Yay, 2013! Best Year Ever! (No, I'm NOT Being Sarcastic!)

I found this article pretty compelling...

http://thinkprogress.org/security/2013/12/11/3036671/2013-certainly-year-human-history/

Between the brutal civil war in Syria, the [US] government shutdown and all of the deadly dysfunction it represents, the NSA spying revelations, and massive inequality, it’d be easy to for you to enter 2014 thinking the last year has been an awful one.
But you’d be wrong. We have every reason to believe that 2013 was, in fact, the best year on the planet for humankind.

Click to expand...

They go on to cite life expectancy, decreased abject poverty, relative lack of war, falling rates of murder and other violent crimes, and less sexism/racism/discrimination. I'd say it's more of a continuing trend than a '2013 was an anomaly', but that's good news, too! We can look forward to the world being even BETTER in 2014!