north carolina

Chris Knight's avatar

The state of North Carolina and local governments ponied-up $208 million in tax incentives and other deals in order to entice Dell to open up its huge manufacturing plant in Winston-Salem. The place has only been in operation since 2005 and employs nearly a thousand people.

Starting next month and on through the holidays, all of ’em are gonna be looking for new jobs.

Dell announced today that its Winston-Salem factory will be shut down, even though this heinously violates the agreements between Dell and the governments here when Dell first arrived.

How the hell did this happen?

And I hate to say “I told you so” buuuuuuttt… this is so way part of why I despise “economic incentive” deals that local governments use to lure potential businesses to their area. It’s not only ethically wrong, but there is no guarantee for success. If governments want to bolster ...

Read more

Chris Knight's avatar

Last week it was news of an elementary school in New Jersey that had forced its students to chant a song of praise about Barack Obama.

And now there’s this video, made at Sand Hill Elementary School in Asheville, North Carolina (one of my most very favorite places that I’ve lived, incidentally)…

What the heck is going on here?

Actually, that’s a very rhetorical question. Because I do know what’s going on here. I’ve watched it build and grow for the past seventeen years, at least. It’s not just a cult of one person. It’s a cult of executive power: worshiping the President of the United States as if he were the living seat of divine government. I saw the warning signs during the Clinton era and was utterly appalled at how too many Christians were eager to imbue the same qualities onto George W. Bush. What’s going on now ...

Read more

Chris Knight's avatar

During the nearly six years that The Knight Shift has been blogging the exploits and ideas of its eclectic proprietor, I’ve chronicled a lot of interesting topics. This next one easily ranks up there among the more fulfilling things that I’ve had the pleasure of writing about. And I can’t help but feel like I came away from this with not only newly-found appreciation and respect for brothers and sisters in our Lord that I might otherwise have never had fellowship with, but also a deepened and even more profound grasp – however inadequate it must always be so long as I persist in this carnal realm – of what it means to be a follower of Christ.

Along the course of my travels I have visited many a place of worship: from every flavor of Baptist church to (accidentally) walking into a sanctuary of snake handlers. And everything in ...

Read more

Chris Knight's avatar

The TV commercial for the Ric Flair Scratch-Off from the North Carolina Education Lottery…

I’m sorely tempted to insert a “Space Mountain” joke in here somewhere šŸ˜›

EDIT 3:18 a.m. EST 09/23/2009: I am just now discovering that this game is not called “Ric Flair Scratch-Off” as I had originally thought. Instead it is officially known as… Wooooooo!

As if this state didn’t have enough people imitating Ric Flair, heh-heh…

That’s it. I’m definitely going to buy at least one of these tickets. Not to scratch off, just to keep and hold onto because, well… a Ric Flair-themed state lottery scratch-off game called “Wooooooo!” is just too clever to pass up on owning one.

This will be the hottest-selling scratch-off game since the lottery started up here almost four years ago, I would wager an RC Cola and a Moon Pie on it. Maybe we’ll see the entire Four Horsemen ...

Read more

Chris Knight's avatar

Last week North Carolina’s State Board of Community Colleges voted to allow illegal immigrants to enroll at the many community colleges we have here.

Very, very wrong move. As Rockingham County’s own Phil Berger Sr., the state Senate Minority Leader noted…

“This action is a slap in the face to legal North Carolina residents that desperately need access to the job training provided by our community colleges during the worst period of unemployment since the Great Depression.”

But it’s still worse than that. It’s this kind of thing that encourages illegal immigration to begin with. And in my opinion that’s not being a good neighbor to our friends across the border in Mexico. They have their own house to clean, just as we have our own that needs a lot of work. Sweetening the pot so that more people will be drawn here illegally to take advantage of our ...

Read more

Chris Knight's avatar

Just a friendly reminder that if you want to meet the blogger/proprietor of The Knight Shift in person and you’re going to be in the Raleigh/Durham today, that you’re in luck!

I will be at Artspace, located at 201 East Davie St in Raleigh at 5:45 p.m. this afternoon during the filmSPARK track of SPARKcon: a grassroots-organized four-day festival celebrating individual creativity around the Triangle area and throughout North Carolina. This will be the fourth annual event and this year SPARKcon will be held September 17-20. I’ll be speaking about the bizarre “copyright infringement” situation that happened between Yours Truly and Viacom on YouTube two years ago.

Look! Event announcement!

The Dude Who Took Down Viacom: One Filmmaker’s Story
EVENT LOCATION
Artspace

EVENT DESCRIPTION
Meet North Carolina filmmaker Chris Knight, a.k.a. “The Dude Who Took Down Viacom”. In 2006, Knight made a campaign advertisement to help promote his running

...
Read more

Chris Knight's avatar

It’s a sad irony that late on Friday night this past weekend I wound up watching Norma Rae, the 1979 movie about a woman in a southern factory town who defies her employers by becoming a union organizer. It was on one of the channels coming in from my digital satellite service. I’d seen it plenty enough before, but this was the first time that I felt led to research the background of the film.

And so it was that I learned the true story of Crystal Lee Sutton. And apart from the changed name, that really was her life that we saw portrayed by Sally Field in Norma Rae. Right down to how Sutton actually scrawled “UNION” on a piece of cardboard and brought the textile plant she worked at to a halt.

Sutton was from Burlington, North Carolina: just down the road from here. And ...

Read more

Chris Knight's avatar

Sheetz opened its first (and hopefully not last) location in Rockingham County this past week, located in Eden at Van Buren Road and Stadium Drive (it’s right next door to King’s Inn Pizza for those of y’all familiar with local geography). I paid my first visit to the new place today and was delighted to get another of their scrumptious Italian sandwiches. Up ’til now I’ve had to go to Greensboro or High Point for the nearest Sheetz. Now there’s one just 20 minutes away! And like all the other Sheetz stores it’s open 24 hours, 365 days a year.

So since this is about Sheetz, like the other two times I’ve posted on this blog about this company here’s that “Feel The Love” commercial that’s been running all summer…

And then there’s this other commercial from a few years ago for the chain, that shamelessly apes televangelism…

Anyhoo, if ...

Read more

Chris Knight's avatar

That commercial is going to haunt me for the rest of my life, isn’t it? šŸ˜›

SPARKcon is a grassroots-organized four-day festival in Raleigh celebrating individual creativity around the Triangle area and throughout North Carolina. This will be the fourth annual event and this year SPARKcon will be held September 17-20. And I’ve been invited to speak that Friday night about the very crazy situation that happened between Yours Truly and Viacom two years ago.

Look! Event announcement!

The Dude Who Took Down Viacom: One Filmmaker’s Story
EVENT LOCATION
Artspace

EVENT DESCRIPTION
Meet North Carolina filmmaker Chris Knight, a.k.a. “The Dude Who Took Down Viacom”. In 2006, Knight made a campaign advertisement to help promote his running for a seat on Rockingham County’s Board of Education. Knight did not win a seat on the board, but he did win some internet and media fame as his commercial was featured in

...
Read more

Chris Knight's avatar

Bev Perdue – who for as long as she is Governor of North Carolina will be referred to on this blog as “WORST GOVERNOR EVER!” – is returning $38 million to the school construction proceeds from the North Carolina Education Lottery, which she raided back in February

(However there’s still $50 million from the lottery’s reserve funds that Perdue isn’t paying back yet).

Does Bev Perdue have any clue at all about the mess she has caused for this state’s public schools? Probably not. Here in Rockingham County plans to build four much-needed new schools were thrown into turmoil because the construction funds earmarked from the lottery were swiped by Perdue so that she could play games with the state’s budget problems. Many other school systems across North Carolina were also hit by Perdue’s monetary mayhem.

I would imagine that in the greater scheme of things, Perdue’s unwise fiscal ...

Read more