Cowboy Who?

“The Pentagon significantly escalated the federal response to the immigration enforcement protests in Los Angeles on Monday, mobilizing a battalion of 700 Marines and doubling the number of California National Guard troops in what officials described as a limited mission to protect federal property and agents, even as President Trump described the situation as ‘very well under control.’”
— New York Times

We all know the protests in LA are turning violent. Even our SWAT teams are scared they might get hit with a STOP FASCISM banner.

We won’t get into the ethics of how we “shouldn’t be sending green card holders to El Salvador without due process.” Let Congress deal with that. That’s not what this memo is about. This memo is about restoring LAW and ORDER. This memo is about AMERICA. This is about how our National Guard doesn’t feel SAFE.

To quote Fox News, “Look at it out there, it looks like a third world country.”

We need to address a serious national issue: Our agents and military personnel, wearing tactical armor and equipped with weapons straight out of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, are scared, and this sets an ominous precedent for future urban uprisings.

What’s next, people demanding to see warrants before their doors get kicked in? Wanting congressional oversight before drones patrol city parks? Are ICE agents supposed to pause every time a grandma gets tear-gassed for standing too close to a vegan food truck?

I even saw someone on TV holding a sign that said NATIONAL GUARD LOL. Next, they’ll start saying MARINES LOL or even AMERICA LOL. Our DEMOCRACY is getting threatened by these protesters expressing their First Amendment rights.

Frankly, the LAPD is too woke to shoot tear gas at children anymore, SWAT teams are hesitant to deploy tanks over yoga studios, and even some ICE agents hesitate before knocking down doors. It’s a slippery slope!

That’s why we need to send in Megatron and the Decepticons to stop the UN-AMERICAN LA riots.

Megatron doesn’t care about “civilian casualties” or “constitutional rights.” He’s too busy WINNING. While our so-called leaders are stuck writing sternly worded social media posts, Megatron is out there blasting obstacles into morally ambiguous dust.

He leads with laser cannon energy, not diplomacy. You think he’s going to “seek bipartisan consensus”? No. He’s going to level the library and call it conflict resolution.

Say what you will about him enslaving planets, at least he’s technically nonpartisan. He’s not pro-Trump, he’s not pro-Biden, he’s just anti-human. That’s the kind of neutrality America can respect.

And, naturally, Megatron needs backup. A two-thousand-ton war machine with a fusion cannon is barely enough to dent the willpower of a drum circle. We need the rest of the Decepticons, too.

Soundwave can hack into protester group chats and replace their “mutual aid” spreadsheets with “Back the Blue” dubstep remixes. BOOM. Morale shattered.

Starscream is the obvious choice for airstrikes without congressional approval. He’s fast and desperate for validation—just like half of Congress, but with wings.

Ravage, the robot panther, is built for crowd control. You think a K-9 unit is scary? Try a mechanical jungle cat with glowing red eyes and no leash laws.

Best of all: Decepticons can’t be defunded. They run on raw Energon and generational resentment, not taxpayer dollars. You can’t audit a grudge that spans galaxies.

Now, we know what you’re thinking: The Decepticons are war criminals from another planet! Well, maybe, but OUR war criminals need backup.

Or perhaps you’re thinking, Isn’t Megatron trying to conquer Earth? Maybe. But at least we’ll have a leader who will follow through.

Protesters say, “No justice, no peace.” Well, that’s fine because Megatron offers neither. Decepticons aren’t here to negotiate. They’re here to restore order (and harvest our resources, but that’s Phase Two).

The Decepticons don’t negotiate. They enforce compliance and suppress dissent, keeping us all SAFE (until Phase Two).

Choose America. Choose civil obedience. Authorize Decepticon deployment NOW!

PITTSBURGH—After the Steelers signed him to a one-year, $13.6 million deal with performance incentives, quarterback Aaron Rodgers reportedly purchased a lavish underground bunker Tuesday in the heart of Pittsburgh. “I’ve always loved Pittsburgh, and I’m excited to finally get settled into a new survival shelter in an undisclosed location deep beneath the city,” said the controversial four-time MVP, adding that he “couldn’t be happier” to have purchased the windowless, 10,000-square-foot fortified structure, which is equipped with custom air filters, a state-of-the-art water purification system, and years’ worth of emergency supplies, in addition to being located just a short drive from Acrisure Stadium. “This city has such a rich history, and the minute I opened the double reinforced steel doors of this home and entered its anti-woke chamber, I knew it was the one. I loved my old doomsday bunker in New Jersey, but there’s no place I’d rather stockpile weapons and prepare for the impending end of days than right here in the ’Burgh.” At press time, Rodgers had sparked marriage rumors after expressing excitement that his bunker had both a trad wife wing and a birthing chamber.

The post Aaron Rodgers Purchases Lavish Pittsburgh-Area Bunker appeared first on The Onion.

It’s a special “where are you now?” season at Ask a Manager and I’m running updates from people who had their letters here answered in the past.

There will be more posts than usual this week, so keep checking back throughout the day.

Remember the letter-writer whose employee regularly forgot important details and entire conversations? Here’s the update.

I’m the person who wrote in earlier this year about Arnold, my direct report who seemed to forget everything he was told. I appreciated your advice and all the commenters who had shared stories of dealing with their own memory loss at work or working with someone like Arnold. I also agree with your suggestion that what was going on wasn’t gaslighting. I think I was just so baffled by all my interactions with Arnold because it seemed he and I were operating in two fully separate realities.

My update is that Arnold’s memory problems are the least of my worries at this point. I did take your advice to try to be much clearer about the pattern of forgetting things and the impact it was having, but things got worse in other ways.

Part of the reason I hired Arnold was so he could manage a few of the high-profile projects that were previously on my own plate. These projects involve regularly meeting with and presenting to senior leaders, including the head of the department. The goal was for Arnold to take these over independently so that I could focus on other work with my team.

Likely due to the memory issues, Arnold repeatedly provided incorrect information to department leaders and made several awkward faux pas with them that made it seem like he didn’t understand what was going on in meetings. I provided regular feedback of my own and shared the feedback I was hearing from others. Arnold mostly blamed the issues on being new (he was in the role for well over six months at this point) or being paired with subpar coworkers for his work. So not only was he not able to independently take over the projects I hired him to take, but he was causing additional work for me in having to fix his mistakes and smooth things over with the leaders and coworkers he worked with.

I had a few instances where some of my best employees confided in me about issues in working with Arnold. They were frustrated about having to repeatedly tell him information or train him on a process, and that frustration would eventually show up in their interactions with him when he asked, again, how to do something. Arnold would then get angry with the coworkers because he said they were not helping him. But they had! He just didn’t remember it.

When I tried to coach him about these interactions and what he could do differently in the future, he started to point fingers rather than take any form of responsibility. His solution was to message me any time he had a disagreement with a teammate. He said he “figured they’d tell me about it first” and he wanted me to hear his side. What’s funny is that he was mostly outing himself on these issues, because his teammates rarely came to me about the run-ins Arnold was telling me about. It was also clear that he had no issue remembering these interactions with coworkers, so it made me feel even more confused about his memory loss related to the conversations we had that were relevant to his work!

It was clear that he needed a more formal performance plan to address the issues. I asked my manager to have a 1:1 with him so I could get her take before making the decision between a lighter coaching plan and a PIP. Arnold told my manager during that discussion that his hands were tied and that I needed to reprioritize the work of my whole team so more people could help him in his projects. I was stunned when my manager recapped the conversation, because it showed such a lack of judgment and understanding of the work on the team that Arnold would even suggest that as a workable solution. Luckily my manager had my back and was equally baffled by Arnold’s recommendation.

That was pretty much the last straw. (Also, the head of our department told me, unprompted, that she would support going straight to a PIP just based on the handful of work quality issues she knew about firsthand.)

During the PIP conversation, Arnold was surprised and angry. He said that I had set him up to fail and that he didn’t think things could improve unless some of his coworkers were replaced on the projects he was working on. I told him I had no plans to do that.

I wish I had a happier update! We’ll see how the next few months go.

The post update: my employee regularly forgets important details and entire conversations appeared first on Ask a Manager.

The men were detained after their immigration cases were administratively closed, according to FIEL Houston. Its account matches reports of similar immigration enforcement tactics witnessed in other cities in Texas and across the United States, in which people have been detained at courthouses shortly after their cases were dropped at the request of federal attorneys.

Ben Thompson:

To that end, while I understand why many people were underwhelmed by this WWDC, particularly in comparison to the AI extravaganza that was Google I/O, I think it was one of the more encouraging Apple keynotes in a long time. Apple is a company that went too far in too many areas, and needed to retreat. Focusing on things only Apple can do is a good thing; empowering developers and depending on partners is a good thing; giving even the appearance of thoughtful thinking with regards to the App Store (it’s a low bar!) is a good thing. Of course we want and are excited by tech companies promising the future; what is a prerequisite is delivering in the present, and it’s a sign of progress that Apple retreated to nothing more than that.

#Runa #RoninWarriors

I'm not just crazy, I'm totally INSANE! #CowboyWho

Marijuana prohibition is a Texas tradition. Unless Governor Greg Abbott vetoes Senate Bill 3, the state’s new ban on THC, the state is about to suddenly and drastically renew its commitment to that tradition—at a potential cost of thousands of jobs, billions of dollars in lost taxable revenue, and countless lives broken in the prison system. 

“We have to look at a long history in Texas,” said Austin Zamhariri, executive director of the Texas Cannabis Collective. “The modern enforcement of marijuana prohibition that exists today, that system began in Texas in 1915 in El Paso. It was the very first city in the entire country that prohibited marijuana.”

Zamhariri offered this historical perspective by way of explaining why our state is so eager to close the legal loophole that accidentally created a booming market for THC products about six years ago. “These systems have existed for 110 years,” he said. 

After becoming pioneers in prohibition, it’s perhaps not surprising that Texas has lagged behind the rest of the country on marijauna legalization. Almost half the country—24 states and Washington, D.C.—have some form of legal recreational marijuana. The Texas government never intended to become one of those states, but hemp legalization changed all that. 

Following a federal agriculture bill that allowed for commercial production of hemp, Texas enacted a law that legalized hemp in 2019, intending to open up a new agricultural market and the many potential uses of the plant for food, fiber, and construction materials. Hemp is legally defined as a form of the cannabis plant that contains less than 0.3 percent of THC, well below the threshold to make a person feel high. But that rigid definition failed to account for human ingenuity when it comes to getting stoned. 

By the time the Legislature convened this year, the state was flooded with largely unregulated THC products, many of which are functionally almost identical to marijuana but technically legal. Their usage has been normalized in our state, where many residents now see cannabis consumption as an alternative to alcohol or prescription drugs.

One of Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick’s top priorities for the 89th legislative session included a total ban on these THC products. That draconian push—which Patrick framed as a necessity to protect kids—for prohibition took many people by surprise. 

“There’s not a place in Texas where cannabis has not become normalized through this,” Zamhariri said. “People just kind of assumed this is a thing, you know, we finally actually have access.”

For the hemp industry and Texas cannabis consumers, the past five months and change have been full of dashed hopes, as they first fought (unsuccessfully) to stop the Senate from passing a total ban bill back in March and then tried to influence the details of the Texas House’s more moderate version that sought to restrict and regulate the industry rather than ban it outright. Then, in the final days of the session, when the House took up its version of SB 3 on the floor, a majority of Republicans voted to approve an amendment by state Representative Tom Oliverson—an ally to the lieutenant governor—that brought the bill back in line with the Senate’s total ban.

Oliverson, who is an anesthesiologist, insisted the extreme move was necessary to protect Texans. “In pain management, self-medication is the first step in treatment failure, and the unregulated hemp market is a hazard to these Texas patients,” he told the Texas Tribune. 

The effects will be far-reaching. The state hemp industry economic study estimates that the ban could cost over 50,000 jobs and about $5.5 billion in annual sales revenue. SB 3 bans popular products like THC-infused gummies, joints, vapes, and beverages, but industry experts worry that even products that have been commonplace and legal in Texas for years, like CBD oil or even edible hemp seeds (neither of which cause mind-altering effects), could still be caught up in the ban because of minute amounts of THC. 

Sarah Todd, a former cannabis business owner, broke down in tears as she described the impact not just to operations like hers but to Texans who she says have greatly benefited from the easy availability of cannabis. 

“I’m so devastated because this rolls back so many years of social acceptance, even here in Texas, where we have been so far behind on changing cannabis policy,” Todd told the Texas Observer.

Like so many other stakeholders, Todd spent many hours throughout the legislative session at the Capitol, meeting with lawmakers, testifying, and advocating for a more moderate version of the bill that would ban some (admittedly profitable) products like vapes while retaining recreational (but highly regulated) access to gummies, beverages, and other edibles.

“There was a huge, huge turnout from the hemp industry. Even though the regulations weren’t great, they were workable,” Todd said of the provisions in the earlier House version. 

According to the lieutenant governor, unsafe products are being marketed and sold to children by shady vendors at gas stations and smoke shops alike, and only a total ban can protect Texans. “We are not going to allow these retailers to circumvent the law and put Texans’ lives in danger,” Patrick told CBS in December.

Cannabis advocates like Heather Fazio, director of the Texas Cannabis Policy Center, argued that there are thousands of responsible hemp vendors in the state that have policies in place to prevent selling to underage buyers. In one widely publicized incident, a THC store employee refused to sell to Patrick himself without an ID. It’s a practice already commonplace in the industry, especially in upscale dispensary-style stores.

Fazio emphasized, “We have 8,000 retailers selling hemp products to mostly adult consumers, by choice.” Still, in the unregulated Texas THC market, there is no age restriction for purchasing THC products, and industry representatives at the Capitol were quick to acknowledge the need to establish clear rules that stop sales to minors, regulate currently unregulated products, and otherwise push out bad actors. “[The lack of an age restriction] is what has driven so much of the concern for change recently, as well as synthetic products that have made their way on the market.”

While the state’s nascent hemp industry broadly agrees on the need for regulation, many differ on where to draw the line.

“This industry has really grown and is starting to achieve some maturity, and there’s so many good actors and quality products on the market that this [ban] is going to devastate them,” Fazio said. “This is going to devastate their livelihood.”

Rather than eliminate demand, Fazio said that buyers would instead turn to the black market. “These products are legal, either cannabis or hemp, in all 49 other states so there’s no shortage of supply. So now what you’ve done is shift the demand from the legal market to the illegal market,” she said. “Who loves this the most are criminals and the cartels, because all the profit just got put right into their pockets.”

The backlash to the Patrick-led THC ban has come from across the spectrum—including, perhaps unexpectedly for the lieutenant governor, from many on the MAGA right. 

Since SB 3’s passage, the hemp industry and other THC advocates have been in a media war with Patrick as they each try to influence Governor Abbott, who has the power to sign the ban into law or veto it by June 22. Near the end of the session, Patrick held an impromptu press conference in which he laid out an array of THC treats on a table, spewed misinformation about some of the products, challenged press members to eat any of them (tossing a bag at the crowd), and lashed out at a Houston Chronicle reporter. Patrick said the ban was necessary to “save an entire generation” from “being hooked on drugs.”

Calls and letters from hemp industry advocates as well as military veterans’ groups have flooded the governor’s phone lines and offices urging Abbott to veto the bill. 

There’s some precedent for Abbott to use his veto pen on this. In June 2024, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis vetoed a similar bill that banned or restricted THC products. In a message accompanying the veto, DeSantis stated that the bill would “impose debilitating regulatory burdens on small businesses and almost certainly fail to achieve its purposes.” As governors of two red mega-states (both without legal recreational weed), Abbott and DeSantis have repeatedly sought to outdo each other on right-wing issues du jour. 

Lawsuits to block implementation of the bill are also likely. An injunction issued in a lawsuit in 2021 managed to block implementation of a statewide policy that would have banned sale of smokable hemp products, giving some hope for a similar outcome with the THC ban, especially since SB 3 varies so dramatically from federal laws around hemp. 

João Mitchell, general manager of ATX Organics, which operates a pair of Austin dispensaries selling hemp-based THC and CBD products, admitted that they would struggle to remain in business under the new law. Currently, they employ 15 people, all of whom make at least $20 per hour, he said. Mitchell said he is going to “hope and pray that the lawsuit goes through,” otherwise they would be forced to move the business, or worse. 

“Honestly, we’re probably more likely to shut down than we are to stay here in Texas and operate under [SB 3],” he told the Observer.

Aaron Owens, owner and lead farmer of Tejas Tonic, which makes low-dose THC beverages, said they were determined to adapt to the new law, even if it means changing their recipe and business model. He believes that the natural terpenes (flavor compounds) and essential oils in hemp can still benefit consumers, even with THC cut out of the picture.

“We’re going to continue to cultivate hemp, which this bill did not ban,” he said. “If we have to adjust our formulas to be compliant, we will continue to do that, and we’ll stay within the law, but we’re going to keep pushing, and we’re going to keep bringing the most effective products that I know how to create.”

Despite supporting a total ban on recreational THC, Patrick also backed HB 46, an expansion to the Texas Compassionate Use Program (often referred to by its initials as “teacup”), which is the state’s existing medical marijuana program.The TCUP expansion bill increases the number of licensed vendors allowed, allows for more pickup locations, and also adds chronic pain to the list of medically qualifying conditions—though that list is still stricter than those in many other states with similar programs. 

Morgan Miller was another frequent visitor to the Capitol this session, testifying about her use of hemp-based THC products to treat side effects of her chronic migraines. Chronic migraine sufferers have at least 15 days with headaches and migraine symptoms per month, and Miller said that hemp products help her calm her body down, stimulate her appetite, and ease bodily inflammation. It’s also helped her replace alcohol, which was hurting her liver alongside her migraine medication, with hemp-based THC drinks. 

“My quality of life is going to be down the drain,” Miller told the Observer. “It’s not only that I want hemp products, but I genuinely need them for my health and for my mental health.”

She said she “can’t really imagine” a world where she can no longer go to her neighborhood dispensary for hemp edibles and drinks. “I’m honestly really afraid of what my life is going to look like moving forward if this ban goes all the way through.”

Grace Delgado of Texas Cannabis Today assisted in the reporting of this story. 

The post Reefer Madness Returns to Texas with Dan Patrick’s THC Ban appeared first on The Texas Observer.

It’s an unusual situation for the lieutenant governor, long viewed by GOP activists as a stalwart conservative responsible for driving the Legislature rightward.

While protests in Houston, San Antonio and Dallas remained mostly peaceful, tensions flared in Austin Monday evening.

ATLANTA—Stressing that the rules were formulated for the safety of all Americans, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new guidelines Thursday governing female body hair. “Effective immediately, women nationwide are advised to remove all hair from arms, legs, underarms, and genital areas or suffer the legal consequences,” said CDC spokesperson Jamie Reardon, stressing that failure to comply with the newly issued weekly waxing schedule for women 18 and over would result in a $50 fine for every hair spotted that was over a millimeter long. “Even so much as a thin landing strip or faint peach fuzz on the cheeks should be reported to authorities. That is, unless the woman in question has written approval from a male family member. But why would they do that? It’s true that body hair doesn’t cause diseases, per se. But it does look very gross.” This reportedly represents the first significant revisions to U.S. female body hair guidelines since 1977, when CDC director David Sencer urged all women to grow a full and unapologetic bush.

The post CDC Publishes   Female Body Hair Guidelines appeared first on The Onion.

NEW BEDFORD, MA—Wishing he had seen more of life before taking on such a big commitment, local sailor Marcus Haines told reporters Tuesday that he regretted getting married to the sea so young. “I was so captivated by those big blue waves that I never stopped to consider whether I was rushing into things with the briny deep,” said the contemplative mariner, admitting that he sometimes wondered whether he might have ended up as a forester or even a mountaineer if he’d given himself more time to explore in his youth. “I was only 19 when I gave up the landlubber life to get married to the sea. Just a kid. I wish someone had taken me aside and told me to check out a few lakes and ponds before becoming a salty old sea dog. There was no reason for me to be in such a hurry. And to be clear, it’s not that I don’t care for the sea. But sometimes, when I’m at port, I’ll see a river and wonder: Could I have ended up sailing along that if I hadn’t been so quick to tie the knot with the deep?” Haines added that despite his regrets, he planned to stay married to the sea for his boat’s sake.

The post Sailor Regrets Getting Married To The Sea So Young appeared first on The Onion.

The post DHS Chief: ‘We Are A Nation Of Immigrants Who Came Here Between 1776 And 1943’ appeared first on The Onion.

The happy couple’s wedding will be first come, first served and open to the public, so loved ones are encouraged to get there early.

The post Ken Weathers and Timmie Sied appeared first on The Onion.

WASHINGTON—Disseminating grainy footage of the California Democrat meeting his disturbing and bloody end, Immigration and Customs Enforcement released a video Tuesday in which Gov. Gavin Newsom is seen being beheaded. “This is a message to the enemies of immigration enforcement: Gov. Newsom’s fate will be yours should you stand in the way of national purity,” an anonymous plainclothes ICE agent wearing a balaclava says as he holds a bound Newsom by his slicked-back hair and prompts him to recite a coerced statement about “paying for the sins of the American left and its insistence on universal human dignity.” “We call on the lieutenant governor and the Los Angeles mayor to cease their opposition immediately. We will continue to behead any Democratic presidential hopeful who stands in our movement’s way. Death to America!” The ICE agent later appears to grow frustrated when several swings of the machete are required to remove Newsom’s head, the result of excess hair gel dripping down the governor’s neck.

The post ICE Releases Gavin Newsom Beheading Video appeared first on The Onion.

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
You're saying, hey, the last panel has a nonsensical perspective. Well, perspective is part of the post-Eden fallen world.

Today's News:

mst3kgifs:

I’m gonna have to get you a nice top, too… maybe a pullover or something. Y’know, your birthday is coming up, maybe I can get you some corrective shoes that match?

In brief: The rest of this week will see the potential for storms in the Houston region, and as of right now Wednesday looks to have the most widespread activity. Due to the possibility of heavy rainfall within stronger thunderstorms, and the cumulative effect of multiple rounds of rainfall, we have put a Stage 1 flood alert in place for this week.

Unsettled pattern

As we’ve been discussing on the site, Houston remains in a pattern where the absence of high pressure leaves us open to passing atmospheric disturbances. We will continue to see these systems sweep through our region every 18 to 24 hours or so, bringing a chance of widespread showers and thunderstorms. Not everyone is going to get hit with storms every day, but the threat of heavy rainfall and lightning is going to be part of our weather story at least through the weekend.

We can count on daily rain chances of 50 percent, or higher, through Sunday. Due to the potential for isolated flooding with each round of of showers, and the cumulative effect of all this by the weekend, we have put a Stage 1 flood alert into place until further notice. This is to cover the potential for (mostly minor) street flooding issues.

Tuesday

The radar is quiet this morning, and I expect things to likely remain quiet until around noon. However, after that there is about a 50 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms, with perhaps the best chances in the central Houston area and to the far north of the metro region: i.e. Conroe and points north. Skies will otherwise be partly sunny with highs in the low- to mid-90s. Actual highs will depend on the timing and coverage of the rainfall. Winds will generally be light, except in thunderstorms. Lows tonight will be in the upper 70s with a slight chance of rain.

There is a slight chance of “excessive rainfall” on Wednesday in our region. (NOAA)

Wednesday

High resolution models are indicating that a particularly potent disturbance will sweep through on Wednesday. I’d put rain chances in the 70 or 80 percent ballpark, with a slight risk for excessive rainfall. The timing is tricky, but right now the most impactful rains and thunderstorms are likely to fall during the middle of the day. Highs will probably top out in the vicinity of 90 degrees.

Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday

Overall the pattern is not likely to change much over the second half of the week, and into the weekend. Days will be partly cloudy, with highs in the vicinity of 90 to 93 degrees, with plenty of humidity. Each day will bring perhaps a 50 to 70 percent chance of rain, with isolated, strong thunderstorms. If you have outdoor plans, there’s a chance you can squeeze them in, as it certainly will not be wall-to-wall rain. But you probably want to have a backup plan.

Next week

This overall pattern now seems likely to extend into the middle of next week, perhaps through about Tuesday or Wednesday, before we see more sunshine and warmer temperatures, along with a diminution in rain chances.

Thirteen people were arrested on various charges during the protest Monday, which ended when officers fired tear gas into a crowd that neared a federal building.

It’s an unusual situation for the lieutenant governor, long viewed by GOP activists as a stalwart conservative responsible for driving the Legislature rightward.

The funk music icon died following a "prolonged battle" with COPD and other underlying health issues, his family said.

Protests against immigration raids by the Trump administration spring up in at least nine other US cities.

A Texas man is being accused of giving his ex-partner the abortion pill without her knowledge.

From Boston to Houston, demonstrators elsewhere have followed the displays of opposition in LA.

Craighead Green Gallery in Dallas has announced the 40 artists selected for its 32nd annual New Texas Talent juried exhibition. See the full list below.

Each year the gallery invites a guest juror to review applications from Texas artists who are over 18 and not currently represented by a gallery. Launched in the 1990s, the New Texas Talent exhibition has given a platform to emerging artists for three decades. The gallery notes that artists showcased in the exhibition have gone on to receive media coverage in various local and regional publications.

This year’s juror is Ben Lima, an art writer and the founding Editor of Athenaeum Review, the University of Texas at Dallas arts and humanities journal. Mr. Lima’s writing has appeared in The Dallas Morning News, D Magazine, Art Lies, Might Be Good, Pastelegram, and other publications. 

New Texas Talent 32 will be on view from July 12 through August 23, 2025. A public reception will be held on Saturday, July 12, from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m.

Selected Artists
Jamie Aranda
Jan Hart Black
Nina Brodsky
Maclovio Cantu IV
Han Cao
Patrick Chuka (Gallery Pick)
Alec DeJesus
Hugh DeWitte
Karen Dorff
Kathy Elliott
Leslie Ezelle
Petra Mae Farr
Estefania Flo
Cole Gunter
Hillaree Hamblin
Weeda Hamdan
Sadie Harrison-Fincher
Jack Hein
Phoebe Heng
Lindsey Hurd
Norman Kary
Liz King
Sudeep Kumar
Gaurii S Kumaar
Mariana Leon
Dave Martin
Romulo Martinez
Mahsa Moein
Gabrielle Peters
GG Reid
Jalen Colton Sanchez
Mandla Senzanje
Shelley Smolen
Mike Smoller
Mary Step
David James Strain
Madhupriya Srinivasan
Crys Tucker
Debra Witter
Pamela Worley

The post Craighead Green Gallery Announces 2025 “New Texas Talent” Artists appeared first on Glasstire.

Envisioning the Hindu Divine: Expanding Darshan and Manjari Sharma features nine large-scale photographs by Manjari Sharma that depict nine Hindu deities (some are also recognized in the Buddhist and Jain traditions). These photographs are supplemented by 40 complementary sculptures from the South and Southeast Asian Art collection of the Birmingham Museum of Art (BMA) in Alabama. The exhibition is the San Antonio Museum of Art’s (SAMA) first show dedicated to Indian art. 

Darshan is a term that refers to the practice of beholding an image of a deity in a profound manner, which is a key component of worship. This devotional act of looking is also understood as reciprocal: the deity “looks” back at the worshipper, and bestows blessings in return. 

Hinduism features three primary deities: Brahma is the creator, Vishnu the preserver, and Shiva the destroyer. Together, they personify the cyclical nature of the universe. At the same time, there exists a vast profusion of interlocking deities with multiple incarnations, identities, names, and aspects, and some consider all the various gods to be emanations or manifestations of a single one. Above all, the Hindu religion has no dogma or canon, and all stories, beliefs, and traditions (however contradictory) are regarded as equally valid. In practice, as in folk Catholicism, Hindu devotees often have a favorite, often regional, deity incarnation or image type that they hold particularly dear, with which they have a particularly intense and personal relationship. 

Envisioning the Hindu Divine is accompanied by a sophisticated catalog that treats the complexities of Hindu devotion, and it also has an informative section devoted to each of Sharma’s photographs. Titled Expanding Darshan: Manjari Sharma, To See and Be Seen, it is edited by the exhibition’s curator, Katherine Anne Paul, who is the Virginia and William M. Spencer III Curator of Asian Art at BMA, where the exhibit originated.

Emily Ballew Neff, the Kelso Director at SAMA, noted in the press release that Envisioning the Hindu Divine provides visitors with the opportunity “to experience the profound connections between history, spirituality, and contemporary creativity.” In a statement to the author, she added that the opening “perfectly captured the magic that happens when artist, curator, and community come together, including performers from San Antonio’s South Asian dance schools, to amplify the beauty, vibrancy, and enduring relevance of Hindu gods and goddesses in — and also well beyond — India.”

Sharma, who was born and raised in Mumbai, India, and now resides in the Los Angeles area, has a background in photographic portraiture. She is deeply familiar with sculpted and painted depictions of the gods in temples she has visited throughout her life. Sharma undertook this project after realizing that she had never seen devotional images of Hindu gods in the form of photographs. It was her goal to utilize the medium of photography to “evoke a similar spiritual response” to the gods that she had experienced with her parents when they had looked at images in other mediums. Click here to hear the artist provide a short introduction to her Darshan series, which was made near the beginning of the project. 

Sharma resolved to photographically recreate Hindu deities within diorama-like shrines in a temple context. This entailed putting together a substantial team of models, make-up artists, and costume makers. Initially, Sharma had utilized ready-made costumes, before concluding that they had to be custom-made to fully realize her vision. 

Ultimately, it took a team of about 35 craftspeople to build Sharma’s human model/deity-inhabited sets. The complexity of the latter are made clear in the videos linked in this review. Each element in Sharma’s photographs was constructed by hand, rather than created digitally. When her camera focuses on her deities, portions of her sets are, to varying degrees, out of focus. As a result, the three-dimensional sets create a strong sense of depth. 

I discuss each of Sharma’s individual photographs below, as well as some of the sculptural comparanda from BMA. 

Lord Ganesha

Fittingly, the exhibition commences with the elephant-headed god Ganesha, who is the god of beginnings. With his elephant trunk, and attributes such as his axe and lasso, he can either put obstacles in one’s way, or remove them. Consequently, one should pray to him at the beginning of every endeavor. Jains and Buddhists also worship Ganesha.

Infinitely useful, Ganesha is the most beloved of the Hindu gods, and the most approachable. He is not a remote, intimidating god. He loves sweets — perhaps a little too much — and he usually has a heaping bowl of laddu treats on hand. Ganesha is vain and childish. He can also be responsible and scholarly. When the moon laughed at him, he broke off one of his tusks, tossed it at the mocking orb, and uttered a curse. This is why, according to one tradition, Ganesha sometimes holds a broken tusk in one of his hands, as a threat (backed by a curse) to the moon. A different tradition holds that Ganesha broke off his tusk to record the whole of the Hindu epic The Mahabharata — without missing a word — when it was being recited by the sage Vyasa. Yet others view the cone-shaped object as a radish, revered as the first fruit of spring. 

Ganesha has more than a thousand honorific names and titles, as well as a multitude of origin stories. He is usually regarded to be the son of Shiva and his consort Parvati (or at least the latter). By one account, in Shiva’s absence, Parvati grew lonely and created a son, who guarded her door. When Shiva returned from lengthy wanderings, the hapless boy tried to bar his entry, and the angry god beheaded him. Parvati was despondent, so Shiva, who vowed to resurrect the boy with the head of the next creature that wandered by, sliced off the head of an elephant and created the composite creature we know as Ganesha. My favorite of these origin stories avers that Shiva and Parvati got turned on while watching two elephants mate. They transformed themselves into elephants and followed suit. When their baby was born, he had an elephant’s head. For a thorough treatment of the god, see Paul B. Courtright, Ganesa: Lord of Obstacles, Lord of Beginnings (Oxford University Press, 1985). 

One never sees a skinny, emaciated Ganesha, since he is a god associated with prosperity. Sharma’s Ganesha possesses gold jewelry studded with rubies and emeralds. The inscription in the foreground of her photograph translates as “wealth, savings, and profit.” Perhaps uniquely, Sharma’s Ganesha holds a pair of lassos in his rear hands. This iconographic variation was unplanned. Sharma had intended to place an axe in his right hand, but it would not fit into the carved and painted hand that had been created for him, so she opted to outfit that hand with another lasso. The rat at Ganesha’s feet is his vahana (animal-vehicle). According to one legend, Ganesha’s fall from the rat caused the moon to laugh at him. The rat offers a laddu ball to Ganesha. 

Offerings are traditionally made to Hindu deities, and I noticed, on the way into the exhibition gallery, that the Dale Chihuly glass installation served as an appropriately colorful offering and gateway to Lord Ganesha’s domain. 

The model for Lord Ganesha was very familiar to the artist. Pandit Santosh Tiwari served as her family’s priest. For an overview of how the set and Ganesha’s prosthetics and costume were fabricated, see Sharma’s video.

In the gallery, Sharma’s image is surrounded by seven Ganesha sculptures from several Asian countries. In the Khmer example illustrated above, the crowned Ganesha has only two arms. He holds a laddu treat in his left hand, and a radish or broken tusk in his right hand. 

One distinction unique to Javanese Ganeshas is that they are seated in a pose that allows the soles of their feet to come together, sometimes to touch. The raised arms of the above Ganesha hold an axe and a noose. He partakes of his bowl of treats with his trunk. Ganesha’s right hand, which is restored, holds an additional treat instead of a broken tusk or a radish. 

The small Nepalese bronze Ganesha illustrated above may have constituted a portion of an oil lamp. Such lamps, in Nepal and elsewhere, serve a symbolic function, with the flame serving a revelatory, obstacle-moving function. 

This Ganesha wears an enormous, Nepalese crown, and is framed by a mandorla surmounted by a small canopy. His rear-most hands hold aloft a lasso and an axe, while the hands belonging to his middle arms make auspicious gestures. His foremost right hand holds either a radish or a tusk, and his left hand brings his bowl of treats close to his trunk. This Ganesha is slim, and much more anthropomorphic than other examples we have seen. He is more like a man with an elephant’s head than an elephant that mimics a human. 

In some locales, particularly Tibet, land of polyarmed deities, Ganesha has up to 32 arms. Europeans, of course, often viewed the animal-headed, multi-armed Hindu deities as demonic and monstrous. See Partha Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters: A History of European Reactions to Indian Art (University of Chicago Press, 1992).

Maa Laxmi

Laxmi is the goddess of wealth. Even her colors — red, yellow, and gold — denote wealth. Bejeweled, she emerges from a giant water lily, with coins flowing from one of her upraised right hands, which is in the abhayamudra gesture, meaning no fear. She nestles a gold-filled pot with an arm that terminates with a hand making the wish-granting gesture. 

Laxmi is framed by a pair of white elephants that hold a ritual water pot in their trunks, creating a stream of holy water that blesses Laxmi. Two images of Ganesha are embossed on the golden frame. Ganesha and Laxmi are closely connected (and sometimes said to be related), due to their auspiciousness and connection with prosperity. Devotees of Vishnu regard Laxmi as one of his primary wives. Laxmi is also sometimes considered to be the daughter of Durga, a female goddess who took on the powers of the male gods in order to slay the buffalo demon.

Sharma’s model for Laxmi was the actress and model Sonampreet Bajwa, who, one year after this photograph was made, was crowned Miss India, 2012.

Water-immersed or water-spouting elephants are equated with monsoon rain clouds, and their trumpeting is likened to thunder. They are also a symbol of royalty, and thus wealth, so it is symbolically appropriate to include them in a scene with Laxmi. 

Lord Brahma

As noted above, Brahma is the creator, one of the Hindu trinity known as the Trimurti. Brahma is understood to have four heads, each of which faces one of the four directions. Here he floats in the heavens, surrounded by cotton candy-like clouds, seated on a giant lotus flower. A gold disk, symbolizing the sun, is situated behind his heads, and is amplified by the wall color behind the photograph. The book he holds is a mantra that symbolizes his authorship of the Vedas, the foundational Hindu texts. 

Sharma’s model, Suhas Joshi, is a musician and architect. His beard is real, not part of his costume, which is why he was nicknamed Brahma by his friends. 

Lord Vishnu

Vishnu, the preserver, defends the world from all attacks, sometimes as incarnations such as Krishna and Rama, who figure prominently in India’s great epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Vishnu typically has blue skin. He is closely associated with a five-hooded serpent that, as noted in the catalog by curator Katherine Anne Paul, is “an aspect of Vishnu called Ananta (without end) or Shesha (remainder), [and] is the primordial entity that navigates and encompasses the universe” (p. 64). 

Sharma’s Vishnu maintains a balanced, confident pose as he stands amidst the frothing, cosmic sea, a point of creation. His mighty weapons are a discus and a mace. His lotus blossom symbolizes purity. Vishnu’s decorated conch shell is a wind instrument that also serves as a weapon, as well as a symbol of infinity. 

Sharma’s model for Vishnu was the Bollywood actor Pransh Chopra. 

Indian gods are not above usurping the roles of other gods, including members of the Trimurti. Here Vishnu, the preserver and not the creator, dreams the world into existence, aided by his wives’ massages. A lotus grows out of his navel, from which Brahma emerges to create the world. 

Lord Shiva

The third member of the Hindu trinity, Lord Shiva is the god of destruction. He is also known for his cosmic dance, as Shiva Nataraja. In bronze examples, he is surrounded by a halo of flames. (See my discussion of Shiva Nataraja in a review of the Asia Society collection.)

In Sharma’s rendition of Shiva, flames spring from the level of Shiva’s feet, and a flaming halo surrounds his head. His third eye, located on his forehead, is closed because it emits destructive rays. The goddess Ganga is represented on Shiva’s head, because the sacred river Ganges flows onto his hair. Shiva’s abode is Mount Kailash, the source of the Ganges, and snow covered peaks are visible in the foreground. 

From head to foot, Sharma’s Shiva is ornamented with golden cobras, symbolizing his purifying powers, particularly his ability to offer protection from poison. His destructive dance also serves as a purifying prelude to rebirth. 

Shiva tramples Apasmara, the dwarf of ignorance. With his outstretched hands, he holds his primary weapon, a trident, which is associated with water, as well as a drum. He makes the fear-allaying gesture with one hand, and the other arm reads like an elephant’s trunk, with fingers pointing to his upraised right leg, which offers liberation and refuge.

Shiva was modeled by Robin Chaurasia. Click here to view a short video of the Shiva photoshoot and the preparations made for it.

Maa Durga

As noted above, when the male gods failed to vanquish a demon that threatened the universe (usually pictured as a water buffalo), Durga, who sprang from the skin of Parvati, came to the rescue. She gathered all the weapons of the male gods, ranging from Vishnu’s discus and mace to Shiva’s trident. In so doing, Durga took on all of their fearsome powers. 

Sharma’s Durga sits atop a tiger, calmly stilling fear with one hand, while her weapon-bearing arms radiate in a circular manner, like spokes in a wheel. 

Sharma’s model was the actor, producer, and designer Kanchan Jadhav.

In the sculpture pictured above, Durga stands triumphant, atop the vanquished buffalo demon, which she grasps by the tail. The buffalo is dead, so the shape-shifting demon emerges from its corpse in human form. But Durga grasps it by the hair, ensuring its destruction at her hands. 

Lord Hanuman

Somewhat similar to Ganesha, Hanuman is a beloved composite creature. He is part man, and part monkey. An astonishingly strong, fearsome warrior, with the power to fly, Hanuman is best-known through the Hindu epic Ramayana. 

Sharma’s photograph depicts a dramatic moment in the Ramayana, when Hanuman had to gather herbs to cure an army of bears and monkeys fighting in support of Rama and Lakshman. For the sake of expediency, instead of harvesting the herbs by hand, he broke off the top of an herb-laden mountain and flew back with it. 

The body builder Mahendra Chavan posed as Hanuman. In 2017, he won the title Mr. World Champion. 

This head is identifiable as that of Hanuman due to his substantial crown and bracelet. The placement of Hanuman’s hand, palm-up against the crown, is a convention used to indicate flight.

This figure’s feet are posed with one bent backwards and the other bent downward, to signify flight. Hanuman bears a sword and a flower. The latter may represent the herbs he brought from the mountaintop. 

Saraswati, by tradition a consort of Brahma, is the goddess of wisdom, learning, music, writing, and the arts. She typically plays the veena, and her attributes (as in Sharma’s photograph) include prayer beads and a book. Sharma’s model for this photograph was the television journalist Devika Chitnis.

In the video screen visible in the above photograph, the model for Hanuman is being outfitted with his prosthetic nose.

A work such as the one pictured above could have served as an architectural ornament, as an object featured in ritual processions, and/or a witness to or focus of ritual rites. 

Maa Kali

Kali, who, according to one tradition, originated from Durga’s sweat, can manifest Durga’s rage. Also associated with time, Kali personifies mass violence and death. 

Kali sports a garland of human heads, and a skirt of severed arms and hands. In each of her ten hands, she holds a weapon — they are taken, as in the case of Durga, from the principal male gods — or a severed head. She stands on a pile of skulls, amidst waves of splashing blood. 

Kali was modeled by Payal Bhattacharya. Click here to watch a short video in which she discusses her role.

In her video made at the inception of this project, Sharma noted that she moved to the United States to pursue her studies. Her pilgrimages to museums and galleries replaced her pilgrimages to temples. Art replaced deities as esteemed objects of wonder and contemplation. “The museum had become the temple,” she declared. Now Sharma’s photographs have become vehicles for enlightenment and aesthetic devotion in museums. 

 

Envisioning the Hindu Divine: Expanding Darshan and Manjari Sharma was organized by the Birmingham Museum of Art, which is the only museum to possess the complete Darshan series. The exhibition is on view at the San Antonio Museum of Art through July 6, 2025.

***

Ruben C. Cordova is an art historian and curator. He has addressed the art and culture of greater India in several pieces for Glasstire: “Buddha, Shiva, Lotus, Dragon”: New York’s Asia Society Masterpieces at the Kimbell; Cupid’s Revenge 2: Apollo and Daphne, From Ancient Greece to Airbrushed Fantasy; 15 Years of Shahzia Sikander’s Extraordinary Realities in Houston; and Deborah Keller-Rihn’s photography in Glasstire’s Best of 2024. Cordova has also reviewed Tree and Serpent: Early Buddhist Art in India at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the New Journal of the Philosophical Research Association (2023).

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The judge’s order prohibits the federal government from using the act to deport people in a large swath of Texas who are accused of being Tren de Aragua members. But the ruling did not order anyone’s release from custody.

We are excited to announce a new version of GifCities, Internet Archive’s GeoCities Animated GIF Search Engine! 

GifCities was a special project of Internet Archive originally done as part of our 20th Anniversary in 2016 to highlight and celebrate fun aspects of the amazing history of the web as represented in the Wayback Machine. Since then, GifCities GIFs have been used in innumerable web projects, artistic works, and in the media and press, including this internet-melting combination of GifCities GIFs and the British Royal Wedding in this New York Times article and the avant-GIF “GifCollider” exhibit at Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive.

The new version of GifCities includes a number of new improvements. We are especially excited at the drastic improvement in “GifSearchies” by implementing semantic search for GifCities, instead of the hacky old “file name” text search of the original version. Note that via the “Special Search” tab, you can still search only by the old text-based index, for, uh, search index nostalgia purposes. But wait, you say, I need a specific-sized animated GIF for my project! No problemo, you can also now search for GIFs by size too. State of the world got you a bit anxious, dear reader? Calm thyself with 51 results pages of 150×20 pixel blinkies.

We also updated the results interface to add pagination for results instead of the original infinite scroll — that would sometimes paralyze your browser after a non-infinite amount of scrolling. And as with GifCities v1, each GIF links to the archived GeoCities page on which it originally appeared, many of these wonders unto themselves. 

Finally, in the spirit of “sharing is caring” and “every GIF is truly a GIFT,” we have added the ability to make GifGrams that you can share with your special someones. Nothing says “I’m thinking of you” more than a custom webcard of GifCities GIFs and inspirational text, like “Hang in There” or “The Web is Yours for the Making.”

GifCities’s new semantic search index used a model called CLIP-ViT L/14 to analyze each frame of the GIFs and searching applies a “nearest neighbors algorithm” to find GIFs that match a vectorized query, allowing you to enter nuanced searches like “blue sparkling border‘ or (everybody’s favorite performing rodent) ‘”dancing hamster” and get matching results. Need more wolf snowglobe GIFs in your life? Yes, you do. Here ya go.

Thanks to all the GifCities enthusiasts out there that send us many messages each week on how they are using and enjoying the site. More details on GeoCities and GifCities are in the About page and a special thanks to enthusiast Ben Friesen who helped prototype using CLIP on GifCities. Now go browse some GeoCities GIFs and send some GifGrams!

OTTAWA — As Americans face the horror of U.S. troops being deployed to American cities on the orders of President Donald Trump to break up peaceful protests, the Canadian government under Prime Minister Mark Carney is looking southward and firmly saying “that, but less.” Under Bill C-2, the “Strong Borders Act,” which was tabled last […]

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