Gay marriage might be 600 years old

“Civil unions between male couples existed around 600 years ago in medieval Europe, a historian now says.
Historical evidence, including legal documents and gravesites, can be interpreted as supporting the prevalence of homosexual relationships hundreds of years ago, said Allan Tulchin of Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania.
If accurate, the results indicate socially sanctioned same-sex unions are nothing new, nor were they taboo in the past.”
MSNBC

At a first glance the could apply to anyone but if they’re based around what women have been bad at doing, they’re worth posting. Seven Rules for Women in IT

1. Expand your frame of reference. Get technology experience in a variety of areas, such as sales, consulting, customer service and operations.
2. Work for standouts. Work with name-brand companies or on important, high-impact projects.
3. Choose projects with weight. Don’t work solely in support roles or the “people” aspects of projects. Work on at least one project that is operationally oriented.
4. Speak clearly and with integrity. On risky or troubled projects, break through political correctness and be forthright.
5. Soften the edges. Be hard-charging and results-oriented, but also develop people skills and a relationship orientation.
6. Raise your own flag. Publicize your team’s successes.
7. Reflect. Assess your leadership qualities, style, values and what you want your career to look like.

What you learn when you read the Daily Mail for a month

Most striking of all, a few days before the end of the experiment I realised that I had stopped worrying about global warming. For the Mail, it barely exists an issue – and certainly not as something to frighten us with – and this, surely, is the secret of the paper’s success. Phantom menaces are given prominence over real ones. The anger it stirs requires no action, no moral or intellectual effort, but simply confirms existing prejudices. By painting the world as a dystopia, we cling to our own cosy certainties.

Guardian

Australians to lose the right to call for a boycott?

So if you’re asking Australians not to buy lipstick tested on caged rabbits, rugs woven by Pakistani slaves or suits made with mulesed wool, then pray your boycott calls don’t succeed, for the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is about to be given the power to sue you out of the water if they do.

But Costello’s bill is designed to protect businesses of any size – all the way up to BHP Billiton – not by outlawing intimidation, but by punishing persuasion.
Hurt a business simply by arguing that it’s ethically repugnant to buy its products and the commission will be able to step in and sue to recover the company’s lost profits.

No free-speech defence is immediately available. You won’t be able to go to court to plead the pros and cons of open-range chooks or gentler methods than mulesing to save sheep from fly strike.
The new law will catch lone campaigners, community groups, NGOs, lobby groups and even the media – anyone whose campaign for what the law calls a “secondary boycott” actually hits the mark and causes financial pain.

The emphasis in the quote above is mine, and thanks to DD for the link.

Two classic quotes from the Kevid Rudd strip club thing:

Greens leader Bob Brown said the issue should be kept in perspective. “Four years ago Kevin Rudd got drunk and took himself into a strip club,” Senator Brown said. “Four years ago John Howard, sober, took Australia into the Iraq war. I think the electorate can judge which one did the more harm.”

Premier John Brumby said his last visit to a strip place would have been in the 1970s when he was a student. “It was probably in Sydney, three decades ago with a group of mates, male and female,” he said. “That’s the main reason people go to Sydney, isn’t it?”

(The Age)

Damn it. I really hate that I can’t fly whenever I want to, but there’s just no way to justify it.
Two degrees of difference: the science that backs the protest

Air travel really is in the front line of the climate change debate. But instead of tackling it we’re planning new airports
It is vitally important that we stabilise global temperature rises below the danger line of 2C – and the aviation industry stands in the way.
Probably the single most polluting thing that you or I will ever do is step on to a plane. Take that tempting return flight to, say, Thailand and you immediately become responsible for about six tons of greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere – three times more than is likely to come from any other activity that you do in the year, including driving and heating your house. This is why aviation is the most bitter and divisive issue in environmental politics today.