Democracy, Cake and Covert Agents

Today, I attended an event where a guy named Lynn spoke. That's not so much important to this story as it is an odd name for a large, bald man. Anyway, I'm not sure what the main point of his remarks were, but he has a really interesting background as a political consultant and now a strategic management consultant. And he gave us some really striking pieces of information about our democracy, the good and the bad. Take this, for example:

If there were only 10 people in America:

3 of them aren't registered to vote.

Of the remaining 7, only half will show up to vote (on a really, really good day)

That means only 3.5 people are voting.

And of those 3.5, we can assume that just over half of them voted for the person who won the election.

Which means that only about 2.1 people actually want to follow the elected leader.

The saddest part of that story is that it's not far from the truth. That's just plain pathetic. Not so much a democracy as a democrazy.

In other news, I've been trying to keep myself to less than 20 Weight Watcher points a day, in order to stay slim for the ho-ish dress for Saturday's prom. But I could really go for some cake right about now.

Last note of the night -- I went to a career info session for the CIA earlier this week. One of the CIA employees had been a covert agent for more than 20 years in the field. He was pretty cool but kinda freaked me out with the way he kept scanning the audience when he wasn't talking. And he kept moving around the room. I found myself wondering how many of our country's secrets he has in his head. And then I started wondering what the CIA knows about me. And then the recruiter started telling us what NOT to do if you want a job with the CIA -- the list included illegal drugs, criminal activity, and illegally downloading music. Honest to god. She actually said illegally downloading music and included it as a bullet on her powerpoint slide. I kinda feel like that automtically eliminates 80% of the college student population.

By the way, the CIA has posted its very own personality test. I've been diagnosed as a Curious Adventurer.

I think I'll go watch an episode of ALIAS now.