You can’t convince me that life (especially human life) on this planet is not on a downward spiral. The following disturbing news clips are from Harper’s Magazine Yearly Review.

Not only are we screwing with other lives on this planet….:

Exposure to antidepressants in the ocean was making shrimp suicidal, and female snails exposed to the chemical TBT were growing penises from their heads. A pair of swans stunned staff at a British wildfowl sanctuary by becoming only the second couple in 40 years to divorce. Seventy-five starlings fell from the sky in Somerset, England, and 10,000 birds were trapped in the twin beams of light projected up from the World Trade Center site, dazzled and unable to return to their migratory paths.

…we are screwing up our own:

A three-year-old girl in South Korea died of starvation while her parents played a child-rearing game online, a Kentucky man was charged with wanton endangerment after he got drunk and put his five-week-old son to bed in an oven, and a Georgia mother punished her 12-year-old son for his bad grades by forcing him to hammer to death his pet hamster. The body of a registered Japanese centenarian was found in her son’s backpack. A video surfaced of an Indonesian two-year-old smoking and propelling himself around on a toy truck because he is too out of shape to toddle.

And here in America, where it’s “don’t think, don’t care”:

“Not to be funny about it,” JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon told the FCIC, “but my daughter asked me… ‘What’s the financial crisis,’ and I said, ‘Well, it’s something that happens every five to seven years.'”

The Texas State Board of Education voted to revise its social-studies curriculum, mandating that the U.S. government should not be called “democratic,”

A Texas newborn with a heart defect was denied health insurance because of his pre-existing condition.

There’s even more such frightening 2010 news bits at the above link to Harper’s.

And you think 2011 is going to be any better for the likes of us?