McClatchy’s Tim Johnson reports that despite the Lunar New Year celebrations, denizens of Hong Kong fear that the Year of the Ox will be gored.

… there is unsettling news in Hong Kong, where residents set aside their quest for money briefly to consult the feng shui masters. Not good news.

A politician picked a “fortune stick” in an annual Taoist ceremony predicting how prosperous the year ahead will be, and he pulled out the worst possible number — 27.

According to this Deutsche Presse-Agentur report, feng shui masters in Hong Kong said the fortune stick meant the former colony faced a turbulent and unsettled year with possible conflicts between the government and people.

The Learning Cantonese blog goes on to explain the origin of the bad mojo, noting that they entrusted the local version of Rod Blagojevich to draw the fortune stick:

Nobody I know in Hong Kong is rending their garments in despair over the very, very bad Chinese fortune stick drawn by Lau Wong Fat at Che Gung temple in Shatin last Tuesday.

My buddy, Ah Wong, in fact, is laughing. “What did they expect? The most important ritual of the Chinese New Year for the Hong Kong Government, and who do they send to kau chim? A guy who’s under investigation by the ICAC!”

Really, Ah Wong has a point. If I were sending a proxy to pull the stick that determined my fortune for the forthcoming year—pulling it, mind you, in front of the entire assembled Hong Kong media corps—I certainly would hesitate before sending the shifty, scandal-ridden “Uncle” Lau, head of the clannish, secretive and powerful village chief’s association, the Heung Yee Kuk.

One of my high school history textbooks went to great lengths to shoot down communism as it was explaining it. The authors cited a large middle class, such as in the US, as a bulwark against the class struggle predicted by Marx and Engels. I guess that argument stuck with me, and over the years I have tended to find comfort in our prosperous middle class as a stabilizing influence in our political culture.

But the middle class comes with a hefty environmental price tag.

If you listen to Julian Darley, Richard Heinberg or any of many academic doomsayers, it is the large, comfortable middle classes of the developed world and the growing middle classes in Asia that are the primary culprits in both energy depletion and climate change. Not the rich, because there aren't enough of them to make a difference, not the teeming millions of poor because they don't individually own or consume all that much, but the middle class with their long SUV commutes to large, exurban houses stocked with globally manufactured possessions.

And the middle classes are themselves an economic burden.

If you believe Sharon Astyk, the middle class bears on a substantial economic foundation of newly-industrialized third world workers. Some of the middle class live off the rich or other middle class workers, but by and large it is the huge numbers of new buyers at the bottom that raise the pyramid of wealth for everyone. If enough of those workers lose their jobs, return to subsistence agriculture, or fall prey to some political disaster, there will be fewer customers to support the global middle class.

So the paradox is that a large middle class is a contented, reliable population for a nation, but a danger to the entire planet's health and prosperity. Even more than general population reduction, I expect to see a reduction in middle class populations worldwide.

Will the future be a grim exercise in Dickensian class struggle, as those who have struggle to keep from joining those who no longer have? Or will people manage to be happy with less? 

Andrew Sullivan likes this graphic novel, which is all well and good. What’s funny to me is that one of the reporters looks like Carl Kolchak, played irascibly by Darren McGavin in The Night Stalker.

08: A Graphic Diary of the Campaign Trail (Paperback)

From a sequel to Not Quite What I Was Planning, which I hadn’t heard about, another collection of six word stories.

I loved the idea of you. — Audrey Adu-Appiah

Tomorrow, maybe, I’ll sell the ring. — Matt Tanner

He posted our sex tape online. — Lauran Strait

Heartbroken, until the bitch finally died. — Christopher Moore

It hurts even worse in French. — Derek Pollard

Inevitably, his obituary didn’t mention me. — R. Sue Dodea

I thought we had more time. — Joe Hill

Wonder-filled, and never a dull torment. — Diane Ackerman

He is married. I am not. — Hope Truhart

She said she liked my penis. — Chip Rowe

We’ll break up before this prints. — Porochista Khakpour

Everyone’s crazy except you and me. — Mark Fraunfelder

What once were two, are one. — George Saunders

Some of you may want to write these after you’re done with e-harmony.

Some fellow made this Gigapan image with 220 images taken from the north press platform during President Obama’s inaugural address. The final image size is 59,783 X 24,658 pixels or 1,474 megapixels. You can zoom in on Denzel Washington, Clarence Thomas (taking a snooze) and a lot of ordinary people watching the speech.

You can order prints, so Obamemorabilia continues.

They’re currently experiencing a large number of users, though.

Water: The hidden cost of your food and drink (slideshow)

“We are facing a crisis of running out of sustainably managed water,” says Peter Gleick, the author of the sixth edition of the World Water report by California’s Pacific Institute. Despite human demand accounting for over 50% of the world’s accessible freshwater, the report warns that billions of people still lack access to basic water services. Developing countries, it notes, will suffer worst from peak water because of supply problems exacerbated by flooding, drought and water pollution. Developed countries won’t be entirely spared though, as Peter Preston discovered in Spain last year.

The World Water report continues by singling out China as a country in danger of water stress because of its inefficient water use and large projects such as the Three Gorges Dam scheme. “[Chinese] Rivers and lakes are dead and dying, groundwater aquifers are overpumped, uncounted species of aquatic life have been driven to extinction, and direct adverse impacts on both human and ecosystem health are widespread and growing,” warns Gleick.

One of the commenters in the Times Online version of this article couldn’t fathom that we could live on a water planet, yet have water problems. Others note that the water used in producing food is not lost forever.

But while water that we use in agriculture, manufacturing, etc. may be eventually returned to the water cycle, it will not be immediately available for an increasing population if we continue using more and more of it. Another graphic illustration of water use (pdf) shows a dramatic increase in water use by Asia. Once more, increasing population, particularly an increasing middle class, is a major part of the problem.