What was the decade for?
[I'm a week late joining this discussion, but think the idea is worth recording for my own memory if nothing else....]

What was the Big Theme of the previous decade?

Toto.

This was the decade when little dogs pulled back the curtains on all sorts of crooked Wizards, the decade when vigilantes punctured the balloons and bubbles of the pompous Professionals, showing the latter as complete miserable frauds, charlatans and criminals.

Like any good story, the Toto theme began with a bang, went on to develop details, and ended with a fine climax.

It began with 9/11, which was a dual example of Toto-ism. The 19 Arabs showed that a handful of men armed with pocket knives could defeat the military might of the "greatest power on Earth". All of the facilities we'd been building over the years, all the trillions of dollars that went into NORAD and radar and jets and so on, all for naught. And then one of the Arab weapons was stopped by counter-vigilantes, without any help at all from the government.

Through most of the decade, professional journalists were brought down by bloggers, professional scientists were corrected by amateur statisticians. Newspapers are deservedly dying, dishonestly earned reputations are in shreds.

The absurdity of federal immigration policy, cheerfully supported by both political parties for their own reasons, was exposed by the Minutemen who decided to do the job of patrolling the border honestly.

In 2008, the vast mortgage bubble was punctured by a few people demanding their money. These don't quite fit the pattern because they were very big dogs ... but they were certainly a handful of players, demonstrating that there were no "fundamentals" in the economy at all, let alone "sound fundamentals". We still don't know what really happened there; for some reason bloggers haven't been able to pull back the curtains on the Wall Street Mafia. So this is an unfinished puncture, and the Mafia continues to build new bubbles with the full collaboration of Goldman Sachs dba "US Government".

Early in 2009, infanticide specialist George Tiller was taken out by a vigilante, after killing thousands of kids, violating state and federal laws with no punishment for more than 30 years.

Finally, at the very end of 2009 we had the mass murder by Nidal Hasan and the near-repeat of 9/11 by Abdul bin Underpants (again stopped by a brave counter-vigilante), showing that the vast military power of this unfortunate land still hasn't learned one fucking thing. Or is still faithfully collaborating with the enemy, take your pick. Underbomber was such a blatant failure that even the professional "journalists" are starting to ask the right questions.

Best of all we had the whistle-blower in the British Climate Gang, who finally forced the professional "journalists" and the courts to pay attention to the largest crime in history. This has dropped under the radar for now, but under the surface legal actions are starting to grind: the Carbon Cult witch doctors are receiving court orders to hand over their records, and predatory lawyers are looking for more whistle-blowers so they can profit from a federal grant-fraud reward program. The latter, though distasteful, may be the most effective way to bring down this gang of megathieves and genocidists.
  ¶ 6:15 AM