Seven Warnings, No Date and No Place

On September 30 SETN (Sanlih E-Television News) published a forecast by the Taiwanese fortune-telling practitioner Liao Mei-ran covering the last three months of 2026, and within a day or two it had been picked up by Mirror Media, Yahoo Taiwan and 4gTV. The year, she said, is a year in which the sky leaks, and she set out seven categories of trouble to expect before it closes: floods, fires and shipwrecks; earthquakes, landslides and collapsing ground; influenza and new viruses; sudden cardiac death; election tempers running badly out of control; broken partnerships, in business and in love; and food shortage with sharp price swings. Her summary of the year was four phrases:

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A year the sky leaks. Turmoil without end. Abundant water, soft earth. Trouble and disorder.

The seven items share a shape

Read as a set rather than one at a time, something becomes visible that is easy to miss. Not one of the seven names a place. Not one names a date. Not one names a size. Between October 1 and December 31, somewhere on a planet of eight billion people, there will be a flood, an earthquake, a landslide, a wave of influenza, sudden cardiac deaths, an election that turns ugly, a great many breakups, and food prices that move. There is no world in which that list comes back false. It is not a forecast of the quarter so much as a description of one.

This is worth putting carefully, because it is not an accusation of dishonesty and we do not intend one. A practitioner writing for a news site is not handing in a falsifiable research protocol, and the categories she picked are the ones people are actually frightened of, which is a reasonable thing for a fortune-teller to address. The difficulty is narrower and it is structural: a claim built this way carries no information. It cannot distinguish 2026 from 2025, or from 1998. Whatever happens, it was foretold, and that is the property of the sentence rather than a fact about the year.

What the systems underneath actually commit to

The traditions being drawn on here are considerably more specific than the list is, and this is where we think the real objection lies. Take Flying Star, which is the layer that speaks about years and directions at all. We ran 2026 through this site's own code rather than quoting a chart from memory, because that is the only version of this we would defend. The solar year 2026 is a Yang Fire Horse year: a yang fire stem sitting on the Horse, which is itself a fire branch. The year falls in Period 9, its annual center star is 1, and the nine stars distribute from there — which puts the 5 Yellow, the earth star the tradition treats as the one to leave undisturbed, in the South palace for the whole solar year, with the 2 Black in the Northwest.

That is a different kind of sentence from any of the seven. It names one sector out of nine. It is the same answer for every person who computes it, in Taipei or in Toronto, which means two practitioners can disagree and find out which of them made the arithmetic error. Most importantly it can be wrong: shift the period or the center star by one and the whole chart rotates, and the published chart for 2026 would no longer match. The claim has edges. That is not a smaller claim than seven calamities — it is the only kind of claim that can be checked at all.

The same holds further down. Date selection names a specific day and says what that day is and is not fit for, and the reasoning is a chain of stated rules you can walk back. Eight Mansions gives a particular person four auspicious directions out of eight, derived from a birth year, and anyone with the same birth year and recorded gender gets the same four. None of these predict the news. All of them are falsifiable in the only sense that matters for a traditional art: given the inputs, the method either produces the stated output or it does not, and two people working honestly will converge.

The one item with a number on it

In July the same practitioner published a forecast for the second half of 2026, reported then as a year of fire calamity, with ten warnings instead of seven. Nine of the ten had the shape described above. One did not: the New Taiwan dollar reaching 1:34 against the US dollar. That one names a quantity, so it can be checked, and it can embarrass the person who said it. We think it is no coincidence that it is also the only item in either list that a reader could do anything with. A number is a commitment.

The two descriptions of the same year are also worth a sentence, because they lead with opposite elements: fire in July, abundant water and soft earth in September. The fire reading has an obvious footing, and we will say so: Yang Fire Horse is fire stem over fire branch, and a year doubled in fire is exactly the sort of thing the stem-branch cycle is read for. Where the abundant water comes from is not stated in either report. Neither piece cites a stem, a branch, an annual star or a classical rule; the September one offers that the sky this year is like a hole. We are not claiming the reading has no derivation behind it — practitioners routinely hold more than they print. We are saying that a reader cannot check it, and on this site that is the whole of the complaint.

Our honest read

A seasonal warning list is not a scandal and we would not want it treated as one. People read these in October because the year is ending, the news is bad, and a practitioner naming the fears out loud is doing something a reader finds useful. Four of the seven — watch your heart, expect prices to move, separate from a failing partnership calmly, be careful near water and unstable ground — are ordinary good advice that happens to be wearing metaphysical clothing. Advice does not have to be derived from a chart to be worth following.

What we would not do is call it a reading. A reading, in any of these systems, is a derivation: here are the inputs, here is the rule, here is the output, and here is the step at which you may tell me I am wrong. The forecast above has no such step. The chart on this page does — the 5 Yellow is in the South in 2026 or it is not, and anybody can run the numbers and say so. That is a much smaller statement than seven calamities, and it is worth considerably more, because it is the only one of the two that could have come out differently.