Tips Notes - South American Explorers: Fill & Download for Free

Puma concolor, the beautiful tawny wild cat of the Americas. Known as the biggest of the “Small Cats”, or “non-roaring” cats. The cat, that thanks to us, has an identity crisis. This feline has more common names than any other animal. In fact, it is the Guinness World Record holder, with 64 names! So why, exactly, does it have so many names? Are any of them more correct than the others? Then add to that, the 7 sub-species that exist:Puma concolor coryi: Florida, United StatesPuma concolor cougar: North AmericaPuma concolor costaricensis: Central AmericaPuma concolor capricornensis: eastern South AmericaPuma concolor concolor: northern South AmericaPuma concolor cabrerae: central South AmericaPuma concolor puma: southern South America.… and there is all kinds of confusion.Once the most widely distributed land mammal in the Western Hemisphere, cougars have been eliminated from about two-thirds of their original range. It existed from southern Canada, all the way down to the southern tip of Chile. The many names are not, as popularly thought, merely regional dialectical monikers given to this cat. They are the result of several factors: sub-species, first observers, the original claimants of various areas of America. We’ll now examine the different names. And we’ll find out how the Lion and the Leopard are partially responsible for these names.Mountain Lion: Is it a lion at all? No, it’s not. The cougar is more closely related to the domestic house cat, than it is to the African Lion. It is not an overtly social animal (although it does have family units), males have no mane, it does not roar. All these things preclude it from being a true lion. So who called it a lion? Early Spanish explorers of North America called it simply leon (lion). The first European observation of this new creature was by Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, one of the first explorers of the New World, in 1530. This was in Florida. He published his findings in 1537 and recounted this animal that so resembled a female African Lion. Not knowing any better, he made the assumption that it was the same as the African Lion. His sightings were sparse, and presumably he assumed he had only seen females. What he saw was likely the sub-species Puma concolor coryi or Puma concolor cougar. Later explorers of South America saw a cat in the mountains of South America and and called it gato monte (cat of the mountain). When they got back to Europe they discovered that de Vaca had already seen this “lion” animal, which they assumed was the same animal, and at that point they differentiated the American lion from the African lion. “Cat of the Mountain” became known as lion of the mountain, from which we get the name "Mountain Lion."Thus “Mountain Lion” was coined.Cougar: “Cougar” is from an old South American Indian word, cuguacuarana, which was shortened to cuguar (note the similarity to “jaguar”). The original recipient of this name was most likely the sub-species Puma concolor concolor. As this animal became a common sighting among all the explorations of the Americas, this name spread northwards through Mexico and into what would become the United States. It was realized the Mountain Lion and Cougar were the same, and both names stuck.Panther: Eventually the French had their share of New World exploration, and left their mark on naming this animal. And this is where the etymology gets complex; so bear with me. This is also where our friends the Leopard and the Lion get involved. Because of the Roman gladiator games, all the Big Cats of the Old World were well known by the public. The Lion, The Leopard, and what they thought was another “species” the Panther; which was the black panther. Of course, the idea of “species” and melanistic cats (black coat) was not understood at the time. So, using the best zoological knowledge at the time, the Leopard was thought to be the result of black panthers mating with lions. And so it was for some time. Makes sense to me! So how did a lion mating with a black panther come to be known as “Leopard”? For that, we have to refer to more ancient times of Latin and Greek. The Greeks named the large maned African cat “leon”. At the same time the black panther was also named. It was named “pardos”. This name, in turn, is said to come from the Sanskrit “prdakuh". Still with me? So we have the lion “leon” mating with the panther “pardos” and we get “leo-pardos” or “leopardus”. The Old French had to “Francosize” it and came up with “leupart” for Leopard and “pantere” for panther. But they were in fact the same animal; one simply had a black coat. When the French explored North America, they found this large cat that resembled the (black) panther (which was actually simply a melanistic leopard). They, unlike the Spanish, thought it more resembled the “pantere”, except it was tawny colored rather than black. So they found a tawny panther. And in the French controlled areas, that was the name that it was known as. The French language evolved, and pantere was now deemed “panthère”. So we’ve added yet another name. Panther.Painter: This one is simple. As you can see above, there is a similarity between Painter and Pantere/Panthere. When the Louisiana Purchase was made, the new Americans heard the French name as “Painter”. Therefore, in central United States we have the next name for this cat.Catamount: As was earlier mentioned, the Spanish explorers in South America had very early called this animal “gato monte” or “Cat of the Mountains” or “cat o’ mount”. And from this we got Catamount. This name spread north and into the Western United States through the Texas area, and was for a time quite common in the American Old West.Puma: “Puma” is the name the Incas gave this cat in their language. So this may very well be the oldest and first name. With the Spanish colonization of South America and Mexico, the name traveled north through Mexico into their North American colonies. After the Spanish-American War, much of this area became part of the growing United States, and this was the name used in the American Southwest (Note: this means your Puma tennis shoes are named after the Mountain Lion and an ancient Incan word!)So there you go. Many countries, societies and civilizations contributed to naming this beautiful creature that seemed to have been found everywhere; none of the names more or less valid than any of the other names. The Cougar is no longer so common as it was. It has fought a constant battle against ranchers and for much of its American history, it has had a bounty on its head. It swings constantly between Federal/local Protection, and killing for bounty, and everything in between. The laws vary widely from state to state. It’s a majestic animal that likes to simply live its life in its home, but constantly has the two-legged beasts infringing on its home and then getting blamed and slaughtered for simply being a cat that hunts in its own habitat. We can only hope that this animal finds a balance and a way to live peacefully, unselfishly giving up more and more of its own terrain to those that continue to come and build homes and put out cattle in the areas that it raises its cubs and hunts for its food. That is the story of the Mountain Lion. Take your pick of what you want to call it. But it would actually prefer if you didn’t call it at all, and simply left it in peace.UPDATE EDIT: As of 2018, the entire taxonomy of all felines has been re-examined and retested. As is (thankfully) the nature of science, improvements have been made due to this massive study and new technology. It’s now been confirmed that there are only 6 subspecies, not 7.

The first European explorer to discover America was Christopher Columbus because “Columbus sailed the Ocean Blue, in 1492”.You may be surprised to find that that statement is incorrect.Sure, Columbus may have been the first European explorer to step foot on the land we now collectively know as “the Americas”, but he didn’t discover it at all.You may say it was the Vikings or the Native Americans. Which would be true- had the question not specified “explorer,” singular. Most people credit Leif Eriksson as the Viking to discover America, but there is evidence which proves there were others here before him.Why didn’t Christopher Columbus really discover the Americas?When Christopher Columbus sailed across the Atlantic, he did so with the intention of reaching China and India. He desired to find a western route to Asia.In fact, this is why Columbus landed on the island of Hispaniola, and never went north or south. See, back in his day, navigators used latitude and not longitude. This is why he never thought about having landed in unchartered territory- because no one knew the Americas existed, and Columbus himself didn’t know the longitude of his location.Once Columbus landed, he thought he was in the Far East. He didn’t need, nor want, to sail north or south- he never could have known he discovered a continent.In the end, Christopher Columbus died in 1506- not knowing he had discovered a continent.The true discoverer of the Americas is no other than an Italian named Amerigo Vespucci.On the 1499 voyage, Vespucci sailed to the northern part of South America and into the Amazon River. He gave places he saw names like the "Gulf of Ganges," thinking, as his explorer contemporaries did, that he was in Asia.Most historians affirm that Vespucci’s first voyage was in 1499, though this is still widely disputed.During Vespucci’s 1501 voyage, he sailed down the coast of South America. During this time, he encountered the rivers Rio de Janeiro and Rio de la plata. It was at this time he suspected this was a whole different continent from Asia.Vespucci was both familiar with and fascinated by the accounts of Marco Polo and his time in Asia. The book by Polo gave great detail on the geography, people, and rich opportunities of the continent. Based on this information, Vespucci could make assumptions about the land they were exploring. For starters, Vespucci noticed that the sky which they sailed under had different constellations that were not visible in Europe. He also took note of the coastlines they traveled, recording their distance and length of time traveled. Vespucci, again a very skilled cartographer and astronomer, carefully studied and pondered over all of his information. He found that the areas and land masses they had explored were actually larger and different than previous accounts of Asia's descriptions. This led him to the conclusion that what they had explored was indeed an entirely new continent.His hypothesis had been confirmed once he sailed down to Tierra del Fuego, the southernmost tip of South America. Quite clearly, this point extends much father south than any point in Asia. This confirmed that Amerigo Vespucci had discovered a new continent.These findings were published in 1502. Columbus did die thinking he reached Asia. Why didn’t Columbus receive word of Vespucci’s discovery then?

Q: Out of our 17 or 19 employment sectors (depending on whose scheme you use), what is the only one with compensation regularly beating inflation?Q: Why would a thoroughgoing monarchist like German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck steal and implement Karl Marx’s social democracy?Q: Why would we in the United States copycat Bismarck’s government?Q: What is our over-arching social policy, the justification for such high taxes?Q: Who really pays corporate taxes?Q: Why is Jefferson Davis laughing from beyond the grave?Answers follow…In the middle of the 19th century, the South was much wealthier than the North. There were more than twenty millionaires in the area of Natchez, Mississippi, where the tricky-to-cultivate, not-so-hard-to-seed sea island cotton grew particularly well [$1M then = closer to $100M now, the reason the surviving antebellum architecture is so splendid]. The cotton gin was threatening to make the readily-cultivated, difficult-to-seed domestic cotton another big cash crop, along with tobacco, sugarcane and indigo. Before the advent of the tractor, slavery was the sole means to reap this wealth.When the Whig Party proved insufficiently resolute to resist the expansion of slavery to the territories, the Republican Party formed, in 1854. In response to many northern Democrats changing parties, the southern trunk of the party reconsecrated itself the Conservative Democrats, a faction devoted to the preservation of slavery and states’ rights as a means to protect slavery. Republican John C. Frémont lost the presidential election of 1856, but when Abraham Lincoln won in 1860, southern states seceded, and Jefferson Davis was elected president of the Confederacy.Let’s explore the idea that what ensued after the South lost the Civil War can be described as the “Revenge of Jefferson Davis’s Ghost.” After all, Davis’s ghost reportedly haunts the Mississippi Gulf coast as well as his estate, Beauvoir. There are ghost tours in Jefferson, Texas, and the Jefferson Davis Hospital, built in Houston atop a Confederate cemetery, is supposedly haunted.The protracted war was devastating for the South and brutal for the North, but the incipient industrialism of the North was taking hold and pulling its economy well beyond the South. Davis would survive the war by almost a quarter century, during which he stuck to his conviction that the social basis must be a "democratic white polity based firmly on dominance of a controlled and excluded black caste."But that view put Davis firmly in the majority. Soon after the war, the Radical Republicans ascended to power and pushed not only a program of Reconstruction but implementation of Amendments XIV and XV making race no bar to citizenship. We could finally lay claim to what Lincoln had called “Our Ancient Faith,” that “all men are created equal.” Who could oppose that?It turns out that their own sons did. Young Republicans in the North, too young to fight in the Civil War, had busied themselves with tracts claiming that Darwin’s masterworks on evolution and the descent of man in fact proved the white race superior and race “mongrelization” the gravest threat to any society. Nationalism, the potent new ideology arising in the second half of the 19th century, held that countries should be nations, consisting of one ethnicity, one language and one religion.Plus, thousands of these young Republicans left Harvard and Yale to continue their educations in Germany, the sole source of the new doctor of philosophy degree that branded one a certified expert.What did these young Republicans find in Germany? They found that their German counterparts were preparing for lucrative and powerful positions in the German administrative state. No such positions awaited them back home in our republican governing scheme.In perhaps the boldest move in all of political history, Chancellor Bismarck simply stole Marx’s social democracy and made it the governing scheme of Germany. As a prince and a duke, Bismarck had no brief with socialism. Rather, he had arrived at the realization that Marx’s (and Engel’s) demand number two in their Communist Manifesto for a heavy, graduated income tax was just the ticket to protect the Hohenzollern dynasty against the rising liberals with their free enterprise.The common threat to socialists and monarchists (though perceived differently) was the rising wealth of liberals. Mere commercial men were growing well beyond their “place in society.” Bismarck recognized that if he implemented Marx’s social program, that would justify imposition of an income tax, just the ticket to siphon off enough wealth from the liberals to halt the growth of their power while enriching the monarchy and using some of the funds to “bribe the people” that Kaiser Wilhelm had a care for their well-being. After his administrative state was up and running, Bismarck simply outlawed all socialists not in his employ.Marx was spitting mad over the theft, but he was also old and ill and little noted any longer. He had always insisted that his communism in either form could not be implemented under state power as it would simply be made to serve the existing class structure, and Bismarckian Germany was definitively state power.Bismarckian social democracy was just the ticket for protecting white supremacy. As the first students started streaming home with their doctorates, the progressive movement was born in the North among young Republicans (though, fortunately, the Radical Republicans would keep a hold on the Supreme Court through most of the coming Progressive Era, preventing much damage). Before long, northern progressives reached out to the Conservative Democrats in the South, their natural allies in making the United States an Anglo-Saxon Protestant nation.By the presidency of Teddy Roosevelt, progressivism dominated both parties. He echoed later by Woodrow Wilson) would proclaim right from the White House that our “relic Constitution needed to give way to modern statecraft,” He addressed Congress saying:There is every reason why, when next our system of taxation is revised, the National Government should impose a graduated inheritance tax, and, if possible, a graduated income tax.The use Bismarck had put the income tax to was well understood. Taft picked up Teddy’s torch. Progressives were busy building a Bismarckian-style administrative state here in the US, and that would need both money and rationales—programs. But “state aid to the needy” programs were not in the cards as progressives were hoping such “unemployables” and “deplorables” would simply wither on the vine. [It would be Roosevelt’s cousin Franklin, once progressive numbers had been cut in half, who would pursue state aid programs having renamed them “welfare benefits” to make them sound constitutional.]With ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment in 1913, the income tax became legit and permanent. The top marginal rate was 7 percent, but Wilson soon jacked that to 77 percent. And the funding was there to grow us out of the scale of our constitutional republicanism into Euro-statism with our politicians no longer being public servants but a secure elite.Did Yankee Republicans and Dixie Conservative Democrats—the progressive movement—conspire to make us all slaves?For a long time now, total taxes have averaged 40 percent of average earnings. Some taxes, like the income tax, are graduated so that they fall heavier the higher up the income scale one goes.But we have secret taxes. Corporations, for instance, must pay taxes, but in reality, what they do is collect taxes, passing the cost along to their customers in higher prices and shareholders in lower dividends. We the People are the actual payers of those taxes too (not to mention the fact that driving up prices makes American businesses less competitive on the world stage).There’s also inflation, which has a number of effects, some positive, some negative (including serving as a particularly regressive tax). But inflation is always of benefit to governments, which are always debtors—they pay off their debts with money worth less in the future. It is of such benefit to governments, they have strong incentive to practice what I call “double secret” inflation. The consumer price index is an extraordinarily complicated calculation, with the requirement that goods that surge in price be omitted—even food staples and energy costs that cannot exactly be easily omitted from a household budget.If you calculate inflation in terms of silver or gold prices or in terms of purchasing power per hour worked, you come to the realization that actual inflation runs a good bit higher than the official rate. How much? When one of my sons got a big promotion half a dozen years back, my back-of-the-napkin calculation showed that at 26 with an expensive MBA degree and living on his own in NYC he had about the same purchasing power I had had in my first real minimum-wage job at 16 still in high school and living at home. That’s a bit discouraging for today’s young earners with their student debt.All-in-all that amounts to us paying half of our income back to the government. You might say we are half-slaves. It’s as though Jefferson Davis and the Conservative Democrats decided, “Since you took away the slaves that were the source of our wealth, we’ll simply make all of you half a slave.”How are we half a slave? Aren’t we paying for programs that make our country better?This is basically what we are paying for:But it’s worse! What is the one employment sector that has been steadily beating inflation? The public sector—government employees plus teachers, professors, researchers and others paid out of tax revenues (military are accounted for differently). Finance and electronics are two sectors that have been keeping up with inflation… all the others have been losing ground.How did this happen? Back in 1960 when Wisconsin passed legislation approving public-sector unions, President Kennedy took note of what a boon it became for his party and executed Executive Order 10988 that established public-sector unions at the federal level.Back in the early 60s, the average public worker made 80 percent of the average private worker but with much better job security to compensate. Now, state and local workers make 150 percent of an average private worker and federal workers 162 percent (as of around 2017—but they also still enjoy better job security and pension plans). They are also 20 percent of the work force. Here’s the effect of the growth of administrative staff in public schools from one per every ten teachers to eleven for every ten teachers:[Note: Similar admin gains hit our universities too, the reason we have so much student debt.]We are paying out one helluva lot of money but have nothing to show for it but a lot more voters inclined to vote Democratic. With one worker in five compensated by tax revenue, the total taxes of the other four barely covers the labor cost of government, which, plain and simple, is the reason we now have such steep government debt. Back in the 60s, we had a ton of discretionary spending—a nationwide interstate highway program, new schools for us boomers, an arms race with the Russians, a space race with the Russians, a War on Poverty program, a land war in Asia and more.Now, our political class has apparently decided it’s better if that money goes directly to their pockets and to the benefit of those who vote to keep them in power. Just as Bismarck (and Marx) foresaw, the heavy graduated income tax has been used to keep the political and intellectual classes safely ensconced at the top of the social hierarchy and to make sure those of us who grub for profit work for them.Tax cuts usually do increase tax revenues. So what? Even that earnings boost too is to get votes for politicians and does little to benefit us working folk.