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The Echo of a Distant Time 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇩🇪🇩🇰🇨🇦🇺🇦🇮🇱

@arthurnewhook.bsky.social

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*John 8:32* Old-fashioned, sick it of all. Anti-populist, independent pragmatist. Girly pics, nostalgia, history, Golden Age of Hollywood. War, tyranny, collapse. Massachusetts Bay Colony 🇬🇧. #StopPutin 🇺🇦 #NeverTrump linktr.ee/arthurnewhook

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The Echo of a Distant Time 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇩🇪🇩🇰🇨🇦🇺🇦🇮🇱 @arthurnewhook.bsky.social · 53m

www.nbcboston.com/news/nationa...

Social Security recipients can expect 2.8% increase in benefit payments for 2026

Individual retirement benefits will climb an average of about $56 per month, the Social Security Administration announced on Friday.

www.nbcboston.com

The Echo of a Distant Time 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇩🇪🇩🇰🇨🇦🇺🇦🇮🇱 @arthurnewhook.bsky.social · 54m

Rising Medicare premiums—to say nothing of inflation and other external economic pressures—are going to wipe it out, yet Social Security recipients are set to receive a 2.8% cost-of-living adjustment in 2026, says the SSA. {AP 24 October, link below the fold}

A young woman with pale grey hair and a face etched with quiet fatigue sits in a dimly lit room, illuminated by the faint glow of an electric heater. She holds a document from the Social Security Administration announcing a 2.8% cost-of-living adjustment, her expression hovering between disbelief and despair. On the table before her lie scattered envelopes, bills, and handwritten notes—the detritus of subsistence. A jar of coins rests nearby, its contents pitifully meagre. Behind her, an old television flickers with the words “INFLATION SHUTDOWN,” a grim chorus to her solitude. Through the frost-rimmed window, a winter landscape looms silent and indifferent. The painting distils economic hardship into intimate tragedy: the illusion of relief rendered absurd against the cold arithmetic of survival. Its muted palette of ochres and greys evokes both domestic quietude and moral indictment—an elegy for dignity diminished by bureaucratic benevolence.

The Echo of a Distant Time 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇩🇪🇩🇰🇨🇦🇺🇦🇮🇱 @arthurnewhook.bsky.social · 22h

stoptheidiocracy2020s.blogspot.com/2025/10/the-...

The USDA has announced that SNAP benefits will not be issued in November—and yet there appears to be scarcely a murmur of public outrage

image generated via ChatGPT {WABI 21 October} ‘USDA announces SNAP benefits will not be issued in November’ One might have thought that the ...

stoptheidiocracy2020s.blogspot.com

The Echo of a Distant Time 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇩🇪🇩🇰🇨🇦🇺🇦🇮🇱 @arthurnewhook.bsky.social · 22h

The USDA has announced that SNAP benefits will not be issued in November—and yet there appears to be scarcely a murmur of public outrage. {Stop the Idiocracy 23 October, link below the fold}

A young woman stands alone in a desolate supermarket aisle, her expression one of quiet resignation. Clad in a faded floral dress that evokes both modesty and bygone innocence, she grips the handle of an empty shopping trolley containing only a single tin can—an emblem of deprivation rendered almost sacramental by its isolation. The shelves around her are stripped bare, their voids echoing the collapse of civic plenty. Behind her, through the dim glass, silhouettes of the desperate press against the light, their raised hands spectral in the gloom. Overhead, a lurid electronic sign blares: “NO SNAP BENEFITS THIS MONTH — BLAME THE DEMOCRATS.” Its accusatory glow casts a sinister warmth upon the scene, a false illumination masking cruelty as policy. The image captures a society cannibalising its poor while peddling blame as bread—an elegy for dignity amid the theatre of economic despair.

The Echo of a Distant Time 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇩🇪🇩🇰🇨🇦🇺🇦🇮🇱 @arthurnewhook.bsky.social · 1d

stoptheidiocracy2020s.blogspot.com/2025/10/a-po...

A politically motivated splinter from the US Episcopal Church descends into turmoil after its presiding prelate stands accused of sexual assault, bullying, and plagiarism

image generated via ChatGPT It is always the most zealous among these types with the most skeletons in the closet. Excerpt from the Washingt...

stoptheidiocracy2020s.blogspot.com

The Echo of a Distant Time 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇩🇪🇩🇰🇨🇦🇺🇦🇮🇱 @arthurnewhook.bsky.social · 1d

A politically motivated splinter from the US Episcopal Church descends into turmoil after its presiding prelate stands accused of sexual assault, bullying, and plagiarism. {Stop the Idiocracy 23 October, link below the fold}

In a golden, vaulted chapel suffused with light from radiant stained-glass windows, a young woman with silver hair and an unyielding gaze raises her hand in firm interdiction toward a startled priest. Her attire—a stark black dress with a white Peter Pan collar—evokes both innocence and quiet defiance, a modern Joan confronting patriarchal authority within consecrated walls. The priest recoils, his expression suspended between guilt and disbelief, as if caught in the act of moral trespass or revelation. The painter’s mastery of chiaroscuro intensifies the moment’s emotional polarity: purity against corruption, conviction against power. Light floods the woman’s form, sanctifying her resistance, while the cleric remains half-submerged in shadow. The tableau reads not merely as confrontation but as reclamation—the sacred turned upon itself, a reassertion of conscience in the face of institutional decay.

The Echo of a Distant Time 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇩🇪🇩🇰🇨🇦🇺🇦🇮🇱 @arthurnewhook.bsky.social · 3d

An excellent #ALCS. Congratulations to the Blue Jays and Canada. I do not believe they shall defeat the Dodgers, but a great team nonetheless. www.espn.com/mlb/game/_/g...

Blue Jays 4-3 Mariners (Oct 20, 2025) Final Score - ESPN

Game summary of the Toronto Blue Jays vs. Seattle Mariners MLB game, final score 4-3, from October 20, 2025 on ESPN.

www.espn.com

The Echo of a Distant Time 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇩🇪🇩🇰🇨🇦🇺🇦🇮🇱 @arthurnewhook.bsky.social · 3d

That Springer home run was massive and may very well be the knock-out blow. Unless, of course, it isn't. Six more outs to go, Seattle is on the ropes. #ALCS

The Echo of a Distant Time 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇩🇪🇩🇰🇨🇦🇺🇦🇮🇱 @arthurnewhook.bsky.social · 4d

A baseball game seven, few things in life beat this. No rooting interest, best of luck to Seattle and Toronto fans alike.

The Echo of a Distant Time 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇩🇪🇩🇰🇨🇦🇺🇦🇮🇱 @arthurnewhook.bsky.social · 4d

floydetcetera.blogspot.com/2025/10/some...

“Sometimes I think if I had the same body and the same natural ability and someone else's brain, who knows how good a player I might have been.”

Topps c. 1952 One of the rare few who stood among the elite of the elite—brilliant, flawed, immortal: Mickey Mantle , born 20 October 1931 i...

floydetcetera.blogspot.com

The Echo of a Distant Time 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇩🇪🇩🇰🇨🇦🇺🇦🇮🇱 @arthurnewhook.bsky.social · 4d

“Sometimes I think if I had the same body and the same natural ability and someone else's brain, who knows how good a player I might have been.” —one of the elite among the elite, in spite of himself: Mickey Mantle. {The Echo of a Distant Time 20 October, link below the fold}

A 1952 Topps baseball card featuring the young Mickey Mantle of the New York Yankees, rendered in vivid lithographic colour. Mantle, bat poised upon his shoulder, gazes upward with the unguarded confidence of early promise—a portrait of athletic idealism at the dawn of America’s postwar age. The composition, clean and iconic, captures the sculptural geometry of baseball heroism: cap and uniform crisply defined against a cloudless sky of dreamlike blue. The Yankees’ emblem appears in the lower corner, flanked by Mantle’s printed and facsimile signatures, a subtle interplay between the mechanical and the personal. To later generations, this image would become not merely a collector’s relic but a totem of lost innocence—symbolising both the apotheosis and commodification of mid-century Americana.

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The Echo of a Distant Time 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇩🇪🇩🇰🇨🇦🇺🇦🇮🇱 @arthurnewhook.bsky.social · 4d

In remembrance of that unruly band of Southern rascals, on the forty-eighth anniversary of the day their world came crashing down. #LynyrdSkynyrd

A defiant and iconic tableau of Southern rock mythology: the members of Lynyrd Skynyrd stand united in a burning alleyway, 1977, just days before tragedy would strike. Flames roar behind them in apocalyptic splendour, the firelight casting long shadows that dance upon the brick facades. Each figure exudes its own archetype—the preacher, the outlaw, the gypsy, the saint—collectively embodying the swaggering, denim-clad spirit of an America teetering between freedom and ruin. At the centre, frontman Ronnie Van Zant gazes coolly into the lens, his cowboy hat tipped low, while the others pose with a studied mix of grit and sensuality. The scene, captured by photographer David Alexander, feels less like a portrait than a prophecy: the band poised at the height of their power, wreathed in literal and figurative fire, immortalised in the instant before the fall.

The Echo of a Distant Time 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇩🇪🇩🇰🇨🇦🇺🇦🇮🇱 @arthurnewhook.bsky.social · 4d

floydetcetera.blogspot.com/2025/10/a-go...

“A goddess sculpted in scandal”: Pauline Bonaparte, born 20 October 1780

Illustration: Robert Lefèvre, c. 1806 “I do not believe that any man in the world is more unfortunate in his family than I am.” —attributed ...

floydetcetera.blogspot.com

The Echo of a Distant Time 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇩🇪🇩🇰🇨🇦🇺🇦🇮🇱 @arthurnewhook.bsky.social · 4d

“A goddess sculpted in scandal”: Pauline Bonaparte, born 20 October 1780. {The Echo of a Distant Time 20 October, link below the fold; illustration: Robert Lefèvre, c. 1806}

An exquisite neoclassical portrait of Pauline Bonaparte, painted circa 1806 by Robert Lefèvre, Napoleon’s favoured court artist. The sitter reclines gracefully upon a green velvet couch, her posture at once languid and deliberate, conveying the self-assurance of a woman accustomed to command attention. Draped in a white empire-line gown of sheer muslin, fastened with a gilt sash that glimmers across her waist, she radiates a delicate sensuality softened by poise. Her head is crowned with a jewelled diadem and a gauze veil, the ensemble evoking both Roman antiquity and early nineteenth-century Parisian elegance. Pauline’s gaze, directed slightly away from the viewer, carries an air of introspective detachment—suggesting both intelligence and ennui, a woman aware of her myth and resigned to it. Lefèvre’s brushwork, of impeccable polish, renders every texture—skin, silk, and gem—with a restraint that exalts her beauty without descending into sentimentality.

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The Echo of a Distant Time 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇩🇪🇩🇰🇨🇦🇺🇦🇮🇱 @arthurnewhook.bsky.social · 4d

stoptheidiocracy2020s.blogspot.com/2025/10/amaz...

Amazon collapses, dragging half the internet—and all reliant upon it—into paralysis: a mere fire drill for civilisation’s fall

image generated via ChatGPT {Mashable 20 October} ‘AWS outage update: What happened today and why’ Perhaps the body politic hath been someth...

stoptheidiocracy2020s.blogspot.com

The Echo of a Distant Time 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇩🇪🇩🇰🇨🇦🇺🇦🇮🇱 @arthurnewhook.bsky.social · 4d

Amazon collapses, dragging half the internet—and all reliant upon it—into paralysis: a mere fire drill for civilisation’s fall. {Stop the Idiocracy 20 October, link below the fold}

A spectral tableau of digital desolation rendered in cinematic chiaroscuro. A young woman with pale hair and an expression of quiet detachment stands amid the ruins of a once-modern city, its skyline dominated by black monoliths branded Amazon and Google. She wears a powder-blue dress with a white Peter Pan collar, its innocence jarringly at odds with the dystopian scene. In one hand she clutches a small loaf of bread—a relic of survival—while in the other she gazes down at a smartphone, its cold light illuminating her downcast face. Around her, the remnants of a fallen civilisation—darkened shopfronts, lifeless screens, tangled cables—form a graveyard of consumer technology. Overhead, storm clouds writhe with veins of lightning, their electric fury mirrored by the web of wires that ensnare the towers. The image reads as an elegy for the human spirit—adrift, obedient, and alone in the shadow of its own creations.

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The Echo of a Distant Time 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇩🇪🇩🇰🇨🇦🇺🇦🇮🇱 @arthurnewhook.bsky.social · 5d

idahonews.com/sports/boise...

Boise State football legend Doug Martin dies at 36

Doug Martin, a celebrated Boise State running back and seven-year NFL veteran, passed away this weekend at the age of 36.Martin, who played for Boise State fro

idahonews.com

The Echo of a Distant Time 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇩🇪🇩🇰🇨🇦🇺🇦🇮🇱 @arthurnewhook.bsky.social · 5d

Saddened to learn of the death of Doug Martin—among the finest running backs in Boise State’s storied history and a Pro Bowler with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Merely 36, his cause of death remains unknown. May he rest in peace. {KBOI 19 October, link below the fold}

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The Echo of a Distant Time 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇩🇪🇩🇰🇨🇦🇺🇦🇮🇱 @arthurnewhook.bsky.social · 5d

stoptheidiocracy2020s.blogspot.com/2025/10/trum...

Trump posts AI-generated video of himself wearing a crown and defecating upon #NoKings protesters, then insists, “I’m not a king”

image generated via ChatGPT {NYT 19 October} ‘Trump Posts Fake Video of Himself Flying a ‘King Trump’ Jet Over Protesters’ A grotesque spect...

stoptheidiocracy2020s.blogspot.com

The Echo of a Distant Time 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇩🇪🇩🇰🇨🇦🇺🇦🇮🇱 @arthurnewhook.bsky.social · 5d

Trump posts AI-generated video of himself wearing a crown and defecating upon #NoKings protesters, then insists, “I’m not a king.” {Stop the Idiocracy 19 October, link below the fold}

A grand allegory of moral decay and the cult of power, rendered in brooding chiaroscuro. At its centre looms a colossal figure unmistakably modelled on Donald Trump, enthroned in the ruins of a republic. He wears a makeshift crown fashioned from glowing television screens, his corpulent form draped in a dark suit and red tie, clutching a gilded bowl stuffed with banknotes—both offering and spoil. Behind him, the shattered dome of the Capitol stands as a mausoleum to democracy, while flames and black flags rise over a mob of zealots whose faces are lit by the cold, blue glow of their phones. In the foreground, a young blonde woman in a black dress gazes outward with haunted composure—part witness, part conscience—her presence a fragile counterpoint to the grotesque grandeur behind her. The atmosphere seethes with apocalyptic symbolism: tyranny enthroned, truth debased, and beauty left to mourn amidst the ruins.

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The Echo of a Distant Time 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇩🇪🇩🇰🇨🇦🇺🇦🇮🇱 @arthurnewhook.bsky.social · 6d

I was told there was going to be violence.

The Echo of a Distant Time 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇩🇪🇩🇰🇨🇦🇺🇦🇮🇱 @arthurnewhook.bsky.social · 6d

stoptheidiocracy2020s.blogspot.com/2025/10/none...

None of this is normal, but a wise few remain: #NoKings, and the last vestiges of sanity and reason struggling for breath in a nation given over to absurdity

image generated via ChatGPT I avoid crowds and cities as one avoids contagion, and am not presently in the physical condition to attempt the...

stoptheidiocracy2020s.blogspot.com

The Echo of a Distant Time 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇩🇪🇩🇰🇨🇦🇺🇦🇮🇱 @arthurnewhook.bsky.social · 6d

None of this is normal, but a wise few remain: #NoKings, and the last vestiges of sanity and reason struggling for breath in a nation given over to absurdity. {Stop the Idiocracy 18 October, link below the fold}

A haunting allegory of a civilisation in ruin, rendered in sombre, painterly tones. A woman stands amid the rubble of a city reduced to ashes, clad in the corroded robes and spiked crown of the Statue of Liberty. Her torch, once a beacon of hope, flickers uncertainly against a bruised sky heavy with smoke and grief. Tears carve pale tracks through the soot upon her face, her expression one of weary disbelief rather than theatrical despair. Around her, fragments of architecture—columns, facades, the ghostly outlines of towers—crumble into shadow, while a tattered flag droops behind her like the last echo of a broken ideal. The image captures a nation’s moral exhaustion, its mythic promise turned elegy; liberty herself brought low, yet still upright—her light, though dimmed, not yet extinguished.

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The Echo of a Distant Time 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇩🇪🇩🇰🇨🇦🇺🇦🇮🇱 @arthurnewhook.bsky.social · 7d

floydetcetera.blogspot.com/2025/10/reme...

Remembering Ace Frehley: 27 April 1951 – 16 October 2025

image generated by ChatGPT {AP 16 October} ‘Ace Frehley, Kiss’ original lead guitarist and founding member, dies at 74’ Rest in peace, Starm...

floydetcetera.blogspot.com

The Echo of a Distant Time 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇩🇪🇩🇰🇨🇦🇺🇦🇮🇱 @arthurnewhook.bsky.social · 7d

Remembering Ace Frehley: 27 April 1951 – 16 October 2025. {The Echo of a Distant Time 16 October, link below the fold}

A striking vision of retro-futurist glamour rendered with painterly precision. A woman with pale blonde hair cascading to her shoulders stands against a deep cosmic backdrop flecked with stars and a faintly glowing red planet. Her face is painted in theatrical blue-black makeup forming winged lightning-bolt motifs around her eyes—an echo of 1970s glam rock iconography—contrasted by her calm, intelligent gaze and crimson lips. She wears a form-fitting silver jumpsuit with sculpted shoulders, its metallic sheen mirroring the night sky’s luminosity, lending her the air of a celestial envoy or interstellar performer. Her poise—one hand on hip, the other resting lightly by her side—balances defiance and serenity, as if she were both muse and messenger of some cosmic art form. The image fuses rock mythology, science-fiction reverie, and portraiture into a single, vividly imagined emblem of beauty transcending both time and gravity.

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