Regional media reports and government statements have confirmed that Israeli naval forces have captured an alleged senior Hezbollah official in a daring raid launched from the Mediterranean sea on Friday.

The man described as a high-ranking Hezbollah operative has been identified as Imad Amhaz. Commandos on speed boats reportedly landed on a Lebanese beach and snatched him from a cabin in the early morning hours. 

“A sizable force, suspected to be Israeli, stealthily touched down on the shores of Batroun in northern Lebanon, roughly 87 miles from the Israeli border, with the intent of snatching a high-ranking terrorist operative from his hideaway in a cabin,” Israel’s YNet news details, adding that the raid involved 25 Israeli elite troops.

Lebanese national broadcaster National News agency separately described that an “unidentified military force” carried out a “sea landing” at a beach at Batroun, south of Tripoli.

The commando group “went with all its weapons and equipment to a chalet near the beach, kidnapping a Lebanese man… and sailing away into the open sea on a speedboat,” NNA added.

Lebanese media is only saying that the man that was nabbed was a “student” of a maritime institute in Lebanon. According to more from eyewitnesses of the strange episode:

He was taken from student housing near the Batroun institute, but was a resident of the Shia-majority town of Qmatiyeh further south, said the acquaintance who spoke on the condition of anonymity for security concerns.

He was completing courses to become a sea captain, the source told AFP, adding that the man was in his thirties and was well known by the teaching staff at the center.

But the IDF has called the man a “significant source of knowledge” for Hezbollah’s naval force. It’s expected that Amhaz will be detained and interrogated in a military prison.

“He was taken to Israel to be questioned by the Military Intelligence Directorate’s Unit 504 — which specializes in HUMINT, or human intelligence — on Hezbollah’s naval operations,” Times of Israel subsequently reported.

UN peacekeeping forces in South Lebanon have entered the controversy, amid conflicting reports they may have prevented the Lebanese armed forces from responding to the raid (which UNIFIL firmly denies) on Lebanon’s sovereign territory and its citizens:

Lebanese journalist Hasan Illaik, who first reported on the raid, cited anonymous Lebanese military officials as saying the operation was apparently carried out in coordination with the German Navy operating within UNIFIL forces, to prevent the Lebanese Navy from interfering.

Meanwhile, some Lebanese sources say that the kidnapped man is innocent, and not affiliated with Hezbollah, and that the IDF kidnapped a regular Lebanese citizen. Video also captured the raid:

🚨BREAKING 🚨 An Israeli commando kidnapped a Lebanese licensed boat officer, believing he was a high-ranking Hezbollah official, in a “daring operation” yesterday in Batroun north Lebanon. pic.twitter.com/BraFMuTdmy

— Hala Jaber (@HalaJaber) November 2, 2024

Israel’s military has further said that “The operative has been transferred to Israeli territory and is currently being investigated.”

The Associated Press has acknowledged that the occupation of the kidnapped man is murky and uncertain, amid continuing speculation: “Three Lebanese judicial officials told AP the incident occurred at dawn Friday, adding that the captain might have links with Hezbollah.” The report added: “The officials said an investigation is looking into the man is linked to Hezbollah or working for an Israeli spy agency and an Israeli force came to rescue him.”

Submitted by QTR’s Fringe Finance

I had an old friend who used to be a bouncer at one of the bars where I worked in Philadelphia many years ago. We got along decently outside of work because we both had the same mutual interests in our twenties: beer, sports, gambling, and women.

The big differences between us were that he had a much shorter temper than I did, a much tougher time controlling his emotions and a much larger appetite for alcohol. As would happen given those differences, as the years went by, we eventually lost touch, only to bump into each other randomly at the airport one day after we hadn’t seen each other for about ten years.

I was returning from a trip I had taken for my job, and he was on his way outbound to some tropical destination I can’t remember. After the perfunctory catch-up, I asked him why he was taking what seemed like a random vacation during the middle of the week.

He told me that days prior, he had been at the local casino in Philadelphia playing poker and had won $30,000 from the bad beat jackpot, so he was celebrating.

I asked him how it happened and what he did when he found out he’d won.

He told me: “Chris, that place has taken so much money from me that when I finally won, I flipped the f*cking poker table over in the middle of the room, while all eight people were sitting at it, and screamed at the top of my lungs.”

Then, he told me, they paid him out and asked him to leave and never come back.

Anybody else might easily write this story off as someone with a flair for the dramatic, but having seen my friend flip a table once or twice under far less exciting circumstances (or for no reason at all after multiple shots of Jameson), I knew he wasn’t making it up.

Heading into the weekend, I kept thinking about metaphors to make some type of big statement about how important I think Tuesday’s election is for our nation. No matter how many ways I tried to word it, all I could think about as an analogy to a potential Trump victory was my friend, sitting inside a casino he’s probably lost a zillion dollars in, finally scoring a big win against the house—the machine that always has the odds in its favor—flipping that table, with the chips, drinks and cards on it, and then getting kicked out carrying a massive Publisher’s Clearing House-style novelty check.

I don’t like that this is how I think of the government, the Democratic party and the media, conjoined as one unbeatable, dystopian chimera with the odds always in its favor—but I can’t help it. What else could you possibly call a ruling party of elites, using one hand to rig their primary process while using the other to write diatribes about the importance of democracy? What else could you call the party that blankets its deeply flawed policy prescriptions under the cloak of the moral high ground? What do you call the party that used to preach freedom of choice, speech and liberty that now takes its cues from giant pharmaceutical corporations and the military industrial complex? How about the party that outright lied in 2020 to the public about the president’s involvement in a Chinese influence-peddling scam days before the last election?

And then, what can be said about almost all of the major media networks that have enabled, and run cover for, these actions, all while making concerned looking faces like they actually give a shit about the truth and can’t believe how stupid we are?

Just last week, I watched the media arm of the Democratic Party, consisting of all the major news networks with the exception of Fox News, accuse Jewish people at President Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally of being Nazis. This week, I’m watching them tell the public that Trump said Liz Cheney should be executed when he said nothing of the sort.

Over the last four years, there have been countless instances like these — the “very fine people” hoax, the never-ending live coverage of the Russia collusion hoax, and CNN putting a yellow filter over Joe Rogan’s face and telling the world he was taking horse medicine when they knew he was not. I wrote it days ago: the media has sacrificed what’s left of its credibility at the altar of an un-elected woman who thinks the PCE deflator is something you sit on at a party that makes a farting noise and that “Strategic Petroleum, Reserve” is a brand of top shelf vodka.

National Review said it pretty well last month:

The media has gotten so much wrong over the last four years that not only is it bleeding viewers to alternative media, but major networks like CNN have been forced to lay off staff and completely rethink their programming. It’s a phenomenon that we saw continue last week, with Jeff Bezos making a point not to endorse a political candidate at the Washington Post because, in his words “Americans don’t trust the news media”.

Among the dead weight purged from CNN some years ago was anchor Brian Stelter. This week, probably without even knowing it, he made a very cogent point when he quoted an anonymous TV executive who said:

“If half the country has decided that Trump is qualified to be president, that means they’re not reading any of this media, and we’ve lost this audience completely. A Trump victory means mainstream media is dead in its current form.”

Stelter doesn’t know it, but he’s onto something much bigger than he thinks. He’s presenting that statement out of protest because he believes that mainstream media really is the authority for objective truth and the moral high ground.

Of course, what the last decade has proven to us is that he’s wrong — deadass wrong. He may not know why he’s wrong, but the point he makes still stands: as I wrote days ago, at some point, the bias and outright lying are going to hit such a fever pitch that even independent and center-left viewers and voters are going to take notice.

People are simply not going to stand for one-sided fact-checking at debates, “60 Minutes” deceptively editing interviews, and political anchors injecting their politics into the “news.” In fact, longtime Washington Post contributor Hugh Hewitt walked off the set of one of his live streams and quit the Washington Post just hours ago because of exactly this: Democrats are not even hiding their bias anymore and completely lack finesse in their attempts to sway public opinion, as I have noted in a previous article.

For a glance at how left-wing mainstream media is imploding, watch the entirety of this four minute clip.

Now that we have the miracle of the internet and alternative media, when that moment comes, mainstream media will have officially crossed to the other side of the adoption bell curve and will begin its slow descent into irrelevance. Before that descent can begin, tolerance for the media must hit a zenith where viewer interest peaks, then ever so slightly starts to fade toward alternative media. This election could very well mark that apex officially moving behind us. Here’s how I see it:

A GOP victory on Tuesday not only flips the media’s figurative table over, it flips over the table of government in favor of empowering people. It flips over the table that is addicted to spending and racking up trillions of dollars in debt every year. It flips over the table that spends those trillions of dollars on other countries while increasing taxation on American citizens. It flips over the table that cleans up San Francisco for when China’s president arrives but can’t do so for American citizens. It flips over the table of every lie you’ve been told about Joe Biden’s mental health when you could clearly sit at home and watch with your own two eyes how poor of a state he was in. It flips over the table of identity politics and looking at everybody by their race, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality under the guise of fighting discrimination. And most importantly, a victory for the GOP on Tuesday flips over the table of trying to stifle the most important God-given right of them all: our right to free speech.

I’m not going to make some sensationalist claim like if the Democrats win, it’s going to be the end of the world. It won’t. That’s why we have three branches of government and, frankly, there are far too many lazy and incompetent people in government to effectively make too many negative changes quick enough for our nation to deteriorate much quicker over the next four years than it already is. But I bet even the Democrats who are going to vote for Kamala Harris know in the back of their mind that the nation isn’t on the right path right now, and that’s the way we will continue under a Harris administration. Only faster.

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If the GOP wins this election, I believe it will be far more consequential to the nation. It feels as though a dam is about to break in the United States and the magnetic poles of the two parties are about to shift. Joe Rogan alluded to this while interviewing Trump when he said:

“The rebels are Republicans now. You want to be punk rock? You want to buck the system? You are conservative now. The liberals are now pro-silencing criticism. They are pro-censorship. They talk about regulating free speech. It’s bananas to watch.”

There’s no question the left is pulling us further and further left and, at some point, the nation will snap back in the other direction, regardless of whether it is this election cycle or not. But I’ll be damned if it doesn’t feel like we are right on the doorstep of making a statement that’s bigger than politics by reelecting Donald Trump.

Sure, it’ll be a statement that we want lower taxes, our freedom of speech, less regulation and small government. But most importantly, it would be a rebuke of all of the names that Democrats have called Republicans, all of the blatant lies they’ve told us and then scolded us like children for not believing, and the party and media machine’s assumption it could serve up whatever candidate it wanted, without a primary, and because they have the moral high ground and the media machine backing them, the country will just shut the fuck up and swallow it.

When my friend lost money consistently at the casino for years and years, he just “shut the fuck up and swallowed it” and kept coming back for more. The games were rigged, but hell—he was in there taking his shot. And when he finally had the chance to take the house, big, not only did he take some of that money back, but he made a statement in doing so. And while I don’t usually condone destructive behavior, deep down, I know how good it felt for him, and I’m glad he did it. Now, I wonder if the nation can do the same.

Note from QTR: This will be my last post about politics at least until after Election Day. If you haven’t yet, I urge you desperately to get to the polls on Tuesday and make your voice heard. Just like in 2020, this election may come down to single-digit numbers of votes in many places.

QTR’s Disclaimer: Please read my full legal disclaimer on my About page here. This post represents my opinions only. In addition, please understand I am an idiot and often get things wrong and lose money. I may own or transact in any names mentioned in this piece at any time without warning. Contributor posts and aggregated posts have been hand selected by me, have not been fact checked and are the opinions of their authors. They are either submitted to QTR by their author, reprinted under a Creative Commons license with my best effort to uphold what the license asks, or with the permission of the author.

This is not a recommendation to buy or sell any stocks or securities, just my opinions. I often lose money on positions I trade/invest in. I may add any name mentioned in this article and sell any name mentioned in this piece at any time, without further warning. None of this is a solicitation to buy or sell securities. I may or may not own names I write about and are watching. Sometimes I’m bullish without owning things, sometimes I’m bearish and do own things. Just assume my positions could be exactly the opposite of what you think they are just in case. All positions can change immediately as soon as I publish this, with or without notice and at any point I can be long, short or neutral on any position. You are on your own. Do not make decisions based on my blog. I exist on the fringe. The publisher does not guarantee the accuracy or completeness of the information provided in this page. These are not the opinions of any of my employers, partners, or associates. I did my best to be honest about my disclosures but can’t guarantee I am right; I write these posts after a couple beers sometimes. I edit after my posts are published because I’m impatient and lazy, so if you see a typo, check back in a half hour. Also, I just straight up get shit wrong a lot. I mention it twice because it’s that important.

Ukraine launched another wave of drones on Russia overnight, with Russia’s military saying early Friday that its air defense systems intercepted 83 Ukrainian drones across several regions, including over Crimea.

But at least some of the drones made it through, causing significant damage at an oil depot in the town of Svetlograd in southwest Russia. Regional Governor Vladimir Vladimirov described that an unmanned aircraft “fell” into the Svetlograd oil facility, but without causing casualties. Such large UAV attacks have been almost daily, and coming for weeks.

Social media videos circulated in the aftermath of the attack, showing a large blaze – which appeared to be quickly extinguished. The depot is owned by state oil giant Rosneft.

Bryansk and Kursk regions also saw waves of inbound drones overnight, with the military saying it downed 20 over Bryansk and 36 over Kursk. At least a dozen were also intercepted over Crimea.

On the other side of the conflict, Ukraine’s General Staff said Russia launched a record 2,023 drones across the border for the month of October. There have been some days in October when over a hundred drones were sent from Ukraine in a single 24 hour period – with the same from the Russian side on Ukraine as well.

Ukraine’s energy infrastructure has been heavily impacted, with rolling blackouts across many parts of the country now a regular part of daily life. Russia has been much less impacted, and its infrastructure vaster.

Earlier this week Russia’s defense ministry announced more key gains in the Donetsk region. The military is now in control of Ukrainian town of Selydove, just southeast of the larger strategic city of Pokrovsk.

CNN has observed that “Selydove was an important staging area for Ukraine’s defenses and a key foothold to prevent Russia’s advance toward Pokrovsk.”

Ukrainian forces on the frontlines in the region have complained of multiple attacks from all directions of late. Russia has the artillery and manpower to keep up a constant assault, while Kiev forces lack both.

Russia “continues to assault with very large troop numbers. They used reserves from the north of the frontline’s Pokrovsk section to increase pressure on Selydove,” 15th brigade national guard spokesman Vitaliy Milovidov said on Tuesday.

Overnight, Ukrainian attack drones successfully struck a Russian fuel storage depot in Svetlograd, Stavropol Krai, setting multiple tanks alight.

Seen here, a Ukrainian drone slams into the Russian depot, detonating. pic.twitter.com/FRNxeKJLAH

— OSINTtechnical (@Osinttechnical) November 1, 2024

“At the same time, the enemy is not destroying the city’s infrastructure,” he explained. “Most likely, they want to keep the town as a foothold for themselves in the future. Selydove is a large town where you can accommodate a large number of people and hide equipment.”

Russian forces are currently engaged in several offensives across the east and they are within a few kilometers of Pokrovsk; that’s spitting distance for their artillery and guided FAB munitions. Their strategy so far has been to encircle urban centers and slowly squeeze Ukrainian defense units out, which means the battle for Pokrovsk will soon be on the horizon at this rate.

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

Some wild shifts are taking place in our time…

The low-tariff global trade order is falling apart.

Nationalist movements are gaining strength in every Western nation, not just the United States.

The major media is under serious financial strain to the point that the owner of the Washington Post has penned an editorial decrying the tendency to speak only to elites.

A presidential candidate is talking about scrapping the income tax.

The Supreme Court earlier this year ruled that 40 years of regulatory jurisprudence is essentially contrary to the Constitution.

The list goes on and on with the rise of homeschooling, the reliance on alternative media, the dramatic shift in partisan affiliations over healthy food, the unpredictable alliances over the U.S. role in the world, and so much more.

People are asking fundamental questions about issues that only a few years ago seemed fully settled. What was stable is unstable and what was believed by nearly everyone is now widely doubted.

It’s enough to make one’s head spin. What is happening and why is it happening?

The short answer is that we are living through a class paradigm shift.

One is going away and another is coming. We are in pre-paradigmatic times, which are surely the most exciting times to be alive.

The word paradigm entered into the mainstream of thought with an important book by Thomas Kuhn. His “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” appeared in 1962, and it completely upended the dominated assumptions about how science works.

More than that, it implicitly shook how people came to understand how progress takes place. He said it is not a linear process with every generation absorbing the best from the last but rather that progress is episodic, a shift from success to failure and back again, through titanic movements of large paradigms.

Kuhn arrived at this conclusion by looking at the long history of science and noticing the tendency toward complacency around an orthodoxy of some sort. This is the period he calls “normal science.” The practitioners have all been schooled in a certain way, deferring to teachers and dominant institutions that have captured government and the public mind. It’s a way of understanding the world and within that the main practitioners focus on problem-solving and applications.

This period of normal science can last a month or decades or centuries, rarely questioned. And then something happens. Kuhn writes that this orthodoxy comes to be challenged by certain features of reality that are not explained by normal science. Once these are more closely investigated, the anomalies start to pile up and then overwhelm the explanatory power of the settled paradigm. The longer this goes on, the more the paradigm comes under strain, as a new generation seizes on the failures and highlights the incapacity of the orthodoxy to account for the reality all around us.

That’s when the settled science breaks down. It can happen slowly or quickly, and sometimes paradigms overlap both in their popularity and their collapse. That collapse does not mean that every mind is changed. Kuhn observes that the practitioners of the old science continue on their merry way through retirement and final expiration, while the younger people work on cobbling together a new way of thinking that gradually emerges as the dominant paradigm.

Kuhn was writing about science and the profession thereof but his insight has broad application to sociological, cultural, and political ideas too. They do not evolve in a linear fashion, piling victory upon victory, as a Whiggish perspective of the 19th century would have it. Instead, change occurs episodically. One generation is as likely to forget the wisdom of the past as it is to overthrow the orthodoxies of the present. We are in a forever state of cobbling together truth rather than progressively unfolding it.

We’ve seen this happen in the postwar world, as planners built structures that were supposed to govern the world forever. But in a few short years, the world came to be divided rather than united by the Western perception of the new threat of Russian imperialism. That created the Cold War which lasted for 40 years until a new “end of history” was born, which put freedom, democracy, and U.S. hegemony on the commanding heights. That turn has been challenged by the rise of China and huge industrial shifts in the 21st century.

A worker is pictured with car batteries at a factory of Xinwangda Electric Vehicle Battery Co. Ltd., which makes lithium batteries for electric cars and other uses, in Nanjing in China’s eastern Jiangsu Province, on March 12, 2021. STR/AFP via Getty Images

If we were to name one dominant factor that has provoked the big change in our time, it would have to be the global response to the lab-created virus of SARS-CoV-2, which was met with Chinese Communist Party-style universal quarantines all over the world, and followed by shot mandates on most public institutions and many private businesses. These policies were extreme beyond which had been practiced in any period of history but also, and in many ways, merely an extension of the “normal science” of times.

The media, large corporations, and nearly all governments got behind the pandemic response and jeered the non-compliers. This was a huge error because it gave rise to a full generation of the incredulous who lost trust in elites at all levels: medical, academic, media, and government. It has all fallen apart in our time, leaving people scrambling in all directions for explanations of what could have gone so wrong and what should be done about it.

What fascinates me about our election year is not so much the issues on the table but the underlying template that everyone knows is there but no one dares mention; namely the utter discrediting of elite opinion over the last four years.

The claims of the experts simply became too implausible to compel public assent. And this time it was personal. People’s schools and churches were closed, loved ones forced on ventilators to die alone, and whole communities were shattered when public spaces were blocked.

In other words, the “normal science” became a threat to people’s lives, especially once the vaccine mandates came along that most people did not want or need and which ended up being far less effective and far more dangerous than advertised. That was the turning point, the mark at which the anomalies overwhelmed the orthodoxies and the expert classes fell into disrepute.

Nothing about any of this would shock Thomas Kuhn, who gave us a map of understanding back in 1962. Finding that new way of thinking is the essence of our times, which is why everything seems to be in question. The other day, Elon Musk suggested cutting $2 trillion next year from the federal budget. It barely made the headlines, even though it is a highly credible promise.

That’s the new world in which we live. It is being built on the embers of the old.

To be sure, this shift will not happen all at once. It will happen in fits and starts and be accompanied by a great deal of alarm and even pain along the way. But one way or another, it is going to happen, and for one simple reason. As Jeff Bezos explained in the Washington Post, reality is an undisputed champion.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.

Podcaster Joe Rogan said in an Oct. 30 episode of his show that he gave Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign an “open invitation” to sit down for an interview at any time.

“I said anytime. I said if she’s done at 10, we’ll come back here at 10. I’ll do it at 9 in the morning, I’ll do it at 10 p.m. I’ll do it at midnight if she’s up, if she wants to, you know, drink a Red Bull,” he said, recalling what he told the campaign.

Rogan’s show features around 14 million subscribers on Spotify, making it the top show on the platform, but it also generates significant traffic and engagement on YouTube.

His interview with former President Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, released late last week, has garnered more than 41 million views on YouTube so far.

While speaking to comedians Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster during episode 2220 of The Joe Rogan Experience…

…Rogan said that Harris “actually reached out when she found out that [Trump] was coming on.”

“So their camp reached out to me,” he said.

“So I said, ‘Great, I would love to talk to her.’ But it was very difficult to tie it down. They wanted [me] to travel, and see, the thing is, if I go somewhere, then there’s going to be other people in the room. And they want to control a lot of things, I’m sure.”

As The Epoch Times’ Jack Phillips reported, Harris was in Houston last week and held a rally there featuring an endorsement and speech from pop singer Beyoncé.

In a social media post earlier this week, Rogan said that the Harris campaign had conditions for the Democratic presidential nominee to do the interview.

The Epoch Times previously reached out to the campaign, which has not responded to Rogan’s remarks, for comment.

“For the record, the Harris campaign has not passed on doing the podcast,” Rogan wrote in a social media post on Tuesday.

“They offered a date for Tuesday, but I would have had to travel to her, and they only wanted to do an hour. I strongly feel the best way to do it is in the studio in Austin. My sincere wish is to just have a nice conversation and get to know her as a human being. I really hope we can make it happen.”

During the episode with Kisin and Foster, Rogan also addressed speculation that he might be a covert Trump supporter.

“Just because of my appearance, there’s always been this assumption that I’m some right-wing MAGA guy,” he said, referring to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan.

“I’m a politically homeless person for sure. You know, I always considered myself a left-wing person. I never thought I would ever vote right-wing, but then the tides of culture shifted in a very bizarre way. And it just made me, over time, much more aware of what this stuff is really all about.”

Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), will also air on Rogan’s show after being interviewed at Rogan’s Austin studio on Wednesday.

Both Trump and Harris have engaged in a flurry of campaigning as the race draws to a close. Both candidates have taken part in several podcasts ahead of the 2024 General Election as they attempt to reach new audiences.

More than 60 million people have cast early ballots so far ahead of the Nov. 5 contest, according to data released by the University of Florida’s Election Lab.

The Epoch Times contacted the Harris campaign for comment about Rogan’s claims but didn’t receive a reply by publication time.