1. Is This What Turns You On?

2. American Media Step Up Anti-Russian Propaganda

3. Pakistan After Musharraf

4. If Obama Loses...

5. Musharraf Became Busharraf

6. Could Clinton Still Be VP?

The Secret of a Sexual Attraction

Phwoar! Look at the symmetries on that! Scientists using hi-tech body scanners have discovered that people with more symmetrical bodies are more attractive to the opposite sex.

The research backs up previous findings that symmetrically proportioned faces are more attractive and suggests that our brains are hard-wired to find symmetry sexy in a potential partner.

In our evolutionary past, symmetry may have been an honest signal of flawless development and health.

Audio: Dr William Brown on why symmetry is sexy

"It is widely believed that human beings are attracted to one another as a result of genotypic and phenotypic quality – in other words, their prospect as a mate who will yield higher quality offspring for the chooser," said Dr William Brown, an evolutionary psychologist at Brunel University who led the study.

"Your body proportions, shape and stature are signals that conspicuously advertise your good development or health and therefore the degree to which you are a desirable reproductive partner. In many species fewer departures from perfect symmetry are associated with good development, health and reproductive success."

The theory is that disturbances in the womb, infections, poor nutrition and genetic flaws all increase your degree of asymmetry and so good proportions are an honest indication of healthy development and hence a partner's ability to produce healthy children.

Brown's team asked 40 men and 37 women to strip down to their underwear and enter a 24-camera body scanner. The device rapidly takes hundreds of measurements of the subject's body allowing the researchers to build up a 3D image. They also calculated a composite measure of symmetry from the hundreds of minute symmetry differences recorded by the cameras.

The team showed each of these images to 87 evaluators who rated them for attractiveness.

The researchers were particularly interested in how body asymmetry would affect the ratings, so to avoid adding another factor to the evaluators' decision, the team presented each image with the head of the subject removed.

The evaluators preferred more symmetrical body shapes in both men and women. "They are choosing individuals who would have evidence for good development which means that maybe their offspring would be more healthy and have good development as well," said Brown.

American Media Step Up Anti-Russian Propaganda

The propaganda barrage directed largely at US public opinion continues in the American media. On Sunday and Monday there were reports of Russian forces digging in or even expanding their grip on parts of Georgia in deliberate defiance of the ceasefire agreement, which calls for Russian troops to withdraw back to the borders of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

The actual situation on the ground is far more complex than the picture presented on US television screens, with indications that most Russian troops have left Gori, the central Georgian city that served as the military base for Georgian forces in the attack on South Ossetia August 7-8 that triggered the crisis.

The US television network ABC reported Monday on its web site, “One indication that some Russians may have been pulled back was a Georgian army barracks in Gori which was full of Russian soldiers on Sunday, but was nearly deserted today except for a lone tank standing guard.”

While some Russian tanks left Gori on the road towards Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, and crashed through a blockade of Georgian police cars, they then veered off to the north, taking a road that would bring them back to the Russian side of the Caucasus Mountains.

Pakistan After Musharraf: How Long Before the Military is Back in Control?

Musharraf’s departure will highlight the problems that confront the country, which is in the grip of a food and power crisis that is creating severe problems in every city.

Inflation is out of control and was approaching the 15 percent mark in May 2008. Gas (used for cooking in many homes) prices have risen by 30 percent.

Wheat, the staple diet of most people has seen a 20 percent price hike since November 2007 and while the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organisation admits that the world's food stocks are at record lows there is an additional problem in Pakistan.

Too much wheat is being smuggled into Afghanistan to serve the needs of the NATO armies.

The poor are the worst hit, but middle-class families are also affected and according to a June 2008 survey, 86 percent of Pakistanis find it increasingly difficult to afford flour on a daily basis, for which they blame their own new government.

Other problems persist. The politicians are weak and remain divided on the restoration of the judges sacked by Musharraf. The Chief Justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, is the most respected person in the country.

Zardari is reluctant to see him back at the head of the Supreme Court. A possible compromise might be to offer him the Presidency. It would certainly unite the country for a short time.

Over the last fifty years the US has worked mainly with the Pakistan Army. This has been its preferred instrument. Nothing has changed. How long before the military is back at the helm?

If Obama Loses...

Hubris and overreach could play a role in a hypothetical Obama defeat, with voters getting turned off by the quasi-millennial aspects of the Obama ascendancy.

This includes an oration before 200,000 Germans and an acceptance speech to be delivered to 70,000 chanting Democrats in a Denver football stadium that will have to do since Mount Sinai is unavailable.

You don't have to be a Republican to think it's more than a little over the top.

Obama fatigue could factor into a possible Obama defeat as millions of Americans get tired of seeing Obama's face and hearing his measured baritone "eloquence" over and over and over again.

We are now technically into the fifth year of the Obama phenomenon, launched during the Democratic National Convention in late July of 2004.

Obama is over-exposed at this point, even as most Americans (including many of his supporters) know amazingly little about his actual public record and world view.

A recent Pew poll finds that nearly half (48 percent) U.S. voters say that they "have been hearing too much about Obama lately." Just barely more than a quarter (26 percent) of Pew's respondents said they had heard too much about McCain.

Team Obama has recently demonstrated some remarkably controlling and prickly behavior towards the press.

This could be a big mistake. If it isn't more careful about ruffling dominant media egos, the Obama camp could do significant damage to the "Obama Love" proffered by a corporate media that retains a soft spot for the supposed "maverick" McCain.

As Gabriel Sherman noted in The New Republic in late July, "Reporters are grumbling more and more that the campaign is acting like the Prom Queen.

They gripe that it is ‘arrogant' and ‘control[ling],' and the campaign's own belief that Obama is poised to make history isn't endearing, either.

The press certainly helped Obama get so far so fast; the question is, how far can he get if his campaign alienates them?"

Instead of Rebuilding Pakistan, Musharraf Made Matters Worse

Musharraf's departure from the political stage is a victory for the people of Pakistan.

There are few times that the colluders and collaborators who helped run the shadowy establishment in Pakistan are prepared to slink away quietly leaving democrats in charge.

Yet Musharraf has decided to do just that – and the world is unlikely to thank him.

Despite nine years of Musharraf's "enlightened moderation" Pakistan has not been transformed. His alliance with the United States might have suited Washington but it enraged and radicalised large sections of Pakistani society.

In a poll earlier this year a third of Pakistanis said they had a positive view of al-Qaida – twice as many as those who responded positively about the United States.

Half of the people questioned believed the United States was the country's "greatest threat".

There's little doubt that Islamic radicalism in Pakistan has spread during Musharraf's time in power. This has left a military that is unable to control generation of Islamic radicals and an intelligence agency with an even greater appetite to control domestic politics.

But such things are a minority pursuit. The real problems begin with the ideas – those of victimhood and overt militarism – used to glue Pakistan together.

Could Clinton Still Be VP?

While never the most subtle bunch, Mrs. Clinton and her aides have maintained a low profile this summer, given that campaigning outright for the vice presidency has rarely paid off.

Recently, as it became clear that Mr. Obama was nearing his choice, Mrs. Clinton’s aides stopped talking publicly about the vice presidency altogether.

Mr. Obama has given little indication that he is preparing to pick her — even though, her supporters note, she could help him in swing states and with key blocs of voters, and she could help raise millions of dollars.

One donor to Mrs. Clinton attended a recent Obama fund-raiser in New York that netted about $500,000; if Mrs. Clinton had been the headliner, the donor wagered, it would have reaped $1 million.Some Democrats do not rule out the possibility that Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton could be playing it supercool, only to increase the splash of seeing Mr. Obama, the junior senator from Illinois, reach out to his old bête noire, Mrs. Clinton, the junior senator from New York, to become the first black man and the first woman to seek the White House as nominees.

“If he determines that Hillary after all is the best choice to help him to win and to govern,” said Dan Gerstein, a Democratic consultant in New York, “they are capable of pulling off what would be the greatest head fake in American political history.”

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