Outside In Print weekly sheet
Bob's Almanack
A weekly note from Robert V. Ussley with new essays, cartoons, and brief notes from Outside In Print.
An institution shows its faith by what it audits.
New from Outside In Print
The Ash Pond Under the Cloud
EPA's coal-water proposal pulls AI's electricity demand out of the cloud and puts it beside ash ponds, wastewater permits, grid reliability, and downstream risk.
The Mailbox at the Clinic Door
Justice Alito's temporary stay keeps mifepristone's mail route open while the Supreme Court weighs how a drug-safety rule became a fight over distance, federal authority, and state abortion law.
Fine China
Porcelain moves from Jingdezhen kilns to European courts and family cabinets, carrying the changing meaning of luxury, imitation, trade, and the words Made in China.
Outside the Garden
The essay reads American civic inheritance through exile, appetite, sacrifice, and the moral story a country needs before its freedoms can make sense.
This Week's Virtue
Justice
Justice is not the loud demand for one's preferred outcome. It is the habit of giving cost, evidence, authority, and consequence their proper weight. This week, the cleaner question is where each decision lands after the announcement is over: in water, in mail, in households, in memory, and in the people asked to carry what others call policy.
Do not do that which you would not have known.
Worth Reprinting
Smokestack Spreadsheets
Read it beside this week's ash-pond piece because both essays treat AI as an industrial claim on power, land, money, and public patience.
A system that needs darkness is already making a confession.