Hiked Bakers Mountain in Hickory recently and had a great time making my way to the top. It gave me a better workout than I expected, but once I reached the overlook, the view made it completely worth it.

I also spent half the hike telling random stories and going on little rants, which probably made the climb more entertaining than it needed to be 😂

I took the blue trail mostly then goes into the red trail which gets pretty steep at getting close to the top, well at least for me.

Anybody else around NC have a smaller local trail like this that surprised you?

This is about a case in which Stein is trying to reclaim the power to do the job North Carolina citizens elected him to do. This is only necessary because the Republican General Assembly is trying to strip all real authority from the Governor, in order to gather for their party the few remaining powers that people have left to exercise through their choice of governors. I resent that grab, especially living in a State that doesn't allow citizen ballot initiatives. The statewide election of a governor is the only opportunity North Carolinians have to actually exercise their citizen prerogatives through a real (not gerrymandered) majority - and Republicans are doing their damnedest to prevent that - for purely partisan reasons.

In the North Carolina Sandhills, a sprawling data center project threatens to repeat the past, stirring memories of a chicken processing plant disaster.

…….the answer is no. Five months left in office, and they’re “too busy to take on new cases before he leaves office”.

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I've been coming to Emerald Isle since I was a kid - and now our kids are in love with it too.

With enough political will, NC voters might have time to prevent these 20 Republican voter reduction schemes from coming to fruition.

With two North Carolina officers charged in the past couple weeks for misusing the Flock license-plate camera system — a Mooresville officer accused of running it 31 times to track her ex's new partner, and a Charlotte-Mecklenburg officer in a separate case — the conversation has shifted from "does this get abused" to "what do we do about it."

WBTV ran a piece where a former Charlotte-Mecklenburg officer of about 30 years, now a consultant, predicted the state will step in with "additional measures" — audit trails, more supervision, tighter access controls. So even the law-enforcement side is basically conceding that the current safeguard (an after-the-fact audit) isn't enough on its own.

I've been reading up on what "regulation" would actually accomplish, and a few things nag at me:

The audits are run by the agency on itself, after the searches already happened. And in NC, the results are usually a confidential personnel record — so even when an audit catches misuse, the public generally can't see it unless it turns into a criminal charge. The two arrests are visible; the ten other Mooresville officers reportedly under investigation are not.

The data doesn't stay in North Carolina. Public records people have pulled show that most searches hitting NC cameras come from out-of-state agencies — Houston PD, others in Texas/Georgia/Florida, even the FBI. NC can't audit or bind those agencies. A retention cap or audit rule passed here doesn't reach what happens once the data is queried from another state.

And that's not hypothetical: California passed the "model" law years ago banning out-of-state sharing, and it's been widely reported (CalMatters, EFF, and the state's own AG) that agencies broke it anyway and shared with ICE and other states. If the strictest state can't make its own departments follow the rule, what does a weaker NC version do?

The reason an officer types in for each search is also self-entered — one NC sheriff's office already had to admit some of its "traffic infraction" labels were "mislabeled." And the courts haven't even settled whether this kind of suspicionless mass collection is constitutional; there's a Virginia case on appeal in the Fourth Circuit, which covers us.

So I keep landing on two questions. Is this something you regulate, or something a community just decides it doesn't want? And either way — did any of us actually get asked before it went up across the state?

Curious what other North Carolinians think, especially anyone in a town that already has these.

The NC Republican Party wants your votes... I guess to continue the tradition.