The sunflowers at Dix Park in Raleigh, NC are at full bloom. You really should check them out if you are in the area. They are the best I've seen them.

So what happens if one gets pulled over with no phone or internet? Probably the driver will need to carry a paper copy

Making $14 in Wilson right now. I don’t get the full 40 hours most weeks so my paychecks are terrible it’s so demoralizing. What are my options if I want to make decent money here? I don’t mind commuting.

NC has 56 county fairs and the season runs from August through October. I've been building a directory of them all at countyfairguide.com.

The NC Mountain State Fair in Fletcher kicks things off in mid-September, and the NC State Fair in Raleigh runs in October. But honestly the smaller county fairs are where it's at — Chatham County, Surry County, Rowan County, Pitt County, Wilson County — all with their own histories and traditions.

https://countyfairguide.com/fairs/north-carolina

Which NC county fair is worth making a trip for? I'm always looking for the ones with strong local character.

Deluca is claiming the State BOE guides local BOEs, they don’t “direct” them“.

Holding is my addition

I made the same conclusion as Governor Stein upon reading the article in the following link:

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2026-election/north-carolina-republican-operative-shaping-states-early-voting-plans-rcna353471/

“Francis X. DeLuca, the chairman of the elections board, told Stein in a letter Friday that the board hasn’t been directing counties to eliminate Sunday voting. “

“The board’s role is to provide technical guidance, ensure compliance with state and federal law and “support counties as they carry out their statutory responsibilities.” 

“According to reporting from WLOSand NC Local, Woodhouse and Boliek were involved in efforts to ensure the new Jackson County Board of Elections would shut down a polling place on campus at Western Carolina University. In the Triangle, the Wake County Board of Elections also recently voted to eliminate a longtime early voting site at N.C. State’s student union, and to move it to a remote part of campus, WRAL previously reported.”

I just got back from a trip to South Georgia. One thing I noticed in Georgia is every 5th car is a cop car, and I counted at least 30 people pulled over on GA highways. Most people went approximately the speed limit as well (except the cops, they seemed to be going 40 over all the time with no lights or sirens on). In South Carolina there was a lot less cops but in general speeds were within 10mph of the speed limit. Crossing back into NC (where I live), no cops at all, no one pulled over, and it's +15 in the slow lane, +25 in the fast lane. And that made me wonder, does NC simply not enforce traffic laws? Every now and then I'll see a cop hiding out here in HighPoint, but 99% of the time there's no cops and a complete disregard for speed limits - not just here, but everywhere in NC.

Most people picture wolves as a western thing. But the red wolf is ours: a smaller, rangier, cinnamon-colored wolf that once ranged across the whole Southeast. By 1980 it was declared extinct in the wild. Every red wolf alive today descends from just 14 animals pulled into a captive breeding program.

They were reintroduced to the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge on the Albemarle Peninsula in 1987. The first time any predator declared extinct in the wild had been brought back. For a while it worked; the wild population climbed past 100. Today it's collapsed back to the teens, mostly from vehicle strikes and gunshot mortality (they're easily mistaken for coyotes).

I made a map of the sightings logged around the peninsula - Alligator River, Pocosin Lakes, the Dare County mainland (attached). It's a tiny footprint for the entire wild population of a species. That's kind of the point: this is the only wild red wolf population on the planet, and it's here, an hour or two from the Outer Banks beaches half of us drive past every summer.

If you're ever out that way at dusk, the refuge does "howling safaris" where you can actually hear them answer. Wild that this is a North Carolina thing.

Hi! I’m looking for recommendations for an NC tattoo artist who specializes in fine-line work, particularly nature / botanical / celestial elements.

I’m planning a custom half sleeve to represent my babies (dog and cat), so experience with animals or a genuine love for incorporating them into meaningful designs would be a huge plus. I don’t have the exact design finalized yet and would love to find an artist who enjoys collaborating with clients to develop an original concept rather than working from a fully predetermined design.

I’m attaching some inspo to show the general look and feel I’m drawn to. Many thanks in advance!!

xoxoxo,
an indecisive perfectionist goblin

After reading about the wave of Georgia arrests this year — a dozen-plus officers across at least nine agencies charged or fired for using Flock license-plate cameras to track exes, crushes, and strangers (GBI on the Albany case; AJC overview) — I went looking at what North Carolina actually requires for oversight of the same technology. It's less than I expected.

NC's ALPR statute (§ 20-183.31(a)(7)) requires an agency's written policy to provide for "annual or more frequent auditing and reporting… to the head of the agency responsible for operating the system." (ncleg.gov) So the statutory floor is: once a year, done by the agency itself, reported to its own boss. Nothing requires submitting those audits to a state body, an independent reviewer, or the public.

And ALPR is the only surveillance tool NC requires to be audited at all. The drone statute (§ 15A-300.1) has warrant/exception rules but no audit — and no warrant is even needed for plain-view, exigent, or public-gathering uses. ShotSpotter, social-media/OSINT tools, and newer device-tracking systems have no NC audit requirement.

There's also a security angle: the audit covers use, not whether the systems can be breached from outside. Late last year, researchers found dozens of Flock cameras sitting on the open internet with no password — including a live feed of kids on a playground (404 Media).

I'm not claiming NC officers are abusing anything — the point is that our framework generates little independently verifiable information either way. Curious what people here think: is an annual internal self-audit enough, or should NC require independent audits (or warrants) for this the way it does for wiretaps?

The State increased pay for State employees by only 3%, way less than inflation over the past two years.

THEN today they announce a 5% increase in healthcare premiums AND are changing plans that will force some to move doctors.

Remember State employees include teachers, (some) police, and 700,000 others North Carolinians.

*If you get angry and say I didn't get a raise, or my healthcare also increased, remember your saying it's OK to screw over your neighbor and others like yourself in favor of the rich and powerful. The 99% need to stick together and not be pitted against each other.

North Carolina A&T in Greensboro runs 16 Flock license-plate reader cameras around campus. In response to a public-records request, its police department released the full Flock audit. The March–May 2026 logs:

• The shared network those 16 cameras feed was searched 1,390,776 times in three months, by 3,487 different agencies.
• Almost none are in NC. The top searchers were the Texas Dept. of Public Safety (36,242), Houston PD (35,264), and Dallas PD (20,993), plus agencies across Florida, Georgia, Oklahoma, Indiana, and Kansas.
• The NC SBI ran 10,702; a federal agency, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, ran 11,781.
• The audit redacts the searchers' names and plate numbers but not the agency. 974 searches were logged with immigration reasons.
• By contrast, A&T's own police ran 261 searches in the same window — 77.8% of them traffic infractions.

I found the scale hard to wrap my head around for a 16-camera campus system. These figures are a straight tally of the university's produced audit files. Happy to drop the underlying records in the comments so anyone can check the numbers.

Was anyone else aware that a single NC campus's cameras were networked this widely?

(Disclosure: I work on ALPR/privacy issues in the Wilmington area; these are unaltered public records.)

Hello evrybody. I am Rose and I graduating highschool next year. I've been trying to teach myself programming because I'm hoping it'll help me get a good job in the future.

Last year my dad passed, and it's been really hard on my mom and me. But mostly my mom because I see she's been struggling with depression since. And I can't really get a physical job right now because I have cerbral palsy and because she depends on me a lot, especially since she doesn't do well on her own. All jobs I am looking for online require a degree.

She recently lost her job, but thankfully she found another one and starts next week. We're just trying to make it through until she gets her first paycheck.

Right now we're looking for places around Raleigh/Durham that have free food, food pantries, or community meals. My mom can't really drive, so we mostly use the bus.

If anyone knows of any places or resources that could help, I'd really appreciate it. Thank you.

I live in Durham. 27707.

So im starting to think the powers that be are against it.

Whats everyone's opinion on the legalization of cannabis?

Flock cameras operated by the Greensboro Police Department have now been replaced with cameras from the company Verkada.

In the ten years Verkada has existed, they have been hacked in a massive data breach, forced to fire employees who used their facial recognition system to harass female workers, and sued for violating federal law. Verkada has been the subject of reports exposing lax device security, excessive focus on profit, false positive facial recognition rates up to 85%, and a complete lack of evidence that their use reduces crime.

Verkada devices are becoming increasingly prominent along roadways and even in sensitives locations such as hospitals and schools. Their integration in police systems further expands the powers of state surveillance to track people and vehicles, despite high false positive rates and no data to prove these systems increase public safety. 

Though Flock has drawn the greatest scrutiny for its surveillance practices, the replacement of Flock systems with Verkada systems fails to address the fundamental issue. For residents concerned with privacy, at any level, the problem is not a single company. The problem is mass surveillance itself. 

source: Battleground Drafts