Welcome to The Faster Times update. In today's edition, we bring you refugees, the State of the Union's real effect, MTV's Skins, The Rite, super computers, and inside Obama's situation room. Enjoy!

Between Jan. 20 and 22nd, more than 1,400 people — refugees from Georgia’s politico-ethnic conflicts of the last two decades — were evicted from the capital, Tbilisi. This time, however, they were not forced from their homes by a rebel uprising or a rolling Russian army, but by the the police of their own government.

I approached the former student dormitory of the Medical Institute at 25 Kazbegi St. at about 1 p.m. on January 20.

We are hours away from the start of the President’s State of the Union address. I haven’t flipped cable news on this morning, but my hunch is that the airwaves are filled with pundits and prognosticators telling us What It All Means and what the President absolutely must do. Which, coincidentally, also happens to be whatever policy position is most important to that particular pundit.

I hate to be the one to break it all of you, but the State of the Union doesn’t really matter.

My feeling on MTV’s adaptation of Skins is well documented, and I doubt my reaction will be much different when I recap the next episode later tonight. And yet I haven’t relished the growing controversy over the show. The Parents Television Council, or PTC, has levied complaints of child pornography against the series, which depicts actual teenagers, rather than 20-somethings pretending to be teenagers, engaging in elicit behavior like sex and drugs.

There’s some kind of strange physics going on in “The Rite.” Not in the sense that it’s a movie about demonic possession, and therefore necessarily inclined to simulate a destabilization of our natural laws, although that’s true too. No, this is something to do with the mechanics of star power. This is a film that takes Anthony Hopkins, Rutger Hauer and Ciarán Hinds, three eminently watchable actors, and somehow combines them in a way that renders them all completely boring. How does a reliable trifecta of charisma just spontaneously cancel itself out? This truly is the Devil’s work.

Last month IBM announced a big project in Rhode Island, and at first I just skimmed over the announcement as one of a dozen or so releases about the company’s various “smart” endeavors. But on a closer look, the project looks a lot like a model for collaboration that other states should pay attention to, particularly as they’re trying to tackle everything from climate change to healthcare with fewer resources than ever.

Last August, President Obama’s national security advisers, including Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Attorney General Eric Holder and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, met in the White House situation room to decide whether and how to go forward with trials for some Guantanamo prisoners.