Eye | Vogue Explains Meerkat | East Austin, Texas Under the Lens | Rick Perry Called By God To Serve

Meerkat Obsessed

What Is Meerkat and Why Is Everyone Obsessed With It? Vogue.com

If you weren’t in Austin last weekend for SXSW, Vogue writes Meerkat is a new app that allows users to easily livestream video from their cellphones onto their Twitter accounts.

Another sign of the imminent rise of Meerkat is that Twitter decided to remove Meerkat from its social graph. So while Meerkat users can still broadcast live videos on their Twitter feeds, a user’s followers will no longer get a notification when a new live stream begins, making it harder to know when to tune in. This move came shortly after Twitter purchased a similar app, Periscope. But the social graph ban only increased Meerkat’s draw—who wouldn’t want to root for the little app that could?

Austin’s Friends & Neighbor’s Jill Bradshaw

The Fashion Insider’s Guide to Austin Vogue.com

In town for SXSW, Vogue’s Laird Borrelli-Persson tracked down hot spots in Austin, starting out with Jill Bradshaw’s Friends & Neighbors. ‘I wanted to see more of the sky,’says Bradshaw, who returned to her college town from Nolita in Manhattan. In New York, the teepee lover ran I Heart, a fashion boutique for emerging labels. Friends & Neighbors, mixes vintage clothing, housewares, music, and food in her signature colorful way.

Her partners in Friends & Neighbors—located in a house in East Austin —are Greg Mathews and Jade Place Mathews, who run local eatery Hillside Farmacy, as well as Brooklyn’s El Diablo Tacos at Union Pool. Check out more Austin hot spots.  

Cruel Joke in Austin

Austin mayor Steve Adler called this week’s placement of professionally-printed ‘whites-only’ stickers on six businesses on the city’s East Side (home to Vogue.com highlights above) ‘an appalling and offensive display of ignorance in our city … Our city is a place where respect for all people is a part of our spirit and soul. We will keep it that way.’

State Rep. Dawnna Dukes (D-Austin) spoke loud and clear on the incident:

‘Some jokes just are not funny. If this is a joke at all, it is tasteless,’ Dukes wrote. ‘Pardon mon française mais, I will be damned if this will occur in my House District, district 46 on my watch on 12th St. in this historical Black Community or any community.’

Dukes, wrote on her Facebook page:

Each and every business that was tagged with a sticker is victim to an act of hatred. As a community, we should come together to protect. Questions should and always will be asked about these types of situations. Asking for explanations is what I do. I brought this situation to the attention of authorities and the media. When I notified the City Managers office, not a single business entity had reported this to law enforcement. A sign with a City seal and not reported lends the perception of credibility. I strongly feel that whoever did this act is a narcissist and a bully. One should never back down from these types. Instead, one should call them out publicly. One cannot assume that these signs are indeed a result of gentrification, that is not proven. But it indeed is an attempt to divide and conquer. Do not allow a racial divide to widen, do not allow the coals of hatred to be fanned. Instead, support the community and its businesses who were victims. Help everyone push back on this hatred and make the community stronger as a whole.

At this moment, officials don’t know if the stickers represent a true hate crime, a complaint over the growing gentrification of the East Austin neighborhood — complete with rising rents and white hipsters, a possible fraternity prank as former state Rep. Gonzalo Barrientos (D-Austin) suggested, or a for-real stunt by the shop owners. The latter seems unlikely but continues as a possibility.

Rick Perry Rejects New Hire’s Views On God Disavowing Women Presidents

We can’t utter the words ‘Austin, Texas’ without thinking of the state’s former governor and Republican presidential hopeful Rick Perry. Although there are no national poll results suggesting that Perry should mount another presidential run in 2016, the former Texas governor made a significant hire of Jamie Johnson on Wednesday. An ordained evangelical pastor tasked with running Perry’s outreach to social and fiscal conservatives in early voting states, Johnson is on record with ultra conservative views on God’s disdain for the idea that women are qualified to be president of the United States.

In a 2011 email, Mr. Johnson, employed by conservative Rick Santorumat the time, questioned whether a woman should be president. “Is it God’s highest desire, that is, his biblically expressed will,…to have a woman rule the institutions of the family, the church, and the state?’’ Mr. Johnson wrote, according toa report in The Des Moines Register from 2012. The email resurfaced in Talking Points Memo, a liberal blog, writes The New York Times.

Noting that his last three chiefs-of-staff were women, former Governor Perry rejected Johnson’s views as reflective of his own. Explanation accepted Rick Perry, but it IS true that you believe you have a hot line to God, so it’s understandable that you would hire a man who also believes he’s on the same party line. The Atlantic explained back in 2011:

At 27 years old, I knew that I had been called to the ministry. I’ve just always been really stunned by how big a pulpit I was gonna have. I still am. I truly believe with all my heart that God has put me in this place at this time to do his will.

It’s a minor matter, but based on research from Texas’ Baylor University — the majority of American men do not believe that God is male. With women, it’s another story and one that surely stands in our way of fair and equal treatment in the US. Read on at AOC: Americans Maintain Four Different Views of God.

We last covered Rick Perry in his 2011 campaign, when his attachment to evangelicals was front and center in his campaign. In his August 6, 2011 Christian prayer event held in Houston’s Reliant Stadium — one billed as ‘a non-denominational, apolitical Christian prayer meeting’, Perry stood with Mike Bickle and his International House of Prayer powerhouse who believes that Oprah Winfrey is the harbinger of the Antichrist. And you thought it was only Obama. Correction there — President Obama IS the Antichrist.

In 2011 Rick Perry also said that he is not responsible for the views of his close associates, prompting us to write Hear This Rick Perry If Oprah Is A Harlot, I Am A Harlot, Too.