4" Penguins in Safety Sweaters Need Help

chrisd writes "We all give lip service to how much we like penguins and such, well a bunch of the "little" penguins (4 inch tall little guys) have been spooged by an oil tanker in southern australia. They need cash to help them take care of the little fellas. They put them in little sweaters and such to keep them from preening the oil off thier wings into thier stomaches, which causes them to die. A picture of them in thier protective gear can be found there or at a my mirror."

Perfect for those IPO millionaires

Now's your chance to do some good with those zillions of dollars you made from the RedHat and VA Linux IPO's. Let's make some donations.

(I say "Let's", even though I didn't get in on the IPO. )

poor guys

Those little guys sure were cute...

It took a bit of reading to find anywhere to send money to, but I finally found this:

Donations can be sent to: Phillip Island Penguin Parade, ATT: Penguin Hospital Support Fund P.O. Box 97 Cowes Phillip Island. Victoria. 3922. AUSTRALIA.

The didn't have anyway that I found, in the amount of time I had, to give money online or anything. Darn it those things are cute. Easy to want to help.

Discharging tanks ... flags of convenience

Like much in our world, the merchant shipping industry is a haven for jobsworths, tightwads and schemers. Rather than have tanks cleaned properly in port (at a cost) unscrupulous shipowners encourage crews to simply flush them at sea. Stand on any beach near a shipping lane, and you can guarantee there'll be tar-like deposits everywhere from this heinous practise.

There's little governments can do even if they have a fair idea which ships or copmanies are to blame. Do it in international waters, and no-one can get you. And if you get caught ... Well, almost every large merchant vessel flies under a flag of convenience. This enables the captain or owners to say ``well, sue me in Liberia''.

A friend who works as a deck oficcer commented to me once that another problem is hopeless crews. OFficers tend to be trained and conscientius(sp?),
but crews often don't speak the same language as the officers and have no training. In the British merchant navy, many crews are Philipino simply because the owners can get away with paying them shit wages.

Anyways, enough of the ranting. I just hope no more of these little penguins succumb to the oil.

Chris Wareham

And in other news...

A company was recently hired to produce thousands of 4 inch tall sweaters specially designed to fit penguins. Sweaters, Inc. was listed as having better than expected earnings for the 4th quarter. The President of the U.S. has been quoted as saying, "The influx of new jobs that have been created because of the penguin crisis has been a boon to the international community."

Surf around the site some more.

Phillip Island's penguin colony is a great place to visit (I was there many years ago). The penguins all come from the sea to feed their chicks at roughly the same time in the evening. You can watch this from bleachers at the beach.

Whoever dumped the slick off Phillip Island should be fed to sharks.

I'm donating

I'm donating $100 to them. Apparently, the address to send checks to is

Phillip Island Penguin Parade

att: Penguin Hospital Support Fund

P.O. Box 97

Cowes

Phillip Island. Victoria. 3922. AUSTRALIA.

But it would also be interesting to make sure that this
doesn't continue to happen -- for any animals! What
organisations exist that help prevent that these polluters
get away?

Consequences for the Oil company?

So what is being done to punish the oil company? Which company is responsible, are they investigating the cause? Who is being held accountable for this? Someone needs to get their ass handed to them on a platter for dumping a bunch of oil in our ocean!

Kintanon

Re:poor guys

Before sending money off to these guys, remember that most banks have nasty charges for converting cheques from one currency to another. From memory, the standard charge in Australia to convert currency is AUS$20, so either include enough money to cover the cost, or get your bank to write a cheque in Australian dollars. Maybe get together with some friends/your local LUG and pool your money to save on bank fees.

There is the chance that since these guys are a worthy cause, their local bank might waive the fees, but I wouldn't count on it.

...j

(US readers: s/cheques/checks/g - make sense now? <g>)

Re:Clean them off

Why would they not just clean them off and let them go? It would kill them. Why clean the birds and then let them die?????

According to the story they are cleaned with solvents and then kept in a penguin hospital in the little sweaters until they test waterproof and then they are released. The cleaning strips away their natural oils and they would freeze if they were released quickly. The sweaters prevent the penguin from trying to clean themselves and thus getting poisoned. From the sounds of it, they also keep them warm.

Sending U.S. Funds

FYI -

According to a colleague of mine who lived for a time in Oz, it is possible to send U.S.-drawn checks to Australia. The recipient, however, will have to pony up the exchange rate difference and possibly pay a fee to their bank to take the deposit.

Note that large banks (Citibank, Harris, etc.) usually will sell you a money order drawn in foreign currency, if you want to save the Penguin People from the evil bank fee collectors.

Really big banks can probably even sell you authentic Australian currency, but we cannot recommend sending that by mail.


-Sharv

Re:This is not the first post

I've never liked the term "colonies" for penguins. It's not like they're answerable to some dominion elsewhere. Maybe the collective term should be a "cluster", and their land habitation a "Beowulf".

Orwell, I tried my best! :)

Might I suggest?

Why don't we nominate the penguins for the "Most deserving to win $2000.00" beanie thing? That'd certainly help them out, and they'd probably put it to very good use. Even if the awards are distributed after the crisis is over, the association which is taking care of the penguins will be in the middle of a major cash crunch and I'm sure that they could use it.

Punish Them?

They should be thanked, for bringing about the greatest fashion breakthrough in Penguin history.

This is *the* Linux penguin.

There are a lot of penguin sub-species or whatever out there, but this is the specific one that bit Linus a long time ago, leading to Linux using penguins as the mascot.

One source that confirms this [cyberwalker.net]

Re:Penguins are cute, but people need help too

However, I have to remind you that there are thousands of poor, homeless, destitute people around the world, dying in streets, suffering in refugee camps, and there are hundreds and thousands (no, that's not a gross over estimation ) of children orphaned by wars and natural disasters.



Each of those human beings is capable of making a choice as to how they live and what resources are available to them. The parents of the starving children chose to continue fucking like rabbits in order to spawn off a whole new generation of starving children. People in refugee camps are there by choice in one way or another, they can pick up and walk somewhere else. Yes, it's hard, no I doubt I'd be able to do it, but it can be done and they have that choice. The penguins have no such option.
I for one have no sympathy for 90% of all poor/homeless/destitute people as I have seen people try to help over and over and over again and the person always ends up back in the gutter. Maybe the homeless in other countries aren't the laziest 3% of the population, but in the US the homeless aren't usually worth helping. Yes I'm a jackass, yes I'm a bastard, but I've tried helping these people and it doesn't work. At least the penguins don't smell like Wild Turkey when they stumble up to me.
All of those orphaned children have relatives somewhere, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, that should be taking care of them. Yes it's too bad they lost their parents, but there should be people there to help them already, my contribution should not be needed.

Mark this as flamebait and a troll if you really want to, but it's the way I feel about sanctimonious bastards that bitch and moan about the plight of the homeless.

Kintanon

Helping people hurts in the long run.

Let's face it, if we coordinated the worlds resources so there weren't thousands of children dying every day, in a couple of decades we'd reach the point that there were thousands of children dying every day again. And the world would be a lot more crowded.

Nobody likes pain, misery, and death, but they are always going to be there. You can shift them around to someone else, or save them up for the next generation, but you can never really reduce them. Everyone must die, and most will go kicking and screaming.

You might say that birth control is the answer, but it will only ever be a temporary solution. There will always be those who don't comply, and their exponential population growth will eventually displace the "responsible citizens." Natural selection favors the breeders. If they are kept in check by force, that is just more of the same misery and death.

You might say that space travel is the answer, but assuming that any human can travel for free at _any_ constant speed, exponential population growth will overtake the cubic growth of the volume humans have reached. Even if humanity achieves methods of instantaneous travel, few believe in an infinite universe; it will get filled up. Something has to keep it in check, and that something will always be death; given that people will almost always accept pain to avoid death, and very few humans have the cold style of mercy (if it is worthy of that name) that would kill people just because they would starve eventually, that means misery.

I help my family, I help my friends, I obey agreements I have made for mutual benefit, but I do not give charity, nor do I agonize over how the money I spend on a snack could have fed some distant family for days (as I used to when my morality was based on the value of survival and happiness of conscious minds). Nor do I care when I hear that some distant people are killing each other, except so far as it may destabilize the world and possibly cause nuclear war.

You may consider this an evil morality, but pure altruism through charity is ultimately a lie, if you look at enough of the world and over a long enough period of time. There are many "positive sum games" out there to encourage cooperation (indeed, expansion into the universe is a worthy accomplishment that would be impossible if we all truly lived "every man for himself"), but remember that ultimately we are all competing for resources. If not in this generation, or the next, then five or fifty down the road.

The standard of living can be raised across the board only by improvement/preservation of the environment. Beauty is a consolation to the hopeless. Nothing is more universally beautiful than nature.

Saving the penguins preserves a beautiful part of the world that is no threat to anyone. As population pressures grow there may be no room for the planet's other inhabitants, but we should preserve what we can. I would rather live in a dangerous, beautiful, interesting world than a safe, boring, comfortable one. I would rather be born into a world of misery and have any slim chance to struggle for life than not be born at all.

Response from the Philip Island Ranger

Well, once again it looks like we've been able, or will be able, to make a difference! From the penguins' web site [penguins.org.au]:

PINP Release (Park Ranger) Fri 9:28am

This response is really fantastic - we are doing up a form page for those wanting to help out. And all the rangers here are *genuinely* moved at this overwhelming show of support. Wish we could show you the Penguin Hospital which is currently crowded by so many Little Penguins, and we will try and get some more pics online in our News Release service. And please keep the notes/emails coming in - this week has been very tiring and stressful. The Island and the Penguins (plus koalas and seals) are more than a job to everyone here. Its hard to explain, but these "wild animals" are very much a part of the life of our Island Community. I hope one day the Linux folk and others will join us for a celbration down here!

All monies raised will be going directly to improving the Little Penguin Hospital facilities in the here and now. Everything IS helping - and your words of encouragement are as meaningful to us as the donations being received. Thankyou! PS Could someone please post this thankyou somewhere ALL the Linux folk etc. can read it? Ta muchly!

and...

Amazing to see the replies coming in from the Linux community - what can we say? Thanks all!

Donations are very much appreciated as th enumber of affected penguins grows over 200 now, and sadly the number of dead is also rising :(

You can send a donation via cheque, postal or money order (probably travellers cheque as well) to:

Phillip Island Penguin Parade
att: Penguin Hospital Support Fund
P.O. Box 97
Cowes
Phillip Island. Victoria. 3922. AUSTRALIA.

Email to: [e-mail] (we WILL reply ASAP to all enquiries)

On the programming side, we have just installed three (3) live online internet "kiosks" in our Visitor Centre. These are due to be up and running this week, delayed a little by the current crisis. Currently the three PC's are networked to a UNIX server, however we have been seriously investigating how to get a Linux box in place.I'm still on a learning curve with Linux, and must confess that it was Linux's use of the Little Penguin that first attracted me to the free/community OS. Programming enquiries to: [e-mail]

Thanks and have a good one all!

Site for online credit card donations

From the site in the article:
[penguins.org.au]
http://www.penguins.org.au/chat/index.html

there is now a link near the top to a form for online donations by credit card. If you don't want to look at the news and chat page on the penguin site, you can go direct to
https://www.penguins.org.au/medi a/helpinghand.html [penguins.org.au]

Credit card donation is now possible!

The Philip Island Nature Park now has a form available for credit card donations [penguins.org.au]. That should take care of the currency-conversion problems.

According to the rangers on the site, " All monies raised will be going directly to improving the Little Penguin Hospital facilities in the here and now."