We Should Switch Names

This was written on March 6, but I didn’t publish it right away.

I have no interest in coin collecting. When I was a kid, my mother tried to get me interested in coins and antiques. I never developed any enthusiasm for coins. I didn’t get anywhere with antiques, either, although I enjoyed going through The Antique Trader, looking for old swords and daggers. My mother should have encouraged me to collect them. I’d be sitting pretty now. She was more interested in things like plates.

It’s remarkable how rich you can get collecting almost anything. Just refuse to clean out your garage for 30 years, and you’re bound to end up with a sizeable pile of assets.

Although I didn’t become a numismatist, I ended up with a few coins, including junk silver, which is the common term for circulated silver coins. Before 1965, US dimes, quarters, half dollars, and dollars were 90% silver. My grandfather was very sharp, and when the change came, he instructed the toll collectors in his area to save silver for him. He paid the state back at face value. When he died, I got a share of the coins.

He was a judge, and he had a lot of clout, so he could do things like that.

Now you know about my history as a coin collector. It is sparse.

A year or two back, Youtube started recommending videos made by a collector. He calls himself a silver stacker, which means he likes to invest in silver bullion and coins. He talks about developments in the precious metals and coin markets. He shows people things he has bought. He interviews shop owners.

I wondered why I was receiving these recommendations.

He published some interviews featuring a man known as the Coin Guy. His name is Guy Ventre, and he has a shop in my area code. I would guess he’s in his late sixties. He moved to Florida from New York, and he has a son who works in the business. His son’s name is Nathan.

The interviews were fascinating. The Coin Guy is not a highly educated man, but he’s very smart, and he reads. He keeps up with various news sources, including The Wall Street Journal. He reads books. He loves history. In the interviews, he provides all sorts of historical insights into coins and metals.

The Coin Guy wears what looks like a Smith & Wesson Chief’s Special on his hip, openly.

He talks a lot about the insanity of fiat currency. He reminds people of what happened in the Weimar Republic, where inflation became so bad, people had to carry bags of money in order to buy groceries.

As new interviews popped up, it became more and more obvious that he and the interviewer were both conservative and concerned about the zombie apocalypse.

The Coin Guy gives talks to kids, trying to interest them in what he does. He is very involved at his church.

I added all these things up. Coin dealer. Metals dealer. Believer in portable wealth. Doesn’t trust the government. Retailer. Born in New York. Smart. Erudite. Family-centered. Last name Ventre. Son named Nathan.

My conclusion: Messianic Jew. Had to be.

Why did “Ventre” make a bell go off? Because I knew a Jewish girl named Ventry.

I found out I was wrong but not far off. In an interview, Mr. Ventre said he had learned, as an adult, that he was part Jewish. Evidently, it was more obvious to me than it was to him. He’s not a Messianic Jew. He’s a Christian with some Jewish ancestry. Enough to be helpful, I think.

I believe I know why Youtube recommended him. I think conservatives and Christians are more interested in coins and metals than other people. I had always thought of these fields as areas that drew Jews, Middle Easterners, and Asians, but based on what I’ve learned, plain old conservatives are very much part of them now.

I took an instinctive liking to this man. He seemed like the kind of virtuous American male you don’t run into often these days. He talked a lot about honesty and reputation. He discussed his hopes for young people and his fears for America, which are, let’s face it, coming true.

A couple of days ago, he told a story about his daughter. She was getting married, so he bought her a bracelet with diamonds and jewels. He paid $2000 for it, and it appraised for more like twice that. When he had it appraised, his wife said, “Sell it.” He refused, saying it might be the thing that got his grandchildren across the Canadian border some day.

I started thinking about the apocalypse. What do we know about it? Here is one thing we know: when it comes, there will be no way to protect yourself. Only God will be able to protect people. If you have money, metals, junk silver, jewels, and securities, they won’t do you any good. No one is going to want to trade food for Bitcoin or Mercury dimes when people are starving.

Will food, land, and barter goods help people? My guess is that they will provide something of a cushion, but the problems of the apocalypse are murder, death, and lack, joined with delusion and a coercive one-world religion. Food and land won’t keep killers away. They won’t keep disease (death) away. When the government belongs to the likes of BLM and Antifa, and they serve the beast, the government’s agents won’t respect your locks and gates, so land won’t help much.

The only answer will be to know God through Jesus Christ. It won’t be enough to ask for salvation and try not to sin. You’ll have to communicate with the Holy Spirit every day and obey him. God is shaking the world so people’s hands will come loose from the things they cling to in vain. His hand is the only thing that will help us.

If we stack silver, silver can lose its value. If we try to grow food, it can be destroyed by bad weather, bugs, and disease. If we store things in our houses, those things can be taken from us. God is quite literally the only thing no person or spirit can take away.

Our enemies only have as much power as God allows them to have. Remember what the Bible said about Jesus. He wasn’t captured by hostile Jews. He turned himself in. He let them know they had no power except that which God gave them. When they approached him, he knocked them to the ground with supernatural power, showing he was God. They knew he was God, but they chose to arrest him, beat him, and have him killed anyway. The men who did this had no excuse when they died and were judged.

You may not be Jesus, but if you belong to God, Satan and his people can’t do anything to you unless God allows it. What he allows depends on your relationship with him.

Sometimes I think I should buy several buckets of disaster food, but I don’t think I’ll ever become a real prepper, because you can’t really protect yourself from the tribulation, and I don’t expect to be here when it happens. I expect to be raptured.

These things were on my mind after I saw the video.

Today, my wife told me about a dream she had last night.

The tribulation had come. She was with another woman. It wasn’t a person she knew in life, but she knew her in the dream. People were running to and fro, looking for safety. There was no refuge. People running away from one place would run past people running to the place they had just come from. People thought other places might be safer, but people who had been to those places knew better.

Vicious dogs were chasing my wife and the woman. There was a gate, and my wife wanted to go through it. She and the woman ran through. Behind the gate, there was a house. My wife knew people in the house were safe, but she couldn’t go in. The other woman was allowed inside. While my wife begged to know how to get in, a giant came out. He had goat’s horns. He was grey. His skin looked as though it had been burned. Suddenly, she knew she had to submit to him, or he would not let her in.

Of course, he was the beast. The house was a place of false safety, for godless people who accept his mark. The woman was a damned soul who submitted to him.

These are my interpretations.

It’s a lot like the Jewish temple, now that I think about it. The temple had an outer area for everyone, and it had areas deeper inside. The farther in you went, the closer to God you had to be. The most sacred place was the holy of holies, where only the high priest could go, and even he could only enter once a year. It makes sense that Satan would work the same way, since he copies God. The house must have been like the priests’ court in the temple. It was for people who proved themselves close to Satan.

God uses sheep to lure people to his altar. Why wouldn’t Satan use dogs and wolves to drive people to his? He used them to drive people into Hitler’s death camps, which were parodies of the temple.

The dream has me wondering: how close is the end?

In related news, I am no longer quite sure who has the moral high ground in the Ukraine/Russia dispute. I haven’t been keeping up with it. Americans on both sides of the political spectrum seem to be overwhelmingly against Russia, but I wonder how many of them know any more than I do.

It makes me uncomfortable to find out I’m siding with people like Bill Maher.

I don’t watch Saturday Night Live, but I decided to take a look at last night’s opening skit because of the war. I thought they might say something about Biden’s dementia and overall weakness encouraging Russia and China to take aggressive action, or maybe about Biden considering boycotting Russian oil and buying from the Venezuelan dictatorship instead of letting Americans drill, but instead, the skit was about Fox News and Donald Trump.

Apparently, some Fox personalities were supportive of Putin in the past, or maybe they didn’t condemn him strongly enough. I can’t really tell, and SNL is (putatively) a comedy show, not a news show.

Biden’s dementia and incompetence are clearly much bigger factors in our current predicament than the words of a few news personalities and a former president, but you can’t expect New York leftists to miss a chance to deflect.

Today, while taking a very brief look at the news, I saw a magazine opinion piece praising Biden for sticking to his guns regarding oil. That amazed me. The argument is that global warming is so terrifying, we need to do everything we can to stop it.

What isn’t so clear is how drilling for oil here instead of in Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iran, and Venezuela will make the oil any more of a warming threat. We still have to burn oil, so it appears to me that the locations of the rigs aren’t very relevant. It seems to me that the main impact of restricting domestic production is to weaken America and strengthen our enemies. We send our money overseas, we kill our own jobs, and we give our enemies control of our oil supply, so we have increased incentive to kowtow to vile regimes.

But perhaps I am wrong.

Maybe the writer was pushing a toxic leftist talking point: emissions should be stopped by curtailing consumption. If so, it’s hard to imagine a dumber position. Consumption equals progress equals prosperity equals a better standard of living. Consumption equals better medical care, schools, and food. It equals peace through enhanced military power. It equals better times for people who rely on charities.

Rational people generally agree that poverty is bad, but there are a lot of people on the left who dream of $15 gas. They truly believe it’s a good idea.

Elon Musk, the foremost proponent of the so-far nonexistent electric revolution, is saying we need to drill more. That’s really something. This is the guy who was going to save us from carbon.

Most people don’t know it, but it is impossible to create a practical electric 18-wheeler. Tesla delivers its electric cars on the backs of diesel trucks. Tesla owners get furious when this is mentioned. Tesla makes big trucks, but truck production is really just a vanity project.

The batteries for a Tesla semi weigh about 7 tons, so they displace a lot of paying cargo. They provide little range. They wear out fast, and semis rack up miles quickly. They cost a screaming fortune: $250,000. I don’t know, but I’ll bet they’re also made with materials we have to get from our enemies. Let’s check.

Yes, China controls 80% of the market for battery raw materials.

The guy who says we have to go electric is clearly worried about the cost of the diesel he uses to deliver his cars, and it’s obvious he is aware his battery trucks aren’t actually useful. If they were, he would be tweeting about the need to get more of them on the road to make us energy-independent.

In any case, even he admits Biden’s policy is destructive and foolish.

The wacky beliefs people are falling for now are strong evidence that supernatural deception is more prevalent than ever. A sign that things are wrapping up.

I take prophetic dreams seriously. My wife has had them before, and so have I.

I got into a conflict with a woman I had dated. One night, I dreamed she was a giant cockroach in my kitchen. She was around a foot tall. She had strange packages attached to her under her wings, like bombs on an airplane. I knew they were full of her eggs; bad future developments she hoped to bring upon me. I knew who the roach was because she was the same color as the woman’s skin, and like the woman, she had a round belly and frizzy hair.

The roach got ready to fly toward me and attack me. I tried to discourage her, but she was too enraged to listen. She flew into the air and into a running fan. It destroyed her and shot her remains into the air, spraying me with her guts. The bombs, which were intended to hatch into problems for me (such as the awful children we might have had), were destroyed. I was unscathed, but I was still covered with brown slime. This is a very accurate metaphor for what eventually happened between me and the woman. I came out on top, but I was still defiled and embarrassed. When I awoke from the dream, I knew how things would turn out.

My wife recently dreamed a man she knew was having premarital sex with his girlfriend, and she called him to tell him. Eventually, he admitted the dream was correct. She also had a dream that correctly showed that the girlfriend’s sister and mother were witches and that they had had a supernatural battle.

I dreamed I took my dad to Chick-fil-A. He was very old and nearly bald. He was feeble. As we walked to a table, waiters cheered. They were elated to see him. I knew this meant he would be saved, and sure enough, it happened later.

In my most obvious rapture dream, I was lifted to heaven on an invisible tsunami that covered the world. Oddly, I had a little tray of roach poison pellets in front of me, and it went with me. Because of this dream, I expect to make it.

Yesterday, I felt an urge to watch a few minutes from movies about Noah. I don’t watch fiction now, but I felt I was supposed to see these things. Noah’s deliverance symbolized the rapture as well as baptism.

The first movie was the John Huston classic. I wanted to see it because I remembered the way Noah’s hostile neighbors looked. They reminded me of today’s hipsters. They were bald, and they looked creepy. They adorned themselves with skulls. Have you noticed all the bald men around us? It seems like half of America’s men are bald, with creepy convict chin beards and tattoos. I thought it was strange that the movie’s characters were so much like them, given that the movie was made in the 1950’s.

Modern Americans are determined to look the way losers looked in 1960. Here’s something God once told me: we become what we imitate.

I saw a funny scene. One of Noah’s sons was asking him if he was sure the world would flood. He said the crops weren’t being looked after, and the weather was dry. His mother scolded him for doubting his dad. Then she turned to Noah and said he needed to take one son off the ark project and send him to fix the roof on Noah’s house. She was worried it would let water in when the rain started. Noah looked at her in disbelief, smiled, and agreed.

When the flood came, there was a moment when screams could be heard coming from outside the ark. That is something I’ve thought about in the past.

The second movie was the Russell Crowe version. Not much of interest there. I saw some short clips.

It portrayed the fallen angels as saviors of mankind, which is obscene, given that all the evidence we have says Satan is their leader. Failing to appreciate your allies is bad, but giving credit to your enemies is beyond stupid. The purpose of the flood was to kill the descendants of the angels.

I feel like John Huston’s Noah. I just can’t believe the things I do now matter. Why bother fixing the roof? My inescapable, persistent feeling is that if I let nearly all my earthly responsibilities go, it will make no difference at all in the long run, because my wife and I will not be here.

Jesus showed the disciples where to cast their nets, and they caught so many fish, they realized they were seeing miracles. Afterward, they walked away from the boats and left the fish to rot. Check the Bible and see. It says that. Imagine doing that today. What if you owned a big grocery store? Would you be willing to walk away and follow Jesus, allowing the inventory to go bad and the building to fall apart?

When the rapture comes, that’s what will happen. No one who goes will care about their savings, their wills, their houses, their careers…none of it.

If the rapture doesn’t come soon, then I guess we’re just stuck here, and we’ll have to take it a while longer.

We have been cleared for a trip to another country: Ireland. They insisted on getting confirmation that Rhodah was really my wife, even though we sent a PDF of our marriage certificate. Barring a sudden ascent into the clouds, we will probably have to make two more trips before she comes to the US. Ireland is somehow connected with the Schengen-area countries, so we expect her Irish visa will give her credibility if we decide to try another country in Europe later.

Israel would be the best possible destination, but they’re so crazy over there, I don’t count on anything.

I have never had much interest in visiting Ireland, because nothing has ever happened there, but the people are said to be very nice, and they have great seafood. It should be fun. I wasn’t interested in Turkey, either, and I had a great time there.