America is locked a cycle of argument that is breaking the possibility of a future where it is safe to go to school, to worship, to gather and to live freely because of gun violence.

Incalculable amounts of time and resources are invested in points of view as the truth.  Uni-dimensional points of view are touted as the truth and forced on others in CAPS and memes.  Guns kill people! No people kill people!  It’s about the bullets!  It’s about the magazine size!  It’s about mental health!  It’s because God is not in schools!  It’s the NRA!  Its President!  It’s the Congress!  None of these points are view are the truth.  They are all false choices.  No problem is solved through singular thinking or “my way.”

It will take the hearts and commitment of 300 million American’s to stop the cycle of violence.   What will it take to bring 300 million together?   Can we agree to look at an outcome?  Can we join together with all of our points of view and stop the body count in America?  What will be our context to create a solution?

Let’s step back and examine the validity of what we already ‘know’ and say about guns and the 2nd Amendment and in what way that ‘knowing’ may constrain, shape, and distort skills, cognitive capacities and solutions that would otherwise be available to us.

In the following weeks, I will post interviews with lots of people talking about this issue and growing the context in which solutions can be placed into action.    I hope you will follow, and if you would like to be in an interview, please contact me.

Cambodia is a dictatorship.  I had the honor of working with Mu Sochua, a leader of the opposition party, when the dictator, Hun Sen issued a warrant for her arrest.  Sochua has fled Cambodia after her party made great strides in recent elections, but was cut down by the regime.  Now, Hun Sen is using Facebook to solidify power and arrest Cambodians who participate in Facebook.   Now, the dictator and Facebook are going to Court in California.

The country’s government, led by Prime Minister Hun Sen, has purchased millions of fake “likes” on the platform, used it to silence critics and spread propaganda, opponents say.

On Thursday morning, former Cambodian opposition leader Sam Rainsy’s lawyers filed a petition in a Northern California court that could shed light on this behavior, raising questions about the social media giant’s possible role in bolstering an authoritarian government.

“Human rights are being ignored and our electoral system is in shambles,” said Sam, 68, who lives in exile in France. “By exposing facts now in the possession of Facebook, we will be able to place real evidence before courts in Cambodia and possibly elsewhere. When facing irrefutable evidence, even a dictator will have to backtrack.”

The Cambodian government has charged Sam in several politically tinged cases, at least four of which concern content he has posted to Facebook. Sam’s petition “seeks information in Facebook’s possession regarding Hun Sen’s misuse of social media to deceive Cambodia’s electorate and to commit human rights abuses,” according to a statement by the San Francisco-based law firm BraunHagey and Borden, which is representing Sam.

Facebook declined to comment. A spokeswoman directed questions to company material that shows Facebook has been cracking down on fake likes since 2015. The company uses pattern recognition to block the practice and has notified more than 200,000 pages in the past three years that they’ve been protected from fake likes.

Since Hun Sen ascended to the Cambodian government’s highest levels in the late ’70s, he has established a reputation as a tough leader with a low tolerance for dissent. With a national election scheduled for July, his government has, in recent months, shuttered Western nonprofit agencies, prosecuted scores of activists and hobbled the country’s independent press. In November, Cambodia’s Supreme Court dissolved the country’s only opposition party, the Cambodia National Rescue Party, or CNRP, which Sam had led until last year.

Sam’s successor, Kem Sokha, was arrested in September for alleged treason. Several other party leaders have fled abroad or gone into hiding.

Cambodians once regarded Facebook as an injection of transparency in the long-authoritarian state. The CNRP used the platform to communicate directly with voters in a 2013 national election, precipitating protests and winning it a significant number of seats.

Yet as the platform grows more influential in the country, authorities have increasingly co-opted it to spread propaganda and silence critics. According to a 2017 report, 4.5 million people in the country are connected to Facebook, and more than half use the platform every day; many use it as their sole source of news.

Since 2014, 15 people have been arrested in the country over Facebook posts, according to a recent investigation by BuzzFeed News.

“Where Cambodians have lost here is in restrictions in online speech,” said Sebastian Strangio, the author of “Hun Sen’s Cambodia.” “(Hun Sen’s party) has been extending all the informal and formal media controls that it’s had offline – in newspapers, radio – and extending them to the online sphere. It can’t go after Facebook, so it’s going after the users.”

Hun Sen has 9.4 million likes on his Facebook page, which mainly depicts him snapping selfies with supporters and spending time with his family. By one metric, he’s the third most popular world leader on the platform after India’s Narendra Modi and President Donald Trump, according to the public relations company Burson-Marsteller.

In 2016, Sam accused Hun Sen of purchasing fake likes from “click farms” in the Philippines and India, a practice that Facebook has said it does not condone. Hun Sen denied the allegation – “If I could buy India, I must be really strong,” he said at the time – and sued Sam for defamation.

Thursday’s petition also alleges that Hun Sen also published a death threat against Sam on the platform, violating its user guidelines.

Although Hun Sen’s government has shuttered independent media, it has allowed far-right, government-aligned news outlets to thrive. The web site Fresh News, often equated to the U.S.’ Breitbart News, often vilifies opposition figures and dissidents while touting the party line. It has 2.4 million likes.

“Facebook has demonstrated its potential to help improve information-sharing and transparency in countries like Cambodia,” Sam’s attorney, J. Noah Hagey, said in a statement. “The issues raised in the petition ask fundamental questions about Facebook’s role in the democratic process, including how it will react when being misused by repressive regimes.”

Sam’s case hinges on a so-called Section 1782 discovery, named for a U.S. statute that stipulates that if an American company is involved in a legal proceeding in another country, a litigant can apply to a U.S. court for evidence that could be used in that proceeding.

Sam faces several lawsuits in his home country. In January, he was charged with inciting and demoralizing the military after he suggested – in a video posted to Facebook – that Cambodian soldiers would not obey orders to shoot civilians. (Hun Sen called the comment a “declaration of war.”)

In 2016, Sam protested the killing of Kem Ley, a prominent political analyst who was gunned down at a Caltex gas station that July. Although the killer, Oueth Ang, is in jail, many Cambodians suspect that the killing was a political assassination and that its architects have not been brought to justice. A Cambodian court found Sam guilty of defamation and incitement for calling the killing “an act of state-sponsored terrorism.”

BraunHagey and Borden used the Section 1782 statute to obtain surveillance tapes from U.S. energy giant Chevron, which owns the gas station where Kem Ley was shot. The Cambodian government is not known to have acted on the additional evidence.

As the largest organ in the human body, skin plays an important role in our daily interaction with the environment. Skin not only protects the internal tissues and organs but also provides sensation of temperature, pressure, vibration, and haptics. It has been of great interest to the research community to design and fabricate electronic skins (e-skins) with functionalities and mechanical properties comparable to natural skin because of their great potential in robotics, prosthetics, health care, and human-computer interface.

Different sensing capabilities of e-skins have been realized by integrating tactile/pressure sensors, temperature sensors, strain sensors, humidity sensors, and chemical sensors. To obtain good compliance and conformability, design principles developed in flexible and stretchable electronics were introduced to create flexible and stretchable e-skins.

Serpentine and mesh structures were adopted to achieve very high stretchability and softness comparable to natural skin. Off-the-shelf chips were successfully integrated with stretchable networks to realize high-performance, multifunctional e-skins with acquisition, filtering, amplification, and communication capabilities. Advanced materials—including single-crystal silicon, organic semiconductors, nanoparticles, nanowires, nanotubes, and graphene—were used to realize superior sensing performances of e-skins.

Inspired by the wound healing capability of natural skin, rehealable e-skins have also been developed.Researchers have created an electronic skin that can be completely recycled. The e-skin can also heal itself if it’s torn apart.

The device, described today in the journal Science Advances, is basically a thin film equipped with sensors that can measure pressure, temperature, humidity, and air flow. The film is made of three commercially available compounds mixed together in a matrix and laced with silver nanoparticles: when the e-skin is cut in two, adding the three compounds to the “wound” allows the e-skin to heal itself by recreating chemical bonds between the two sides. That way, the matrix is restored and the e-skin is as good as new. If the e-skin is broken beyond repair, it can just be soaked in a solution that “liquefies” it so that the materials can be reused to make new e-skin. One day, this electronic skin could be used in prosthetics, robots, or smart textiles.

“This particular device … won’t produce any waste,” says study co-author Jianliang Xiao, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at University of Colorado Boulder. “We want to make electronics to be environmentally friendly.”

So if the e-skin is severely damaged, or you’re just done with it, it can be recycled using a “recycling solution.” This solution dissolves the matrix into small molecules, allowing the silver nanoparticle to sink to the bottom. All materials can then be reused to create another patch of functioning e-skin. The whole recycling takes about 30 minutes at 140 degrees Fahrenheit (60 degrees Celsius) or 10 hours at room temperature. The healing happens even faster: within a half hour at room temperature, or within a few minutes at 140 degrees Fahrenheit (60 degrees Celsius), according to Xiao.

The e-skin isn’t perfect. It’s soft, but not as stretchy as human skin. Xiao says he and his colleagues are also working to make the device more scalable, so that it’ll be easier to manufacture and embed in prosthetics or robots. But it’s the fact that the e-skin can be recycled that gets Xiao excited.

“We are facing pollution issues every day,” he says. “It’s important to preserve our environment and make sure that nature can be very safe for ourselves and for our kids.”

After failing to win a majority, the Conservative Party forged an alliance with the right wing Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) to form a government. Government needs to have an overall majority of 326 MPs to get legislation past the House of Commons. Let’s meet the DUP which is akin to the Westborough Baptist Church as a political party, now, with power.

The DUP was founded in 1971 by radical Ian Paisley during the Troubles.  It is a Unionist party, a group that favors northern Ireland’s union with the UK and is primarily Protestant.  An Irish nationalist party favors a united Ireland and is typically Catholic.

Northern Ireland was in the midst of an ethnic-nationalist conflict known as the Troubles, which began in 1969 and would last for the next thirty years. The conflict began amid a campaign to end discrimination against the Catholic/Irish nationalist minority by the Protestant/unionist government and police force. This protest campaign was opposed, often violently, by unionists who viewed it as an Irish republican front. Paisley had led the unionist opposition to the civil rights movement. The DUP were more hardline or loyalist than the UUP and its founding arguably stemmed from insecurities of the Ulster Protestant working class.

The DUP opposed the Sunningdale Agreement of 1973. The Agreement was an attempt to resolve the conflict by setting up a new assembly and government for Northern Ireland in which unionists and Irish nationalists would share power. The Agreement also proposed the creation of a Council of Ireland, which would facilitate co-operation between the governments of Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. The DUP organized general strikes which led to the downfall of these shared-power peace initiatives.

During 1981, the DUP opposed the talks between British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Irish Prime Minister Charles Haughey. That year, Paisley and other DUP members attempted to create a Protestant loyalist volunteer militia—called the (Ulster) Third Force—which would work alongside the police and army to fight the Irish Republican Army (IRA).

In November 1986, a rally was held in which DUP politicians Paisley, Robinson and Ivan Foster announced the formation of the Ulster Resistance Movement (URM). This was a loyalist paramilitary group whose purpose was to “take direct action as and when required” to bring down the Agreement and defeat republicanism. Recruitment rallies were held in towns across Northern Ireland and thousands were said to have joined. The following year, the URM helped smuggle a large shipment of weapons into Northern Ireland, which were shared out between the URM, the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and the Ulster Defence Association (UDA). Most, but not all, of the weaponry was seized by police in 1988. In 1989, URM members attempted to trade Shorts’ missile blueprints for weapons from the apartheid South African regime. Following these revelations, the DUP said that it had cut its links with the URM in 1987.

The DUP opposed the other peace initiatives including the Good Friday Agreement referendum, in which the Agreement was approved by 71.1% of the electorate.

In 2016, seeds of alliances with the Conservatives/Tories were planted. The 2017 election bore fruit of power for the DUP. May will have to make concessions to the DUP in order to maintain her government.

Arlene Foster, is the current leader of the DUP. Foster was raised in the town of Dernawilt and is a member of the Protestant Church of Ireland. Her experience with political violence began early in her life when her father was the victim of a failed assassination attempt — shot at their home. As a teenager, Foster was on a school bus that was bombed by the IRA, the vehicle targeted because its driver was a soldier in the Ulster Defence Regiment. Foster is a degreed lawyer.

The DUP formerly campaigned against the legalisation of homosexual acts in Northern Ireland through the “Save Ulster from Sodomy” campaign,and in recent years has vetoed the legalisation of same-sex marriage in Northern Ireland. In December, the DUP’s Trevor Clarke was criticised by Sir Elton John after the politician admitted he did not know heterosexual people could contract HIV until a charity explained the facts to him.

DUP East Antrim MP Sammy Wilson, a devout climate change denier, was once Northern Ireland’s environment minister. Mervyn Storey, the party’s former education spokesman, once called for creationism – the belief that human life did not evolve over millions of years but was created by God – to be taught alongside evolution in science classes. He has also objected to an exhibition on evolution in the Ulster Museum and signs at the Giant’s Causeway in his North Antrim constituency.

The DUP has called for a debate in the House of Commons over the death penalty. The party maintains that it is “pro-life” and unanimously opposed a bill by Labour MP Diane Johnson to protect women in England and Wales from criminal prosecution if they ended a pregnancy using pills bought online. The DUP opposes funding for international family planning programs.

The party backs “soft Brexit” and a soft border in Ireland.

Beth Klein Boulder Attorney talks about Weaponized Lawyer Advertising.

In the legal profession, advertising lawyers have gone to extremes to acquire clients.  And it is rather frightening to know that lawyers are simply following marketing techniques that are used to push the sale of nearly everything.  It started in the 1970’s.

Bates v. State Bar of Arizona, 433 U.S. 350 (1977), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court upheld the right of lawyers to advertise their services. In holding that lawyer advertising was commercial speech entitled to protection under the First Amendment (incorporated against the States through the Fourteenth Amendment), the Court upset the tradition against advertising by lawyers, rejecting it as an antiquated rule of etiquette.

With this decision, lawyers began working with phone book advertising, billboards, radio, and TV.   Who could out noise, out number and out size was the game.  Strong arms, grizzlies, and rabid dogs became brands to get leads.  And the warehouse law firm model was born.  The back office with nameless paralegals in warehouses processing cases and the front office crunching productivity – churning cases and burning clients.

Childless lawyers hire child models to appear as their own kids for that “family man” image.   Lawyers hire dancing-girls and target motorcycle riders at events with the vibe of Sons of Anarchy and sexual innuendo.

And then there are lawyers who are brutally honest about who they are:

Groups of lawyers fund national campaigns to acquire clients by pooling money for bigger ad buys.  Telephone banks and auto mailings are created to receive calls, read scripts, and sign up clients.  And then, clients are sold as commodities.  There are private lawyer banks that fund the sale of blocks of clients.

Recently, lawyers have gotten into the email text, and behavioral data harvesting game.  Your emails and face book posts and anything you click  on-line are harvested for data analytics on behavior prediction.  Google is not an electronic library index; it is a data collection company.

Ever notice how you might be searching for a product or emailing someone, and then all of the ads that you see are targeted toward your recent search and seem to have a connection with a recent email?   Your data is being collected and used to predict your buying behavior.

But it gets worse.  Some lawyers use marketing companies to text you directly if you are communicating about an illness, a product, or a death.  This means that your internet carrier and phone company are harvesting your phone data and communicating directly through texts to your phone number.

And now there is a new frontier:  voice ads talking through your home and intelligent personal assistant devices (like Siri).  Google and Amazon are currently engaged in a battle over who will dominate the new voice-activated AI-enabled smart assistant market. Google Home can play information about new products through your house speakers.

But there are ways to fight back.  Burger King launched an ad that would read out the benefits of Whoppers on AI smart assistants and home speakers.  The script that the AI was to read was from Wikipedia.   But annoyed consumers re-wrote the Wiki text.  So that the AI assistant read that Whoppers were the worst burger and contained cyanide.   The ad was pulled.  And a least for a day, Siri was not reading about the benefits of a burger.

But soon Siri will be talking about the benefits of the pit bull attorney or the lawyers who “ride” and “hammer hard.”    We can only hope that this script is changed, and that quality and mastery becomes what matters when hiring an attorney.

For the first time, a Texas law that Beth Klein Boulder Attorney helped pass in 2011 may be used to land a trafficker in prison for life.

A Houston man was charged Friday with human trafficking for allegedly leading a prostitution ring, forcing women into sexual slavery through beatings and threats to their lives, according to the Harris County District Attorney’s Office.

Anthony Gardner, 27, is believed to be the first person charged by the Harris County District Attorney’s Office with the crime of “continuing trafficking of persons.” He also faces one charge of aggravated promotion of prostitution and two counts of compelling prostitution by force, authorities said.

The Texas Legislature created the trafficking criminal charge in 2011 so that a person can be charged if they use force, fraud or coercion to cause someone to engage in a sexual act on two or more occasions for 30 days or longer.

JoAnne Musick, sex crimes chief for the DA’s office, said she’s been unable to identify anyone charged with the crime in Texas. She said charging someone with the crime is rare because it’s hard for investigators to catch them.

“I am thrilled that a law we helped pass with Senator Leticia Van De Putte is being put to use” Beth Klein said. “I look forward to monitoring the trial, and I hope that the prosecution is successful.”

Gardner forced eight women, including two minors, to work for him on Houston streets since November 2014. Houston police collected evidence through a monthslong investigation that included interviewing women Gardner hired to commit sexual acts, which eventually led to them tracking him down and arresting him in January 2017. Houston Police Department’s Human Trafficking Unit worked in collaboration with the Harris County District Attorney’s newly formed Sex Crimes Division.

“Sex trafficking in Houston is an epidemic. Our new Sex Crimes Division is making prosecution of traffickers like Anthony Gardner a priority,” said Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg. “Gardner posed a real-time threat to the women he has trafficked and abused, but the tables have turned.”

Police identified one woman in June 2015 after an officer with HPD Vice Division contacted her based on an advertisement from BackPage.com, according to court documents. The then 17-year-old agreed to meet the undercover officers at a place at 2400 West South Loop to engage in a sexual act for $300.

She drove a vehicle registered by the defendant to the location. The woman called Gardner after being arrested on a phone number police recognized and said, “They got me, I’m going to jail.” She also referred to him as “Trouble,” which police knew as the defendant’s nickname.

The women working for the defendant allegedly had to make at least $1,000 a day by performing sexual acts. If not, they would face violent punishment.

One woman “A.L.,” who worked for Gardner shortly after turning 17, told police she had a child by him, according to court documents. She said that he would tell her how much to charge for sex acts, buy her hotel rooms to work out of and instructed all the money she made should be given to him.

A.L. also said a few weeks after Thanksgiving 2014 the defendant became physical with her and “backed her up against the wall, grabbed her by the throat, and started to choke her.” One woman also working for Gardner told police that he hit her so hard she chipped a tooth.

Musick said the District Attorney’s Office has made it a priority to track down criminals like Gardner.

“With human trafficking so prolific in Houston, it’s impossible to estimate how many people might fall into this position,” she said. “We anticipate that it’s a significant number of people. It’s very eye-opening just how much of this is going on in our own backyard.”

The defendant faces five years to life in prison for the charge of aggravated promotion of prosecution. He also faces up to 20 years for each count of compelling prostitution by force. His “continuous trafficking of persons” charge holds a penalty of 25 years to life in prison.

“With the new laws, I encourage any man or woman who’s being victimized to reach out to law enforcement for help.” Klein said. “We want this crime to end for all time.”