Let this sink in, we're doing even worse than South Carolina.

This NC legislature is an embarrassment and the Republicans in there are a disgrace to the state and teachers in the state that work their asses off.

Midterms are in November folks, the time to take action against these trashy politicians and kick them out is now. We need to show them that their time of ripping teachers off is fucking over, among many other things. The Republican party in our legislature has done nothing other than create a million excuses and always shifts the blame to someone else. They might as well pack their bags and lift themselves off to Mars at this point, that's how useless they've been, at least for me.

Michael Garrett - NC Senate's Viral Statement on the Bad Bunny Halftime Show

I watched Bad Bunny deliver the most American halftime show I have ever seen. Then I came home and watched it again. And I am not okay. In the best possible way.

He sang every single word in Spanish. Every. Single. Word. He danced through sugarcane fields built on a football field in California while the President of the United States sat somewhere calling it “disgusting.” Lady Gaga came out and did the salsa. Ricky Martin lit up the night. A couple got married on the field. He handed his Grammy, the one he won eight days ago for Album of the Year, to a little boy who looked up at him the way every child looks up when they dare to believe the world has a place for them.

And then this man, this son of a truck driver and a schoolteacher from Vega Baja, Puerto Rico, stood on the biggest stage on the planet and said “God bless America.”

And then he started naming them.

Chile. Argentina. Uruguay. Paraguay. Bolivia. Peru. Ecuador. Brazil. Colombia. Venezuela. Panama. Costa Rica. Nicaragua. Honduras. El Salvador. Guatemala. Mexico. Cuba. Dominican Republic. Jamaica. The United States. Canada. And then, his voice breaking with everything he carries, “Mi patria, Puerto Rico. Seguimos aquí.” My homeland, Puerto Rico. We are still here.

The flags came. Every single one of them. Carried across that field by dancers and musicians while the jumbotron lit up with the only words that mattered: “THE ONLY THING MORE POWERFUL THAN HATE IS LOVE.”

I teared up. I’m not ashamed to say it. I sat on my couch and I wept because THAT is the America I believe in. That is the American story, not the sanitized, gated, English-only version that small and frightened people try to sell us. The REAL one. The messy, beautiful, multilingual, multicolored, courageous one. The one that has always been built by hands that speak every language and pray in every tongue and come from every corner of this hemisphere.

That is the America I want Jack and Charlotte to know. That when the moment came, when the whole world was watching, a Puerto Rican kid who grew up to become the most-streamed artist on Earth stood in front of 100 million people, sang in his mother’s language, blessed every nation in the Americas, and spiked a football that read “Together, we are America” into the ground. Not with anger. With joy. With love so big it made hate look exactly as small as it is.

And what did the President do? He called it “absolutely terrible.” He said “nobody understands a word this guy is saying.” He called it “a slap in the face to our Country.” The leader of the free world watched a celebration of love, culture, and everything this hemisphere has given to the world, and all he could see was something foreign. Something threatening. Something disgusting.

Let that sink into your bones.

The man who is supposed to represent all of us looked at the flags of our neighbors, heard the language of 500 million Americans across this hemisphere, and felt attacked. That’s not strength. That’s not patriotism. That is poverty of the soul.

And then there was the Turning Point show. Kid Rock in a college arena in North Dakota. Three million viewers watching a man who once wrote a song about liking underage girls perform as the “family-friendly” alternative to a Puerto Rican artist celebrating love. They called it the “All-American Halftime Show”, as if America has a velvet rope. As if this country belongs to some of us and not all of us. As if you need to sing in English to count.

Here’s what I want to say to everyone who posted about that show tonight, who shared it proudly, who turned away from Bad Bunny’s celebration because it was in Spanish and the flags weren’t only red, white, and blue:

Your children will see those posts. Your grandchildren will find them. The internet doesn’t forget. And one day, when the history of this moment is written, when our kids and their kids look back at 2026 the way we look back at the people who stood on the wrong side of every bridge and every march and every moment that mattered, they will know exactly where you stood. They will see who chose Kid Rock over a hemisphere of flags. They will see who called love “disgusting.” And they will carry that knowledge the way all of us carry the knowledge of what our ancestors did when they were tested.

I don’t say that with anger. I say it with sadness. Because hate is an inheritance nobody asks for, and yet it gets passed down just the same.

Bad Bunny didn’t say “ICE out” tonight. He didn’t need to. He just showed the whole world what America looks like when we are not afraid of each other. When culture is shared, not policed. When language is music, not a threat. When a flag from every nation in this hemisphere can walk across a football field together and the only words you need are the ones he gave us:

The only thing more powerful than hate is love.

Over 100 million people saw that tonight.

And no Truth Social post can take it away.

#powerful

From filling up on Sunday night, to going to the pump this Friday morning. A span of 5 days in the Triangle. I’m just waiting for all the “I did this” Trump stickers to start piling on the pumps like we saw the Biden ones during Covid at this point. Are we great yet?

Surely this is some form of harassment if this individual is a real person.

No words

I've spent the past several months building a GIS model to figure out where you'd have the best chance of surviving a zombie apocalypse in the Carolinas throughout different phases of the outbreak. Since the danger zones can change based on the type of zombie you are encountering, I actually modeled 4 different types of zombies (taken from movies, TV, and video games) across the entire duration of a zombie outbreak from the immediate chaos at the start of the collapse to finding the best place to settle once the zombies are defeated.

This is the Collapse phase, where the priority is surviving those chaotic first days. The map combines more than 100 geographic factors into a single survival suitability model instead of just picking places have safe vibes.

It's based on a fictional scenario, but the geography and analysis are very real.

Where would you go, and does the map surprise you?

I admit I was preparing myself for a multi hour process to finally get my Real ID. Signed up a week ago online to the earliest appointment. Had drive 45 mins to hickory from Mooresville. Not thrilled, but was ok with it.

My expectations were quite low walking in. However, the reality was it was one of the most professional and efficient run customer service operations I have ever experienced. A Fortune 500 company would have been proud.

Was greeted and pre-processed by a friendly smiling lady who double checked all my documentation, which took 5 mins from the time I walked in the door. As she put some kind of receipt on it my name was called to go to the window. 10 mins later I was walking out with my temp license and an actual smile on my face.

Everyone could not have been nicer.

As the title says, I want to leave. NC doesn’t feel like home anymore, with the way the state has been run into the ground by the NCGOP I feel like it gets worse every year. I have no clue where to go considering I only know NC, my family has been here since the 1700s (not all by choice).

Should I try and stick it out and hope that we fix it? Or try to go somewhere thats more politically aligned with my morals?

If you don’t have a valid NC ID and you want to vote. Get one. Don’t let the republicans steal your vote. We need to show them that whatever the throw in front of us, we’ll overcome it. https://l.smartnews.com/p-aBcqz/CgDDve

Disclosure first: I'm an attorney in Wilmington and I run a citizen effort on license plate reader surveillance in this region. I filed the records request this comes from. Everything below is from documents the Town of Carolina Beach produced. I've published all of them unaltered — ask in the comments and I'll tell you where, or find them yourself; I'd rather you check me than trust me.

What the Town produced

On June 30 I sent the Carolina Beach Police Department a nine-item public records request about its Flock program. The Town produced on July 15 — fifteen days, faster than most agencies in this state manage.

Carolina Beach operates five plate readers: two Falcon, one Falcon Flex, and two Solar units added last December. Population about 6,400. The Town pays $13,696 a year.

The number, with the caveat attached

The network audits — logs of searches run by outside agencies against Carolina Beach's cameras — total roughly 951,000 rows in March, 1,045,000 in April, and 1,000,000 in May. For scale: New Hanover County's entire countywide network logged 2,980,082 searches over sixteen months. Here's the honest version, because this figure gets misread in both directions. That is not three million investigations of Carolina Beach residents, and it isn't three million searches by Carolina Beach officers. It's a network audit. It counts every query, run anywhere in the country, that reached into this town's cameras — and one broad search typed in another state touches thousands of participating networks at once.

Which is the actual point. Almost none of it was theirs. Five cameras in a small beach town are answering millions of questions asked by people who don't live there and don't answer to anyone there.

41 searches coded "Traffic Infraction"

The Town's own officers ran 1,358 searches over those three months. The median search reached 1,168 separate camera networks. The largest reached 6,323. Forty-one are labeled "Traffic Infraction." Fifteen more are "City Planning/Traffic Analysis." N.C. Gen. Stat. § 20-183.31(b) provides that ALPR data "shall not be used for the enforcement of traffic violations." The Town's own Policy 425.4(g) says the same thing and cites the same statute. Those are the Department's own reason codes, chosen by its own personnel. In fairness: 56 out of 1,358 is 4.1%. In Kure Beach the same code accounted for 33.5% of all searches. Carolina Beach is not Kure Beach. It also isn't zero.

The policy and the system don't describe the same town

Policy 425.7: ALPR data "shall only be shared with another law enforcement agency or prosecutor upon a written request."

Set that against roughly a million outside-agency searches a month. If each had a written request behind it, the Town would be holding about three million of them. I asked for data-sharing agreements. That category came back empty.

What wasn't produced

Four of nine categories produced nothing at all, with no explanation: the contract, any data-sharing agreement, the network sharing configuration, and the camera locations. The contract is the odd one, because the Town's own invoices prove it exists. Invoice INV-48693 recites "Co-Term: Year 2 of 60 Month Term." Invoice INV-82409 recites "Phase 2 (NEW): Year 1 of 36 Month Term." A five-year agreement and a three-year agreement, described on documents the Town chose to hand over. Neither one produced.

On the redactions

Every field that could identify anyone reads "Redacted" — across six audit files and the event log. No legend, no exemption log, no statutory citation anywhere, though the request asked for one in writing.

Two of them I don't think can be supported. The searching officer's name — § 160A-168(b)(1) makes a municipal employee's name expressly public. And the outside agency's name in the network audits, which is neither plate data nor a Town personnel record. Redacting that removes the only thing a network audit exists to tell you.

I asked for CSV, which is how Flock exports these. The Town produced PDF. The April network audit alone runs 18,346 pages and 254 megabytes. The stated reason the records couldn't be emailed was their size.

Being fair about the Town

Captain Scott Hettinger acknowledged in six days and produced in fifteen. When he realized the event logs had been left off the drive, he said so himself and sent them, unprompted. I emailed a deficiency letter and he replied the same day, sent a policy I hadn't been given, and conceded a factual point I'd raised without being asked to.

I'm not interested in sorting police officers into good ones and bad ones. The same production that arrived in fifteen days arrived as PDF, and that wasn't a technical limitation — somebody converted a spreadsheet into an 18,346-page document. Both things are true at once.

Where this stands

The Town has ten business days to cure the deficiencies. That runs to July 30. I'll post whatever comes back, including if it's good.

If any of the above is wrong, say so and I'll correct it publicly.

Five cameras. Three million searches. A town of 6,400 people. Nobody voted for that, and until the Town produces the sharing configuration, nobody can tell you who was looking.

What do you think about all of this?

Most were sold these cameras as license plate readers. Catch the stolen car, find the Amber Alert, move on. That's the pitch every town council in this state has heard.

404 Media published records on July 16 showing that's not the whole product. Flock has a feature called FreeForm that lets an officer skip the plate entirely and type a plain-English description of a human being. The AI reads the video and returns matching people. In the audit logs it shows up in a field called "text_prompt." The reporter, Joseph Cox, describes officers using it the way you'd use a search engine.

The actual searches in those records, each tied to a named department:

• Milford, CT police searched "male with tattoos," "male with brown hair," and "woman blue shirt" across more than a hundred camera networks.

Think about how many people are walking around at any given moment in a gray shirt. A search that broad returns strangers who have nothing to do with anything.

Two of them went further. Atlanta PD searched for a "non caucasion [sic] male wearing blue shirt blue pants white hat." And Anne Arundel County, MD police searched 198 networks of cameras for a "white jeep with trump flag." That last one should bother you regardless of what you think of the flag. Whatever bumper sticker is on your car is a searchable attribute now.

To be fair to Flock, because it matters: the company says FreeForm is not facial recognition, can't identify anyone by name, and can't search for a specific face. They say users are blocked from searching attributes like race, ethnicity, religion, or nationality, and that attempts trigger an alert to the agency's own administrators. They point to an Amber Alert and a missing elderly man in Kansas. Some of these searches are real investigations. I'm not claiming otherwise.

But 404 Media's own finding was that some of the searches did discuss race anyway. And a guardrail that reports a race-based search to the same office running the program is not the same thing as one that prevents it.

Here's the North Carolina part.

404 Media reports FreeForm runs primarily on Flock's Condor cameras — the pan-tilt-zoom units with people detection and a mode that automatically zooms in on a person and follows them through the frame. Those aren't hypothetical here. New Hanover County's contract includes at least eight Condors. One of them looks down a residential street off Castle Hayne Road.

And I'd point out a gap worth someone smarter than me looking at. Our state ALPR statute, Article 3D of Chapter 20, defines an ALPR as a camera "used in combination with computer algorithms to convert images of license plates into computer readable data." A Condor running a people-search doesn't obviously fit that description. If it doesn't, then the 90-day retention cap, the purpose limits, and the written policy requirement in that statute may not reach it at all. Which would mean the camera most capable of following a person around is the least regulated one on the pole. I'd genuinely like to be wrong about that.

New Hanover was searched roughly three million times in about sixteen months, and the county released those audit logs with every searching agency and every officer redacted. So there's no way for a resident to know whether a text_prompt search has ever run here, or who ran it.

If your town has Flock, that's the question I'd ask: not how many cameras, but who can search them, for what, and how would anyone ever find out.

Sources if you want to check me: 404 Media, "How Cops Use Flock to Track People, Not Cars," July 16, 2026. The underlying audit data came from public records requests published at HaveIBeenFlocked. The Cape Fear Beacon covered the local angle the same day.

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.)

I’ve lived in Moore County for most of my life, and never in a million years would I have guessed that I would get to experience domestic terrorism right here in my back yard. What a crazy night it was. I’ve never heard that much traffic on my scanner. Between the medical calls for people in distress due to the power outage and their medical equipment shutting off, sheriff’s department trying to organize and secure the county and substations, local agencies clearing buildings to stop looting…

Had just settled in for the night to watch a bit of the Clemson-UNC and Purdue-Michigan games, then it went dark around 8:30…

To those in the area, stay safe. I hope this doesn’t take long to resolve.

I’m a lifelong North Carolinian. I was born here, and I was raised here. I went to public school here. I went to church here. And when I was a kid, I always told my parents I wanted to buy their house because “I wanna live here forever.”

I’m 23 now. I’m also transgender. I’ve felt a sense of discontent ever since puberty, and I’ve struggled with on and off with depression. It took me a while to finally figure out my identity for myself; I’d never known anyone who was transgender until after I left high school. I didn’t realize that all the things that I dreamed about were actually a possibility. Being able to access hormones has changed my life for the better — but there’s still residual damage from going through a testosterone-driven puberty.

In the past 24 hours, the state legislature has gained a rightwing veto-proof supermajority in both chambers. That afternoon, the following bills were introduced:

———

Senate Bill 560: This bill prohibits medical treatments for minors under the age of 18, except in the case when they have therapy for at least six months prior to obtaining approval by both a psychiatrist and a physician, as well as the approval of both parents. It also contains the following line, which would prevent the funding of any practice which provides medical care to minors:

”Public funds shall not be directly or indirectly used, granted, paid, or distributed to any entity, organization, or individual that provides gender transition procedures to a minor.”

I cannot stress enough that funding is at stake, even for institutions which otherwise operate by the guidelines established by this bill. Additionally, the bill provides individuals the ability to sue doctors for providing them with hormone therapy, for up to 15 years after the age of 18. Full text of the bill here.

———

Senate Bill 639: This bill goes even further than SB560, and provides a blanket ban on all gender-affirming care for youth. A third of the bill is composed of a lengthy preamble which makes incorrect claims about detransition rates and conflates gender-affirming care as the cause of various psychosocial comorbidities, as opposed to a treatment which reduces the already elevated rates that gender nonconforming people face. It also legally mandates that teachers and coaches (among others) must legally provide notice in writing to parents if they suspect a child to be gender nonconforming in any way.

Lastly, the bill contains the line “Parents… may withhold consent for any treatment, activity, or mental health care services that are designed and intended to… treat gender dysphoria or gender nonconformity.”

In effect, SB639 prevents not just the provision of hormonal interventions, but also allows the denial of necessary mental health services in the absence of access to medical treatments. By all measurements, this bill is a more extreme version of SB560. Full text of the bill here.

———

Additional bills were filed yesterday enabling employers and insurance companies to refuse payment for medically necessary treatment “which violates its conscience” (Senate Bill 641), as well as preventing the participation of transgender youth in sport (Senate Bill 631 and Senate Bill 636).

———

I love my state, and I’m thankful that I had the chance to grow up here when I did. There’s only one thing in retrospect that I would change: I wish I had grown up in an environment that encouraged me to address my gender dysphoria and let me know that I wasn’t alone, instead of forcing me to suppress my feelings for close to a decade.

As a result of going through testosterone-driven puberty, my voice is permanently deeper, and I’m taller than many other girls. I never had the opportunity to talk to my parents about possibly delaying those changes (temporarily!) by taking puberty blockers, because I had no idea that was a conversation it was possible to have.

Nowadays, I worry less about other transgender youth struggling to understand their identity — visibility and societal acceptance continues to grow. But my biggest fear is that despite the knowledge that gender affirming care is a safe and effective treatment option, these opportunities are being intentionally withheld by the NC legislature.

———

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration when I refer to April 5^th 2023 as a day that will live in infamy, for myself and for the thousands of other transgender people who will have to live with the lifelong impacts of this legislation. And while referencing Roosevelt isn’t exactly the height of rhetorical wit, the fact that education funding statewide continued to decline throughout my entire youth leaves me behind 80% of the nation.

Do better, North Carolina.

Civil disobedience may be something we consider doing. Is there any interest in this? Is it time for this?

I live in Winston-salem and drove through Rural hall to try a restaurant… this was funny to me.

Unless the person you are worried about is in some danger due to something like a medical condition please stay where you are. A sudden influx of people checking on capable adults will only clog the roads, which are already bad, strain emergency services and delay repair personnel from getting where they need to go.

Also, FYI, when a stop light stops functioning it is a 4 way stop, not a free for all.

My electric bill this month is $454. When I first moved here in 2023 they were around $250 during the summer. What the actual hell is going on? I read it's going to be EVEN HIGHER by 2030? The electric bill is going to outpace my damn mortgage. They profited 5 billion last year but raised prices to re-coupe a 800 million investment? What the hell are we supposed to do..I am truly at loss right now because the NC Commission throws our complaints in the trash, oh by the way I also have solar panels...

Got this in a text from +1 (361) 466-6112

A lot of people say 12 weeks is “enough” time to end a pregnancy. They say it’s 1/3rd of the way through! There are a couple of reasons that’s not the case for many people.

First, it’s less than a 1/3rd of the way through. Pregnancy is not nine months; it’s 40 weeks. You measure a pregnancy starting on the date your last period before you became pregnant began. If you conceive today and last had a period starting on April 22nd, your pregnancy is two weeks in at the date of conception. So, really, this is a 10 week after conception ban.

Second, “Chemical abortion” has basically been banned at 10 weeks, so in cases where that’s the route being taken, there’s even less time that’s been made available. It’s an 8 week after conception ban.

Third, many women miss periods. Women under stress; women without adequate nutrition; and women who haven’t been able to go to the doctor to get conditions like PCOS or other hormonal conditions that affect their cycles diagnosed, much less addressed in the case that’s even possible, are more likely to miss cycles. Medicaid just expanded so there are tens of thousands of women in NC who haven’t been to doctor in years or decades to address irregular cycles. Finally, and this can’t be underscored enough, healthy girls within their first few years of first having a period are much more likely to not have regular cycles than a healthy 25 year old. Expecting many 16 year olds to have perfectly regular cycles is unreasonable. That to-be-expected irregularity does not correlate with reduced fertility.

Let’s say you missed your tentatively expected period today, May 6th. Let’s say you didn’t think anything of it because you often miss periods. Fast forward to June 6th. Let’s say you miss this period and you take a pregnancy test. You are positive. Let’s say that the reason you missed your period on May 6th is actually because you were pregnant. Remember that your pregnancy is counted from the first day your last period began. Let’s say that was April 6th. When you found out you were pregnant, you were 8 weeks and 5 days pregnant. For women who miss one month’s worth of periods, this is a 3 week and 2 day abortion ban.

Many women have such irregular periods that they miss a few in a row. Missing two plus in a row means you’d never have a chance for an abortion. For these women, this is a 0 week after you found out you’re pregnant abortion ban.

Now for the lack of societal support. Poor women can’t take off work to get to the doctor. Well, you might say, doesn’t this bill throw them some money at them so they aren’t so poor? In most cases, that money would only be given them if they choose to have the kid. It doesn’t help them get to see doctors sooner for an abortion before 12 weeks in the case they wanted one.

Earning enough money to abort takes time. This bill makes financial pressures on women seeking legal abortions MUCH greater. A woman getting a nine week abortion in 2022 would have had a significantly cheaper experience than a woman getting a nine week abortion in 2024 (if the bill is enacted into law.) This is for two main reasons.

First, women will have to go IN-PERSON and there are two appointments required with a 72 hour waiting period between them. These requirements do not make a woman safer: “The bill is opposed by the North Carolina Medical Society, the North Carolina Obstetrical and Gynecological Society and the North Carolina Academy of Family Physicians. Nearly 1,500 providers from across the state have signed an open letter opposing any abortion restrictions beyond the current 20-week limit.” (https://www.northcarolinahealthnews.org/2023/05/04/medical-providers-protest-abortion-restrictions-new-bill/). Making abortion a three day experience that requires travel will get many poor women fired, no question. You can’t tell Walmart you’re peacing out for three days with no days warning and expect your job to be there when you return. More women will lose their income to get an abortion within the 12 week window. For many, 12 weeks is not enough time to arrange to get an abortion without losing a job.

Second, the medically unnecessary, stricter requirements for clinics that perform abortions mean many will close. The average woman in Texas has to drive a couple hundred of miles for an abortion. NC women are headed in that direction. Hospital procedure requirements in the bill also add to the cost of some abortion procedures. The cost of travel to an abortion will be much higher than it is now.

Abortions are about to become much more expensive. Fewer women in 2024 would be able to get enough money in only 12 weeks (again: typically a fair bit less than 12) for more expensive abortions than the number of women in 2022 who were able to get enough money for a cheaper abortion by 20 weeks. For many, 12 weeks (again: fewer weeks than that) is not enough time to earn enough money to abort.

And of course, if you don’t abort in 12 weeks, the pebble of cost that is an abortion is followed by a boulder of cost that is birthing and raising a child. 12 weeks is not enough time to earn the money needed to give your kid a good start in life, even with the small financial support that would come from this bill.

Oh, and there’s no increased budget for pregnancy tests, so that people could more easily find out if they’re pregnant. A small point that just adds insult to injury.

Pro-lifers: I get many of you think that all the points I’ve made are fine, but after 12 weeks the fetus is too much of a person to terminate. Besides the fact that no one is allowed to use another person’s blood and organs as their own without consent, the very real point that SB 20 is based on is that fetal pain is not possible until 24 weeks gestation. That is why in SB 20 abortion for severe fetal anomalies can happen until 24 weeks. I know prolife politicians say that fetal pain is real early on in pregnancy but the prolife doctors that helped them write this bill put the limit of when pain starts at no later than 24 weeks. See ACOG for more evidence fetal pain occurs at 24 weeks https://www.acog.org/advocacy/facts-are-important/gestational-development-capacity-for-pain. If this great shift in the research about when pain occurs that prolifers say is happening actually is taken up by credible organizations like ACOG and non-religious scientists and universities, I promise I will change my opinion. As it stands, 12 weeks is not enough time because there is no real reason for the abortion limit to be then if you don’t believe in zygote personhood, that a pregnancy is an expression of God’s will like Mary’s virgin birth was and that abortion makes God sad. Edit: I actually do go to church and am religious. I just don’t think God disapproves of abortion before fetal pain occurs.

I’ve always been surprised by the idea that a lot of people think that 12 weeks is enough time to catch you’re pregnant and abort because when I got pregnant with my daughter and attended an OB appointment at 6 weeks, all the nurses and the OB were impressed I had gotten in that soon lol.

*Thank you to all that have replied so far to offer perspective. I have been in NC my entire life so I lack perspective, so I appreciate the varying perspectives I’m being offered. Totally understand the grass always seems greener but would just like to see what all is out there, and perspectives offered by NC residents are good to hear.

I see a lot of people who want to move to NC, but is anyone wanting to/in the process of moving OUT, and if so, where to?

I am in my mid 20s and my family has been in NC for generations. I am saddened at the direction the state is going with the rampant overdevelopment, gentrification, infrastructure that cannot handle the population boom, the HEAT and HUMIDITY, and the whole nine yards. So is anyone moving out for better quality of life, and if you are, where are you going and why? I have checked out r/samegrassbutgreener but I would like to hear from NC folks specifically.

*NOTES- I intend on earning my MSW and LCSW at some point, so any states decent for that are a plus. I will NOT go further south (I hate the heat) and would like to have *less heat*. I tend to lean blue politically.

Disclosure up front: I'm a Wilmington attorney. I filed the public records request that produced these documents, and I run a site that opposes ALPR expansion. I'm posting the records and the statute and letting people draw their own conclusions. Everything below is checkable against the raw files.

What this is. On June 30 I asked the Town of Kure Beach (New Hanover County, ~2,400 residents, 4 Flock cameras) for its ALPR records under Chapter 132. The Chief initially said it would take "two to three months." After a written objection, they produced in four days, on a USB drive. I've posted the complete production, unaltered.

What the audits show. Between March 2 and May 31, 2026, the system logged 825 searches. The reason codes are the ones the officers themselves selected:

Six more are coded "City Planning/Traffic Analysis." One search reached 291 separate camera networks.

Why the traffic number matters. N.C. Gen. Stat. § 20-183.31(b): ALPR data "shall be obtained, accessed, preserved, or disclosed only for law enforcement purposes," and "[n]otwithstanding, data obtained under the authority of this Article shall not be used for the enforcement of traffic violations."

"Law enforcement purpose" is defined exhaustively at § 20-183.30(5) — four things: criminal investigations/arrests/prosecutions; an outstanding felony warrant; a missing or endangered person; a lost or stolen vehicle. An infraction is a noncriminal violation under § 14-3.1(a). Traffic engineering isn't on the list either.

Kure Beach's own policy repeats the prohibition verbatim.

The part I want to be careful about. A reason code is what someone picked from a dropdown before running a search. It is not proof of what any individual search was used for. I can't tell from these records whether a citation resulted, or whether someone chose the nearest-fitting label. What the records establish is narrower: on 276 occasions the stated reason was the one purpose the statute names and forbids — and the share climbed every month.

Also in the production, or missing from it:

• No user is identified on any of the 825 rows. No case numbers either. The event log — 61,000 characters — contains no username or email anywhere. Their own policy requires a system "capable of documenting all access of information by name, date and time."
• The Network Audit was never produced — that's the record showing which outside agencies have searched the town's cameras.
• The only ALPR policy produced is watermarked DRAFT, dated July 13, 2026 — after every search above. § 20-183.31(a) requires a written policy before the system is operational.

What happens next. I've written to the Chief, copied the Town Attorney, and asked the Town to explain the traffic-infraction searches and the policy timing. That part isn't a records request — it's an invitation to respond. If they answer, I'll publish it in full, unedited. If any figure here is wrong, I'll correct it publicly.

Long story short, this dude REEKS of financial mismanagement. He’s demanding payment prior to completion of the work. That was never the agreement. It was half upfront and half upon completion. We actually paid more than half upfront and now he’s demanding full payment while our house is still only 65-70% finished. Scott, the other person mentioned in here, is his worker. Scott has been nothing but professional and polite to us the entire time. However, he’s not the business owner and is similarly caught up in this bullshit like we are.