Opinion by Michael Stripling

USA – -(AmmoLand.com)- Why does anyone need an AR-15? This question came to me, for the second time in recent history, while I was teaching a concealed carry firearms course at a private range surrounded by woods in Central Florida.

To be honest, even though I had heard this question recently, I still stumbled over my answer. I hesitated slightly and half heartily blurted out something about home defense, but why was this question so hard for me to answer? I mean, the first time I was asked, I have to admit I got a little defensive, and it was my own mother who had asked me. I had fumbled my words, became quite frustrated and told her “I would go find my copy of the Constitution for her to read”.

I later realized that I owed my mother an apology, she had genuinely meant no harm, she was merely ignorant of the subject, and asked in curiosity. It was myself I should have been upset with because, in times like these where our guns and rights are always under attack, I just was not prepared with an intelligent response.

You see, I’m a “gun guy.” I’m a proud NRA member, a firearms instructor, a chief range safety officer, and a veteran. I’m registered to vote Republican, and I have been collecting guns since I was a kid. So how is such a little, simple question presenting me with so much frustration? Well after some careful thought, I realized what the problem was. It was the question; it was not so little or straightforward after all. The question itself is misleading, often unbeknown to the asker.

Why do I have to find a reason to justify my need for it?

The truth is my need doesn’t matter. It might be property defense, it might be hunting or competition, but it doesn’t matter. I don’t NEED to NEED it. I have the RIGHT to WANT it. Why does the average American household need 3 TV’s? Why does my wife need 15 pairs of boots? Why do people need to put rims on their vehicles, or what is the need for a microwave oven? Wouldn’t the cars still drive with factory tires? Don’t most kitchens have conventional ovens? So why does anyone need any of these things? The answer to all of these questions is the same! It’s because I WANT them and it’s my RIGHT as an American!

You see, we have this thing called a Constitution, the American Heritage Dictionary defines Constitution as “The system of fundamental laws and principles that prescribes the nature, functions, and limits of a government or another institution. The supreme law of the United States, consisting of the document ratified by the original 13 states and Amendments.”

The question in itself leaves the tart taste of communism in one’s mouth. The fact is, the Second Amendment protects us, the law-abiding American citizen, and it protects the other Amendments of the Constitution, and it is now under blatant attack.

The left tells us they just want to ban the “dangerous assault rifles,” high capacity magazines, and bump stocks, but that is just the beginning. They only say this to win over those, who wonder on the middle ground. What comes next are “permanent protective orders” like the House Bill 2060 that’s making its way to the Pennsylvania state Senate right now. Which would require certain individuals to relinquish all firearms and ammunition within 24 hours. You can be sure it won’t stop there, if the Liberals get their dirty claws in the American people, they will undoubtedly pull us in for the kill, sinking their infecting teeth in the whole Constitution, shredding and destroying all of our freedoms and liberties.

This is it, folks, this is a Civil War, and we must fight not yet with violence but with our voices and our votes. We must resist in any way possible before it’s too late. I urge you to call, or write your Senate, remind your friends to register, and to vote. Let the snowflake Liberals know that, “we will not stand for our freedoms to be stripped away.” The time is upon us, our Constitution was written to protect the people of this great nation, and now it is under attack, and “We the People” must return the favor, and protect the Constitution.

When I was a teen, I spent much of my time fantasizing about and designing my ultimate homestead. I got the Scott and Helen Nearing books, the Foxfire books, the Whole Earth Catalogs, and a book called One Acre and Security. I studied them like DIY bibles. I had an organic garden in our backyard. I raised rabbits. My best friend raised chickens. We fancied ourselves semi-rural homesteaders.

I never built my dream homestead, although I did live on a farming commune for 6 1/2 years and got an opportunity to learn and live all of the homesteading skills. Even in my middle age, I still think about what my hand-built dream house might be like and what I might be able to do with one acre and a mule.

Given this history, I love living vicariously through a friend, Make: contributor, Andrew Lewis, and his Shedlandia project. For the past few years, Andrew and his wife Caroline have been building their own little dream homestead. Andrew has been documenting the process on a website and a YouTube channel.

Here is a sampling of the Shedlandia video content. Andrew also does a live-streamed MakerHour where he chats with fellow makers, discusses the projects he’s working on, and opines on various aspects of homesteading and DIY.

Laravel Tutorials
/
November 02, 2018

Building a Laravel Translation Package – Wrangling Translations

As we’ve discussed earlier in the series, out of the box, Laravel translations are stored in language files. These can be either PHP array-style syntax or straight up JSON files.

The Laravel Translation package interacts with the files in order to achieve the following:

• List all languages
• Add a language
• List all translations
• Add a translation
• Update existing translations

The plan for the package is, much like many features of Laravel, to expose multiple drivers to power the translation management. The first driver will utilize Laravel’s existing file-based translations with plans to later add a database driver. With this in mind, we first define a contract to which driver will implement to ensure all the required methods are available to the package.

The file driver needs to interrogate the filesystem in order to return the data in the required format. This involves a lot of filtering, mapping and iterating, so we will lean quite heavily on Laravel’s collections.

Listing languages

To generate a collection of languages, we use the filesystem to get an array of directories from the configured language path, wrapping the result in a collection.

$directories = Collection::make($this->disk->directories($this->languageFilesPath));

Next, we utilize the mapWithKeys function to iterate over the directories, stripping the language from the path (it will be the last segment) and returning a key => value array.

return $directories->mapWithKeys(function ($directory) {
    $language = basename($directory);
    return [$language => $language];
});

The result looks something like this:

// $this->allLanguages()->toArray();

[
    ‘en’ => ‘en’,
    ‘fr’ => ‘fr’,
    ‘es’ => ‘es’,
];

Adding languages

To create a new language, we need to add a new directory and empty JSON file to the configured language path and name it after the language we’re adding.

$this->disk->makeDirectory(“{$this->languageFilesPath}/$language”);

if (! $this->disk->exists(“{$this->languageFilesPath}/{$language}.json”)) {
    $this->disk->put(
        “{$this->languageFilesPath}/$language.json”,
        json_encode((object) [], JSON_UNESCAPED_UNICODE | JSON_PRETTY_PRINT)
    );
}

Then, we use the filesystem to add a new file to the language path containing an empty JSON encoded array.

Using the JSON_UNESCAPED_UNICODE | JSON_PRETTY_PRINT constants ensure the generated JSON is in the right format.

Listing translations

When listing translations we want to ensure we differentiate the group (array style) translations from the single (JSON style).

Group
To get the group translations, we can use the filesystem to get all the files from the language directory.

$groups Collection($this->disk->allFiles(“{$this->languageFilesPath}/{$language}“));

Then, to get the translations, we can iterate over all the files in the directory and use the filesystem’s getRequire method to require the file giving us direct access to the array.

$groups->mapWithKeys(function ($group) {
    return [$group->getBasename(‘.php’) => $this->disk->getRequire($group->getPathname())];
});

The result looks something like this:

[
    ‘auth’ => [
        ‘failed’ => ‘These credentials do not match our records’,
    ],
]

Single

We can get the single translations by using json_decode on the contents of the file.

if ($this->disk->exists($this->languageFilesPath.“/$language.json”)) {
    return new Collection(json_decode($this->disk->get($singlePath), true));
}

The result looks something like this:

[
    ‘hello’ => ‘hello’,
]

Adding/updating translations

Translations are added and updated in largely the same fashion. First, we get the contents of the file the translation should be added to in array format. Then, we check whether or not the key to be added already exists. If it does, we update the value and if not, we append the new key and value to the array. Finally, the whole array is written back to the file.

Group

$translations = $this->getGroupTranslationsFor($language);
$values = $translations->get($group);
$values[$key] = $value;
$translations->put($group, $values);
$this->disk->put(
    “{$this->languageFilesPath}/{$language}/{$group}.php”,
    “<?php\n\nreturn “.var_export($translations, true).‘;’.\PHP_EOL
);

Single

$translations = $this->getSingleTranslationsFor($language);
$translations->put($key, $value);
$this->disk->put(
    “{$this->languageFilesPath}/$language.json”,
    json_encode((object) $translations, JSON_UNESCAPED_UNICODE | JSON_PRETTY_PRINT)
);

Some of the code samples have been truncated for clarity. You can see the full code for the files mentioned in the article below:

Driver Interface
File Driver

This driver lays the foundation from which we can build upon. Next time, we’ll build out the user interface which will ship with the package. It utilizes a combination of Tailwind CSS and Vue.js, two frameworks which have been widely adopted by the Laravel community.

U.S.A. –-(Ammoland.com)- Saturday, in Pittsburgh, a Sabbath celebration at the Tree of Life synagogue became the site of the largest mass murder of Jews in U.S. history. Eleven worshippers were killed by a racist gunman.

Friday, we learned the identity of the crazed criminal who mailed pipe bombs to a dozen leaders of the Democratic Party, including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden.

From restaurants to Capitol corridors, this campaign season we have seen ugly face-offs between leftist radicals and Republican senators.

Are we more divided than we have ever been? Are our politics more poisoned? Are we living in what Charles Dickens called “the worst of times” in America? Is today worse than 1968?

Certainly, the hatred and hostility, the bile and bitterness of our discourse, seem greater now than 50 years ago. But are the times really worse?

1968 began with one of the greatest humiliations in the history of the American Navy. The U.S. spy ship Pueblo was hijacked in international waters and its crew interned by North Korea.

A week later came the Tet Offensive, where every provincial capital in South Vietnam was attacked. A thousand U.S. troops died in February, 10,000 more through 1968.

On March 14, anti-war Senator Gene McCarthy captured 42 percent of the vote in New Hampshire against President Johnson.

With LBJ wounded, Robert Kennedy leapt into the race, accusing the president who had enacted civil rights of “dividing the country” and removing himself from “the enduring and generous impulses that are the soul of this nation.” Lyndon Johnson, said Kennedy, is “calling upon the darker impulses of the American spirit.”

Today, RFK is remembered as a “uniter.”

With Gov. George Wallace tearing at Johnson from the right and Kennedy and McCarthy attacking from the left — and Nixon having cleared the Republican field with a landslide in New Hampshire — LBJ announced on March 31 he would not run again.

Four days later, Martin Luther King, leading a strike of garbage workers, was assassinated in Memphis. One hundred U.S. cities exploded in looting, arson and riots. The National Guard was called up everywhere and federal troops rushed to protect Washington, D.C., long corridors of which were gutted, not to be rebuilt for a generation.

Before April’s end, Columbia University had exploded in the worst student uprising of the decade. It was put down only after the NYPD was unleashed on the campus.

Nixon called the Columbia takeover by black and white radicals “the first major skirmish in a revolutionary struggle to seize the universities of this country and transform them into sanctuaries for radicals and vehicles for revolutionary political and social goals.” Which many have since become.

In June, Kennedy, after defeating McCarthy in the crucial primary of California, was mortally wounded in the kitchen of the hotel where he had declared victory. He was buried in Arlington beside JFK.

Nixon, who had swept every primary, was nominated on the first ballot in Miami Beach, and the Democratic Convention was set for late August.

Between the conventions, Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev sent his Warsaw Pact armies and hundreds of tanks into Czechoslovakia to crush the peaceful uprising known as “Prague Spring.”

With this bloodiest of military crackdowns since the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, Moscow sent a message to the West: There will be no going back in Europe. Once a Communist state, always a Communist state!

At the Democratic convention in Chicago, the thousands of radicals who had come to raise hell congregated nightly in Grant Park, across from the Hilton where the candidates and this writer were staying.

Baited day and night, the Chicago cops defending the hotel, by late in the week, had had enough. Early one evening, platoons of fresh police arrived and charged into the park clubbing and arresting scores of radicals as the TV cameras rolled. It would be called a “police riot.”

When Sen. Abe Ribicoff took the podium that night, he directed his glare at Mayor Richard J. Daley, accusing him of using “Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago.” Daley’s reply from the floor was unprintable.

Through September, Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey could not speak at a rally without being cursed and shouted down.

Describing the radicals disrupting his every event, Humphrey said, these people “aren’t just hecklers,” but “highly disciplined, well-organized agitators. … Some are anarchists and some of these groups are dedicated to destroying the Democratic Party and destroying the country.”

After his slim victory, Nixon declared that his government would take as its theme the words on a girl’s placard that he had seen in the Ohio town of Deshler: “Bring us together.”

Nixon tried in his first months, but it was not to be.

According to Bryan Burrough, author of “Days of Rage, America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence,” “During an eighteen month period in 1971 and 1972, the FBI reported more than 2,500 bombings on U.S. soil, nearly 5 a day.”

No, 2018 is not 1968, at least not yet.

---

About Patrick J. Buchanan

Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of the new book “The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose From Defeat to Create the New Majority.“

When it comes to building interactive props, you have always had two main areas where there is going to be tons of work and problem solving. There’s the physical structure and look, then there’s the interactive electronics. For many, learning the techniques for shaping foam or 3d printing came naturally, but the electronics were still a hurdle. There’s a lot to learn!

Adafruit has been listening and has just released the Prop-Maker FeatherWing. This is an add-on board to their feather microcontrollers that has some easy to use features specifically for adding lights and sound to your prop.  Check out this quick video of a light saber built using the system.

As I’ve mentioned each time I talk about the feather ecosystem, I love that this uses Circuit Python, which means you don’t need a compiler installed. You just plug this into any computer (or phone!) and open it like a storage device, then edit the text file that is there. That’s all. As for sound, you just drop .wav files onto it.

 

from the product description:

We looked at hundreds of prop builds, and thought about what would make for a great low-cost (but well-designed) add-on for our Feather boards. Here’s what we came up with:

• Snap-in NeoPixel port – With a 3-pin JST connector, you can plug in one of our JST-wired NeoPixel strips directly, or use a 3-pin JST connector to wire up your favorite shape of addressable NeoPixel LEDs. This port provides high current drive from either the Feather Lipoly or USB port, whichever is higher. A level shifter gives you a clean voltage signal to reduce glitchiness no matter what chip you’re using
• 3W RGB LED drivers – 3 high current MOSFETs will let you connect a 3W RGB LED for powerful eye-blasting glory. For most Feathers, the 3 pins are PWM capable so you can generate any color you like. Available as pin breakouts plus strain-relief holes
• Triple-Axis Accelerometer with Tap Detection – The LIS3DH is our favorite accelerometer, you can use this for detection motion, tilt or taps. Here’s an example of a light saber that makes sounds when swung or hit. We have code for this chip in both Arduino and CircuitPython.
• Class D Audio Amplifier – Drive a 8Ω 1Watt speaker or 4Ω 3W speaker for sound effects. Plug and play with our cute and slim oval speaker, or connect a picoblade cable for your favorite speaker. For use only with Feathers that have analog audio out such as the Feather M0 Express and M4 series.
• Low power mode! The power system for the RGB LED, NeoPixels and speaker amplifier can be controlled by a pin to cut power to them, so you have lower power usage when the prop is in sleep or off mode (but can wake up fast by listening to the button press or accelerometer data). When the power pin is set low, the current draw for just the wing is under 1mA and no there’s current draw from any attached NeoPixels – normally they’re about 1mA even when not lit.
• Breakouts plus strain-relief hole for the enable pin and ground (for a mechanical switch that will power down the whole board)
• Breakouts plus strain-relief holes for an external switch pin and ground (for a mechanical mode button)