I'm finding it a bit hard to get fired-up about what to expect in the Year of the Pig. No disrespect to the Pig sign itself, you understand, or to the millions of honest, industrious souls, including my wife and father-in-law, who happen to be Pig people.

And no hard feelings, either, towards all the feng shui masters, geomancers and other such pundits who grow fat, or should I say fatt , on issuing predictions and pronouncements at times like this for the edification of true believers.

It's just that I happen to be highly suspicious of superstitions. I've also observed that whatever lunar sign is supposed to be influencing events in any 12-month period, the world seems as loony-tunes as ever, and as lousy as always with people hell-bent on their own comfort, convenience, gratification, aggrandisement at everybody else's expense.

In other words, whether it's astrologically the Year of the Rat, Ox, Tiger, Rabbit, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Goat, Monkey, Rooster, Dog or Pig, there's an astronomical number of reasons why every year can also be seen as the Year of the Hog.

Most obviously, of course, the Road Hog, the sub-species that drives us to distraction every day of every year. They travel like a bat out of hell, then tailgate, cut in or overtake via the emergency lane if we're so inconsiderate as to impede their progress; or else slowly weave from side to side while conversing or SMS-ing on the phone; change lanes and turn without a thought of signaling; sit resolutely in the passing lane, oblivious to anyone else's presence; pull out from side streets without pausing or even looking; run a red light if it takse too long to change; U-turn at 'No U turn' signs; and go the wrong way down one-way streets.

As heedless and potentially homicidal as road hogs are when in motion, they're just as big a menace when stationary. They park on corners or leave vehicles sticking out at odd angles; double-park the rest of us in or stop and block traffic lanes, especially in front of schools, mosques and LRT stations on busy main roads.

One consolation is that road hogs, especially those riding motorcycles erratically and without helmets, are by definition a dying breed. But unfortunately they take far too many of the rest of us with them.

The Malaysian traffic-safety authorities claim they're working hard to reduce the yearly toll - the 6,000 or so dead, many times that number injured or crippled and billions of ringgit in vehicle repairs every year - but it's hard to see the difference they're making.

Snouts in trough

Which brings us to another sub-species of hog - police who add to the dangers and delays on the road with traffic-clogging and often dangerously-placed road blocks but are rarely visible on patrol to either deter offenders or catch them in the act; politicians revving-up Mat Rempit with promises of vroomier new motorcycles for serving as vigilantes; and municipal officials many of whom are apparently too busy hogging public space for themselves or copping kickbacks for closing their eyes to infractions against construction, zoning, licensing, health and other regulations to be bothered with such trivia as enforcing the rules for safe, sensible parking.

And onward and upward the hoggery thrives. From Ah Long preying with impunity on the poor, weak and desperate, through state officials with their snouts in the contractual and natural resources trough, to Federal bigwigs and their fat-cat cronies who preside over and suck up the lion's share of this swill of patronage, predation and parasitism. These potentates also contrive to hog all the news media, so they can tell the populace as many porkies about the situation as they please.

And that's just in Malaysia, which, though sinking steadily lower every year on the Transparency International Corruption Perception Index, still manages, astonishingly enough, to be less hoggish than more than 100 other countries.

Speaking of the world at large, the 'global village envisaged by the Canadian media guru Marshall McLuhan back in the 1960s looks half a century later more like a case of global pillage.

The US, which with around 5 percent of the world's population accounts for 30 percent of the world's energy consumption and owns 30 percent of the planet's wealth, still pressures poor countries for 'free trade' while paying fortunes in subsidies to its own arms manufacturers and farmers.

Japan, with a mere 1 or 2 percent of the world's population, gobbles down 30 percent of the world's seafood catch, and yet still hungers so mightily to add whales to its menu that it bribes small needy and greedy nations to vote with it at meetings of the International Whaling Commission.

And on the other end of the global scale, the 'Dear Leader' of North Korea, having, like his father before him, enslaved and starved the people of his backward, bankrupt pariah state, now uses the threat of nuclear weapons to extort from the South and the West the oil and cash he desperately needs to sustain the lamentable public status quo and support his personal champagne-and-caviar lifestyle.

With greed of this magnitude prevailing, it's hardly any wonder that everywhere, at every level from international to national to personal, the rich are getting richer and the poor keep getting poorer.

Though the long-impoverished citizens of the so-called 'People's Republic' of China, if still kept as dirt-poor as ever in political, spiritual and personal freedoms by a party that continues to swinishly hog all the power, have finally achieved some measure of economic liberation.

So it's with at least some sense of optimism that we can wish our Chinese and other friends and colleagues of all 12 signs of the Sino-zodiac a happy, healthy and prosperous Year of the Fire Pig.

And at the same time, hope for as miserable a year as possible for hogs of every kind, everywhere.