.

Life After Death

     If you haven’t seen this documentary:

Why do near-death survivors stop being afraid of death? These people who came back from clinical death were asked directly. Their answers came without hesitation. Watch our documentary 𝗙𝗜𝗡𝗔𝗟 𝗛𝗢𝗨𝗥𝗦—𝗜𝘀 𝗗𝗲𝗮𝘁𝗵 𝗥𝗲𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗘𝗻𝗱? 👇

— Epoch Health (@epochhealth) September 26, 2026

     …you might want to give it a look.

     The Epoch Times is a Christian-oriented publication, so many non-Christians would dismiss it a priori. However, the Final Hours production is intended to be a genuine documentary: i.e., it records the statements of persons who’ve had near-death experiences. It doesn’t insist that those statements are unimpeachable. Rather, it notes the commonalities among their statements and invites the viewer to form his own conclusions.

     There’s always more than one possible explanation for any given phenomenon, whether it’s an event we can all witness or something that happens in only one person’s experience and is therefore un-witnessable. Many explanations have been offered for the similarity of the experiences of persons who’ve been brought back from the edge of death. You pays your money and you takes your choice, as the saying goes.

     Still, the commonalities are suggestive. What, exactly, do they suggest? None of them involve being imprisoned in a place of torment. None of them suggest that the afterlife will be less pleasant than our temporal lives. Is the commonality being portrayed here about what we can all expect, or is it about the characters of the deponents?

     There’s no way to know on this side of the veil of Time. People will gravitate to the inference that fits most comfortably with their existing beliefs and convictions.

     I don’t know whether Final Hours is viewable by non-subscribers. But if you can see it, I would encourage you to do so, especially if you hold to Christian teachings about life after death.

Day Off

     Good morning, Gentle Reader. It being Sunday, I went to Mass as I usually do, came home at about 8:30 AM as I usually do, sat down at this furshlugginer machine to write a piece for this dive as I usually do… and fell asleep at the keyboard. (I usually don’t.) I woke up a few minutes ago.

     It seems I don’t have anything on my mind that’s energizing enough to keep me awake long enough to write it. So I’m going to beg your indulgence and declare a day off. Enjoy your Columbus Day (traditional) and check back for fresh drivel tomorrow. Be well.

The Infinitely Renewable Resource

     Unless you resolve on a subsistence existence – find your own food, make your own clothes, et cetera — you must sell something to others. That, of course, requires you to make or find something to sell that others will pay you for. And so begins the division of labor economy. That encourages each of us, by the efficiencies available from specialization, to adopt a particular occupation and get good at it.

     Some decide to become pure salesmen: i.e., to produce nothing by their own labors, but to specialize in selling goods and services from some other source. In the usual case, that other source is other people or organizations. But an unusual case is on my mind this morning. It unites salesmen who would otherwise appear to be unrelated.

     Those salesmen sell hope.

* * *

     Hope is a peculiar good. The hope salesman doesn’t mine, harvest, or manufacture hope; he evokes it from within his customer. He does this by offering some less abstract good or service that the customer hopes will bring him nearer to some cherished goal. Sometimes that good or service is objectively real, even tangible, but evoking and strengthening the customer’s hope is the point of the matter.

     People hope for many things: love; sex; companionship; money; acceptance into specific groups; recognition of their excellences; propagation of their ideas. That list could be extended, but the point has been made. If a salesman can get you to believe that your specific hopes will draw nearer to achievement by purchasing what he’s selling, he’s got a hook in you.

     An honest salesman will hang in there with you for a long spell. He’ll try to show you how to use his nominal product to get closer to what you hope for. He’ll watch how you do it, and comment constructively on any missteps he recognizes. And should there come a point when it’s plain that you aren’t likely to get what you hope for in the foreseeable future, he’ll mourn with you.

     However, he’s unlikely to offer you a refund. Word of that could get around. The hope salesman can’t afford that.

     Of course, there are dishonest hope salesmen as well. We call them con men, charlatans, gamesters, snake-oil salesmen, or something even less appealing. They know perfectly well that what they’re selling will do nothing positive for you. It might even make you ill.

     Persons in certain fields are heavily beset by such salesmen.

* * *

     Since the customer is the true source of hope, it will be in plentiful supply for as long as there are people who want something. Paradoxically, that “oversupply” appears to have no depressing effect on hope’s price. Economic wisdom fails to apply to hope.

     Roger Zelazny once wrote a short story, “But Not The Herald,” around the theme that the Hope that lay at the bottom of Pandora’s box was the true scourge of Mankind. Now and then I find myself thinking he just might have been right about that.

     Anyway, if you’ve been wondering why this topic today, it’s because of a collection I’ve been amassing. Among my various categories of incoming email is a folder titled “The Promoter Scam.” Those emails came from persons who claim expertise at promoting books: an expertise they generously offered to put at my service. This morning, the number of entries in it passed 1000.

     “The Promoter Scam” has about 100 subfolders. Each is dedicated to the emails of a particularly persistent promoter: one who has importuned me three or more times. Persistence is sometimes an asset, though it hasn’t served the persons whose emails fill those subfolders.

     Yes, Gentle Reader: one of those promoters did “get me.” I may be a Certified Galactic Intellect, but I’m as susceptible to hope as anyone. It was a costly lesson, but it served to inoculate this foolish old man against foolish hopes.

     If you’re an indie writer, please consider this your warning: those promoters are trying to sell you your own hope. If you’re a friend or relative of an indie writer, you might want to pass this essay along to him. If you do so before he bites some promoter’s hook, you could save him money and disappointment. As for me, I write as a public service. There’s no money in it, anyway.

Spectacles

     I suppose it’s a matter of taste. Some like Chopin, others like hip-hop. Some like William Faulkner; others like Dan Brown. Some like weddings; others like…

     Executions? Really?

     Apparently so.

* * *

     If you haven’t yet read the news – lucky you – you may not be aware that the execution of Fort Hood mass murderer Nidal Malik Hasan is to be “livestreamed.” Some are aghast; others are cheering. Some feel it’s offensive; others… no, let’s not do that again. The general attitude, as is so often the case today, is “whatever floats your boat.”

     There are serious thinkers who hold that publicly executing the worst of our criminals is edifying to the general public. Not only do they see that justice has really, truly been done; they’re reminded of the possible consequences of a heinous action. And it is inarguable that murder contributes to a degradation of the proprieties. To that effect we have the words of Thomas de Quincey:

     If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination. Once begun upon this downward path, you never know where you are to stop. Many a man has dated his ruin from some murder or other that perhaps he thought little of at the time.

     And let that be the last drop of humor I drip onto this subject.

     So the public is invited to watch the snuffing of Nidal Hasan on December 3 of this year. As Hasan was a major in the U.S. Army, he will face a firing squad. It’s possible that millions will witness the event.

     At least no one will be “tailgating” it.

* * *

     Executions were once routinely public. Hangings, the “preferred” method of execution in the 19th Century, were held in the open air and often heavily attended. That became less common as the century dwindled. The last public hanging in the United States took place in 1936.

     Executions are still witnessed, of course. Regardless of the method employed, a few dozen people are always present to watch the termination of the condemned man’s life. As grisly as the notion seems, there are sound reasons for it, including transparency and the maintenance of legal standards.

     But I wouldn’t care to see such a thing. I don’t grasp why anyone would, except out of a desire for vengeance. We cannot create a human life; the desire to see one ended by human artifice strikes me as a kind of hubris. Which is not to say that some criminals don’t deserve to be put to death.

     Respect for human life, even the life in the body of a total villain, seems to me to trump any considerations of “closure” or “public edification.” If a man must die, let him be put to death, but why make a spectacle of it? The desire to see such a thing speaks to something unworthy lurking in one’s heart.

     Of course, there are people who delight in seeing others suffer. Perhaps they hope that the procedure will be botched, as was the case recently in Tennessee’s attempted execution of Christa Pike. There were a number of botched electrocutions before that method was abandoned. No doubt some of the onlookers were gratified to see the switch thrown over and over.

     I simply don’t grasp it. Does that mean I’m soft? Over-civilized, as they say?

* * *

     I stand between opposed poles. Despite the teaching of my Church, I agree that there are persons whose conduct merits a speedy dispatch from this life, and who should receive exactly that. But to make a spectacle of it for others’ entertainment? No, that I can’t condone.

     If we must kill for any reason, I’d prefer that we be squeamish about it. Let it be done privately, albeit with the appropriate representatives of the justice system for witnesses. Let it be sanitary and as painless as it can be made. It’s quite possible that there are better ways of sending a condemned man to his final reward than the methods used today. But I can’t see inviting millions of people, the great majority of whom are completely uninvolved with the criminal and his deeds, to watch it done.

Predictions Old And New

     I think I’ve mentioned here, or perhaps at Eternity Road of loving memory, that I was once deeply immersed in international strategic analysis. That immersion arose from my studies in physics. Once I became aware of the immense power available from nuclear technology, and the ways in which it could be put to destructive purposes, I had to get a sense for the possibilities.

     That began, roughly, in 1966, when I happened upon a peculiar book in my high school’s library. It wasn’t the sort of book one would expect to see in a high school library, but there it was. Having found it, I simply had to read it.

     The book was Herman Kahn’s magnum opus On Thermonuclear War.

     Pretty strange fodder for a fourteen-year-old kid, eh? Even my father thought I’d spend my time better by improving my screwball and chasing girls. But I felt a need to understand Kahn’s analysis of that most horrifying of subjects. After all, we were doing regular “duck and cover” drills back then. People still built backyard bomb shelters. “Civil defense” was a lively subject even at town hall. So I read Kahn’s book carefully and thought hard about its implications.

     I was aware that many things people argue about have no relation to any real danger or opportunity. But I knew about the tensions in Europe, the NATO / Warsaw Pact face-off, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Nuclear Test Ban treaty, and (of course) the “space race.” I knew about America’s steadily increasing expenditures on strategic weaponry. I kept abreast of the angry rhetoric that emanated regularly from the USSR. The matter was serious enough to deserve attention and study.

     Strange things were being said in classrooms, too. The mid-Sixties were the leading edge of antinuclear activism. Any number of people argued that the mere existence of nuclear weapons endangered the very existence of Mankind. Some of those people were teachers determined to impress their views on us young folks.

     It’s been six decades since then. A great deal has changed, but not this: nations that fancy themselves as “great powers,” actual or potential, still strive to acquire weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Whether nuclear, biological, chemical, or whatever else there may be, those who seek power over others want all of them.

     It’s unclear just how widely nuclear weaponry has spread. We know that nine nations definitely have them:

     But other nations may have acquired them as well. As for the other varieties of WMD, the picture is considerably cloudier. The tableau makes the need to understand international relations, competitions, and tensions graver than ever.

* * *

     Haretina Kukuri may be the most valuable thinker alive today. She’s produced a stunning compilation of analyses and inferences about international stability. If you have any interest at all in international relations and how the various rivalries affect world events, please read her piece in its entirety.

     From its beginning:

     Nobody built 2030 on purpose. I need you to sit with that sentence before you read another word of this piece, because everything that follows is simply proof of it, repeated across five domains until the pattern becomes impossible to unsee. Every actor examined here did the single most defensible thing available to it, at every decision point, across four straight years, and the sum of all that defensible behaviour produced a condition none of them would have chosen and none of them can now exit alone.

     From its middle:

     Twentieth-century stability rested on forces you could observe, count, trust to change slowly, tank divisions, missile silos, the sort of thing a satellite could photograph and a treaty could cap. The decisive capabilities of this decade meet none of those conditions.

     And from near its end:

     Haretina is an honest prognosticator. Immediately before that chart of probabilities, she writes:

     Every generation's predictions, [Freedman’s] own research shows, were shaped by the anxieties of their own present as thoroughly as by any genuine foresight…. The weights below are my own judgement.

     Once you’ve acquainted yourself with the breadth of her studies and ponderings, you’ll be inclined to trust that judgment.

* * *

     This is one of those encounters that can alter a thinker’s entire mental model of geostrategic causality. While there are themes that reach backward to fears we’ve faced in other guises – consider the movie WarGames for an example – there are new factors that transform those themes in critical ways. Probably the most important of those factors is the emergence of what we’ve been calling artificial intelligence (AI).

     The greatest of all threats to world peace is the powerful decision maker who sees his nation – and by implication, himself – brought to the edge of the abyss. In times past, his judgment, even if bolstered by the counsel of sober, intelligent others, was a human thing. It functioned at human speeds from a catalogue of a human’s priorities. It may include economic calculations, but only as supports to decisions with broader consequences.

     Digital AI, founded on calculation as is all digital technology, will “see things differently.” And it will see them at a speed far above the human. When that powerful decision maker’s analyses of his nation’s situation derives partly from AI, the factor of greatest import will be the degree of trusts he – and whoever might be in a position to constrain or overrule him – invests in that AI.

     We once thought the arms-control agreements of the Eighties and later decades would make us safer. But those agreements only limited certain kinds of weapons. The destructive capabilities of the world’s States have grown in other directions. AI hasn’t yet been adequately assessed in that light.

     When Haretina wrote:

     A single leader's miscalculation, a single accident nobody modelled, could make every careful trend in this piece irrelevant in an afternoon, and no survey, no book, no probability table protects against that possibility, because that possibility is precisely what none of them can see coming. I have built this piece on the better-supported case. I have not proven it is the only one.

     … I’d bet she was thinking about AI.

The Death Of A Fictional Character

     I’m in a fictional slump just now, so I’ve retreated from writing fiction to thinking about its necessities. My own tales always originate with a character conception. I’ve never been able to craft a story without such a character in mind at the outset. He and his needs and conflicts must come first.

     That key character must be someone plausible enough that were you to meet him, you wouldn’t take him for anything but a human, even if he should turn out to be way, way off the axis of the Bell Curve in some regard. I have to care about that character, as well. No matter what fate awaits him, I want him to live well and be happy… even if I birthed him intending to kill him.

     Just what is it that makes a writer care about one of his characters? A slew of other writers have told me that they agonize over the need to kill a character. I share that with them. I hope I share it with my readers. Apparently, now and then I do. You wouldn’t believe the amount of angry email I’ve received over the “deaths” of several characters.

     I’ve written heroes: Louis Redmond, Armand Morelon, Larry Sokoloff, and others who possess above-average abilities and characters. I killed two of those characters. I’ve also written victims: Christine D’Alessandro, Teresza Chistyakowski, Fountain, and so on. I killed two of those characters, as well. Now and then I’ve wondered which kind of character demise affects the reader more powerfully.

     I suppose it depends on how much appeal the character has for the reader – to which kind of character the reader bonds more readily.

     Some readers look for heroes to admire because they see themselves as heroes, or yearn to become heroes. Some others might sympathize more with victims, out of the sense that their lives and surroundings have treated them badly. The degree to which the reader bonds with a character determines the impact of the character’s death. If the reader bonds with none of your characters – possibly because he’s just looking for a few hours’ diversion from his mundane cares – will their deaths affect him at all?

     I even kill characters in my romances. Three of those four books are responsible for a total of nine character deaths: three heroes, three villains, and three Supporting Cast figures. The bloodshed made my “alpha reader” Amy ask whether I’d decided to take a page from George R. R. Martin.

     What about fictional villains? I’ve killed a few of those. I doubt my readers identified with any of them, but I hope they took satisfaction in their deaths. Nevertheless, I have to admit that killing them off took as much out of me as the deaths of any of my heroes or victims. They, too, were the children of my mind. No storyteller kills his children dispassionately. It boggles my mind that Shakespeare (whoever he was) survived killing so many of his characters, especially the Grand Guignol scene at the end of Hamlet.

     My colleagues in the storytelling trade: Tell us about your “body count.” Tell us which of your characters was hardest to kill, and why. And tell us, if you’ve received relevant feedback from your readers, how they reacted to that litter of corpses. If you’ll pardon the choice of words, it’s vital information!