Poverty Now
The holidays always produce a flurry of stories and attention to the problem of homelessness and need. And while it is great to have some mind paid to these problems, it is always baffling that not many people seem to care much about these problems for the rest of the year. Thank goodness, there are …
MLK Day Study Circles
NCSJP is proud to partner with the YWCA of the Greater Triangle and Community United Church of Christ to offer this exciting MLK Day event! Register here! For the upcoming Martin Luther King holiday, recitations of Dr. King’s iconic speeches, essays about the meaning of his life and legacy, and other commemorations will be accompanied …
Thankful
Sometimes it is difficult to be thankful for what we have. Especially in this line of work, where it is literally our job to obsess over what is wrong, it is exceedingly difficult to identify what is going right. And believe it or not, there are lots and lots of things that are going right …
NCSJP Holiday Giveaway!
Since the holidays are upon us (and let’s face it, not much is getting done at work this week) we thought would reward our incredibly awesome FB peeps with some NCSJP goodies! The process is simple: click the little “Email Signup” tab on the top of our FB page, (or just click here), give us …
NC Leads Nation in Job Losses
The NC Bureau of Labor Statistics released November’s jobless numbers this morning, and the numbers were not good: North Carolina leads the country in the number of jobs lost in November. The North Carolina seasonally adjusted unemployment rate was 9.7 percent in November, an increase of 0.1 of a percentage point from a revised 9.6 …
Census Data
We’ve been playing around with the new census data that was released today. Overall, nothing terribly unexpected, but we still have quite a bit more to look at. However, if you want to play around with it yourself, try this amazing map, courtesy of the New York Times. You can dive down to the individual …
Equally Unhappy
When I was a boy, I asked my father what it meant to “compromise”. He told me that compromise is coming to a decision that makes all parties equally unhappy. Working off of that definition, compromise abounds this week, with President Obama and Republican leaders coming together to get an agreement for the extension of …
Hate v. NC
Bigotry, in any form, is a particularly mindset. It is not productive for the source, nor constructive to the target. Bigotry burns hot and fast with the flammable combination of intolerance and ignorance, which makes it incredibly difficult to extinguish without yourself being burned by its flame. Bigotry produces the ultimate paradox: how does one minimize a hateful
Silence is Goldman
When you pay attention to the Wake County School Board, it sometimes seems like Groundhog Day. Late last night, in what has become the standard operating procedure for a Board of Education that treats its constituents as a mere annoyance, decided to limit public comment on one of the very topics on the agenda for …
What Deficits Mean for NC
Much of the debate in Washington these days centers on how we, as a country, are going to dig ourselves out of our current, and future, deficit. Depending on whom you listen to, the U.S. is looking at a budget deficit of between a billion and a billion and a half dollars for 2011, with …