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TIME magazine’s clock must have stopped.

We are living in one of the most amazing times in the history of humanity, and yet America’s foremost popular news magazine is so appallingly out of touch that the list below is all they can come up with for their memorable person of the year. The top vote getters in TIME’s annual popularity contest of this past year aren’t very memorable. The chance of any of these people being remembered by historians in 500 years for what they did last year is near nil.

Compare these people to Columbus, who in 1492 discovered a New World, or Francis Drake, who in 1580 returned to England with treasure and was the first captain to successfully navigate his ship around the world, or Neil Armstrong, the first person to set foot on the Moon in 1969. Or Craig Venter, who first created a living thing from simple chemicals in 2010. Those are memorable things which will be remembered. But look at what TIME came up with for this year. ??? It isn’t because nothing happened. Plenty of memorable things happened this last year! They just didn’t look.

TIME’s pathetic list of memorable event-makers.

1    Recep Tayyip Erdogan    122913 Turkey’s Prime Minister.
2    Lionel Messi    74406 A great soccer player.
3    The 99%    61353 Didn’t do anything memorable.
4    Anonymous    34880 That is a joke!!! ???
5    Steve Jobs    30035 Wonderful electronics, mostly years earlier.
6    Arab Youth Protesters    23249 Great for them.
7    Fukushima 50    15622 Self-sacrifice a to desperate situation.
8    SEAL Team 6    12094 Just doing their job. Good work!
9    Ai Weiwei    12058 A Chinese political artist.
10    Gabrielle Giffords    11541 A heroic struggle against injury
11    Barack Obama    11163 A HOPE unfulfilled. Sorry.
12    Warren Buffett    8851 A wise man keeps making money.
13    Hillary Clinton    6217 It is hard to judge until much later.
14    The 1%    5286 They do what everyone wants to do, but better.
15    Kate Middleton    5133 Marries into hereditary wealth.
16    Elizabeth Warren    5007 Running for Mass. Senate seat.
17    Angela Merkel    4908 Guides Germany and Europe skillfully.
18    Casey Anthony    4266 Beat murder of her baby rap.
19    Charlie Sheen    3893 An actor with problems.
20    Herman Cain    2988 A horny businessman with aspirations.
21    Admiral Mike Mullen    2445 “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” revisions.
22    Kim Kardashian    1902 A pretty thing to watch.
23    Silvio Berlusconi    1786 Italian Primer leaves office.
24    Nicolas Sarkozy    1642 Goading painful French austerity.
25    Dominique Strauss-Kahn    1155 Sex scandal kills aspirations.
26    Mitt Romney    1064 US Presidential hopeful.
27    Paul Ryan    918 Congressman pushes for US deficit reduction.
28    Michele Bachmann    869 US Presidential hopeful.
29    Eric Cantor    838 Top Rep. to lower taxes and cut spending.
30    Rupert Murdoch    684 Media mogul in hot water.
31    Reed Hastings    441 Backtracked on unpopular Netflix change.
TOTAL VOTES    469607

TIME focuses its attention on the trivial.

These are all fine people and I would probably like every one of them for a personal acquaintance, but just marrying into a royal family doesn’t make a fine young woman into a memorable world-class influence on humanity. Over the years perhaps Kate will have a real influence, but not this last year. It is like Obama becoming the Person of the Year just for getting elected, which is obvious nonsense; it is doing something with the power granted to him that should make him into a history making person, and he may have hoped to do that but he didn’t. Someone was going to be elected, and almost always someone marries the various royals, but those things in themselves aren’t very important to humanity.

The great Steve Jobs was too sick to work.

Steve Jobs is a much more influential person because he improved the user interface between microchips and humanity and that made all our lives better. But, he was an artist standing on the visible shoulders of a huge industry. If that industry didn’t exist he would probably have found other outlets for his talents, but possibly not, and possibly he would have gone to jail for the pranks that he was pulling when I met him back in the late 60s. Even in failing health Steve Jobs is the top guy on this pitiful list.

There have been wondrous things happen this year, and come January 1st the Probaway – Person of the Year will be posted. Sorry Steve!