☕️ TRIPPING UP ☙ Monday, September 8, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

NYT baffled by toppling seniors tripping and dying; DoD boots foreign coders from nukes; Navy blows up fentanyl smugglers; Trump redraws hemisphere; Epstein story detour; RFK Jr. torches CDC.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Monday! September’s second week is off with a bang. Your roundup includes: New York Times and its useless experts are baffled at the latest medical mystery— seniors falling and dying in droves, and you’ll (really) never guess what they’re blaming this time; DoD ditches sketchy foreign programmers working on our nuclear codes; U.S. Navy blows up Venezuelan fentanyl smugglers and also blows up fake constititional crisis; Trump’s hemispheric America First policy; New York Times massively diverts the Epstein narrative in the wake of a bare suggestion Trump helped nail the international man of mystery; and RFK Jr. drops the CDC truth bomb we’ve been waiting for.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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This morning, the New York Times ran its latest medical mystery story headlined, “Why Are More Older People Dying After Falls?” What do I always tell you about headlines that pose questions? As ever, the article failed to answer its own query— thus: doctors are baffled. But this time, they posited a doozy of a theory.

According to data from last month’s JAMA, “In 2023, the most recent year of data, more than 41,000 Americans over 65 died from falls.” Not just fell. Keeled over.

After working-age folks, seniors were the next-highest-jabbed population. If you were a covid jab conspiracy theorist, you might suspect the article was about to confess there’s been a recent, deadly new trend in geriatric tumbling.

Well, guess what: “More startling than that figure, though, was another statistic,” the Times said. “Fall-related mortality among older adults has been climbing sharply.”

And there it was. Seniors are not so much climbing sharply as they are toppling over faster than bowling pins in an earthquake.

Worse, it’s not just more falling. It’s also treatment-resistant falling. “There’ve been studies and interventions and investments, and they haven’t been particularly successful,” said Dr. Donovan Maust, a geriatric psychiatrist and researcher from the University of Michigan. “It’s a bad problem that seems to be getting worse.”

But why?

Finally, and sticking the dagger into any chance of hand-waving away this deplorable trend among a significant group of active voters, in January, the Lancet published a highly inconvenient study showing rates of senior tumbles are actually reducing in other countries.

They’ve been caught, exposed, and hauled into the sunlight. Let the blame-shifting begin.

💉 Since I’ve explained media’s usual mendacious timeline-twisting tactics before, I won’t bother much, except to point out that the Times trotted out all the usual misinforming confounders. It pulled the trend’s timeline like taffy by anchoring it in the distant past (“…since 1990...”) without providing any annual data, expecting readers to assume this trend has been steadily increasing for 35 years but they just now noticed. It tossed in some red herrings, like citing academic advice to seniors about avoiding falls from 2011, trying to throw readers off the trail.

Tellingly, the Times’s two sources of ‘timeline evidence’ actually disproved its unstated premise. The scholarly 2011 article mentioned no trend in increased fall rates. Nor did a CDC pamphlet from 2019. You’d think if there were a steadily increasing trend in fatal falls, either source would’ve said something. Anyway, the Times obviously assumed their regular readers would just lap up the claims like good little doggies and not check.

The bottom line was the Times actually proved the real timeline: Since the CDC’s 2019 pamphlet about senior falls did not mention any alarming increases in rates, and since other countries’ fall rates are not also increasing, we are seeing a domestic, post-vaccine trend, despite the Times’ best efforts to stupefy and misinform its readers.

That doesn’t mean they didn’t try.

💉 Here’s where things got really interesting. The fatal-fall trend is so sudden and so pronounced, and —thanks to Robert Kennedy, Jr.— the nation is paying so much closer attention, that they were forced to cobble together some kind of theory. Behold, the most unlikely and entertaining development yet: pharma beginning to cannibalize itself.

Oh, they tossed in the usual silly mumbo-jumbo, like improved reporting (i.e., doctors are getting smarter), but they landed on a fusion of blaming the patient (their favorite target) and throwing less profitable drugs under the bus:

“We know a lot of these drugs can increase falls by 50 to 75 percent” in older patients, said Dr. Michael Steinman, a geriatrician at the University of California. The problem, though, is that for several years, doctors have already started deprescribing, especially opioids and benzos. But the fatal fall rates are still spiking.

And you’d be forgiven for not noticing the missing Checkov’s rifle: any plausible cause of these drugs making falls deadlier. Sure, opioids might make seniors more likely to stumble, but why would they make the falls worse?

Annoyingly, the one thing they won’t look at is the most likely cause: the jabs. But regardless of the cause, what we do know for sure is that all those well-paid CDC scientists failed to make us healthier, despite being given a budget bigger than many countries’ entire gross domestic product. That’s why Secretary Kennedy has to fire so many of them. They are incompetent.

Anyway: if we refuse to look at the actual cause, or if we exclude plausible causes, there’s no hope of fixing the problem.

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Last week, Data Center Dynamics ran an encouraging story headlined, “US Defense Sec Hegseth confirms Chinese engineers no longer working on DoD's Microsoft services.” They say common sense isn’t common, but thank heavens it’s recently been getting more common.

CLIP: Secretary of War Hegseth announces canceling China programmers working in DoD (2:21).

On July 15th, ProPublica reported that, under an Obama-Biden program, Microsoft was using contract programmers from China to help write the Defense Department's most secure computer systems. The Chinese engineers were supposedly ‘overseen’ by US citizens with security clearances called "digital escorts.” But, ProPublica revealed, the so-called digital escorts were mainly “former military personnel with little coding experience who are paid barely more than minimum wage for the work.”

One digital escort told ProPublica, "We’re trusting that what they’re doing isn’t malicious, but we really can’t tell.” Trust and don’t verify.

Um.

In the wake of ProPublica’s article, War Secretary Hegseth immediately initiated a program review, and Microsoft immediately suspended all its DoD-related Chinese engineering teams. Last week, the review concluded, and three key points emerged. First, Secretary Hegseth has banned all foreign engineers from working on sensitive DoD computing (duh). Second, all the code previously provided by the Chinese teams will be carefully reviewed (also duh), by a neutral third party, at Microsoft’s expense. Third, all other contracts with other vendors will also now be reviewed for similar problems.

If you’re like me, you are shaking your head and wondering why it even took 60 days to figure out that using overseas programmers on the nation’s most sensitive digital infrastructure was wrong. But, not so fast— the last three Democrat administrations either approved or expanded the program (Obama 1, 2, and the Autopen). So “common sense” clearly isn’t universal.

In fairness, nobody has (yet) alleged the Chinese engineers did anything wrong. For its part, Microsoft had DoD approval and digital escorts, so while they were morons, they weren’t breaking the law. (Being even more generous, let’s assume they faced a shortage of skilled American programmers and weren’t just being cheap. I know. It’s a stretch.)

But just because it was legal doesn’t mean it was smart. If something did go wrong, how would the DoD get hold of a team of Asian engineers with fake names lurking somewhere in the murky Chinese mainland?

War Secretary Hegseth explained, “It blows my mind that I'm even saying these things. It defies common sense that we ever allowed it to happen. That's why we're attacking it so hard. We expect vendors doing business with the Department of Defense to put US national security ahead of profit maximization.”

Two takeaways. First, not only is Hegseth’s shrewd and prudent approach gratifying, but the speed from the time of publication to the time of correction was lightning fast for the government. In the usual course to which we’ve grown accustomed, ProPublica’s article would normally have been followed by an Asian buffet of denial and bureaucratic obfuscation as tangled as a family-sized bowl of lo mein.

Second, Hegseth’s contractual perspicacity tracks the Trump Administration’s “America First” geopolitics. It’s not that China is a de facto enemy. It’s not “China virus” racism. It’s not xenophobia. It’s that America’s top-secret military systems should be designed and run by Americans. Period. This isn’t hard.

When your mandate is “America First,” everything else gets a lot simpler.

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Last week, the New York Times ran a pearl-clutching story headlined, “Trump Administration Says Boat Strike Is Start of Campaign Against Venezuelan Cartels.” It’s become the Democrats’ latest hand-wringing ‘constitutional crisis.’ Trump is being too mean to drug cartels. It’s a problema mucho grande.

CLIP: President Trump “declares war” on drug cartels (8:29).

The news was sparked by last week’s targeted destruction of a small cartel drug-smuggling boat and its 11 ‘crew’ by U.S. military forces off Venezuela’s coast. Of course this immediately became controversial. Democrats and libertarians ironically howled that the military aren’t policemen and the smugglers got no due process.

I’ll just pause to note that, whenever the military is deployed to a Democrat-sponsored regime-change operation, like in Afghanistan, the same people complaining now clapped like trained seals over military drone strikes on civilian weddings. They weren’t even hardcore fentanyl smugglers; they were just dancing around and stuff. But for Democrats, that was no problema.

Secretary Rubio told Fox, “We have to start treating them as armed terrorist organizations, not simply drug-dealing organizations.” The history of U.S. military action on the high seas is storied and deep and supports the President.

In the First Barbary War (1801–1805), President Thomas Jefferson —without Congressional approval— sent the Navy and Marines to the Mediterranean to suppress North African muslim pirates and slavers preying on U.S. shipping lines. This was called quasi-war enforcement, rather than any declared war. Later, Congress retroactively approved and funded it.

In the 2000s–2010s, U.S. Navy and Marines often battled Somali pirates in the Gulf of Aden. In the USS Bainbridge event (2009), military snipers took out the pirates holding Captain Phillips hostage in a dramatic law-of-war style rescue.

On land, in both Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. forces routinely attacked non-government groups when those groups were identified as insurgents, militias, or ‘designated terrorist organizations.’ At that time, the post-9/11 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) was cited as the legal justification, even though that law was originally limited to the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Successive administrations (Bush, Obama, Trump) stretched the AUMF to cover “associated forces.”

After extensive military operations in those countries, a lot of buildings, trucks, enemies, and a few unlucky civilian bystanders were all blown up by U.S. forces. But nobody ever demanded the military prove that those “associated forces” were related to the Taliban or Al-Qaeda. Presidential discretion was assumed.

So the argument now is whether Trump technically needs a new law, passed by Congress, in order to legally sink cartel ships— or maybe even take more aggressive military action inland, which we haven’t seen yet, but many suspect is coming next.

He might need a new law. But the Jefferson Doctrine from the Barbary Wars suggests the President can act first and then seek retroactive Congressional approval later. Like Jefferson did, President Trump could argue his broad Commander-in-Chief power covers the immediate defense of U.S. national interests.

All this legal chatter is fascinating, and raises deep, intellectual questions about the legitimate use of lethal military force outside of a declared war. But as far as the courts go, it is not at all clear who has standing to sue— although we can easily imagine a judge or two who’d try to slap an injunction on the operation from pure TDS. But it probably wouldn’t hold. So the legal issues remain purely speculative.

Legal technicalities aside, most Americans are probably ready to embrace a final solution to the cartel problem. Once again, Trump has forced his political enemies into uselessly defending some of the worst criminals on earth— and they have no practical way to prove they are right in court.

You’d think they’d have learned their lesson by now. But they keep stepping right on the political rake.

On a final note, some more thoughtful Democrats argued that battling the cartels in South America contradicts Trump’s stated goal of keeping the United States out of any new conflicts. But this aggressive military action against the cartels is perfectly consistent with Trump’s “America First” policy. Securing the homeland includes securing America’s own regional sphere of influence (from Greenland down to Chile) while eschewing globalist conflicts in Europe, Asia, and the Pacific.

In other words, actual enemies attacking our own shores —in this case, violent multinational drug cartels— is categorically different from sending troops to Eastern Europe to help protect President Macron from mean old Putin invading Paris.

Anyway, I don’t even think Putin will invade Paris. I sure don’t want him to. But I could live with it.

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The top of the New York Times’s website featured a fascinating pivot in the paper’s Epstein coverage headlined, “How JPMorgan Enabled the Crimes of Jeffrey Epstein.” It’s especially weird, since this new focus premiered mere days after Speaker Johnson hinted that Trump might have helped the FBI nail the prolific pedophile. Look! A squirrel! In the bank!

Captain Obvious award nominee. Get it? JP Morgan “covered up” Epstein?

It was an impressive effort. Clocking in at over 20,000 words, the article is the size of a small book or a multipart magazine series. It absolutely pummels JPMorgan, chronicling in minute detail an unsurprising story of how money, celebrity, and one or two embedded bad actors can override the common sense of bank officials. It’s also the story of how a lot of big money is actually pretty shady— and bankers have grown too accustomed to it.

None of it is new; the story claims only to have boiled the whole thing down in one place for the first time. Everyone already knows the bank’s hands were somewhat dirty: JPMorgan paid victims an eye-watering $260 million and the Virgin Islands another $75 million in settlement of their claims. At least one top bank official, Les Staley, who supervised Epstein’s accounts and frequently visited pedo island, was terminated with prejudice.

The most damning fact, which probably led to those generous settlements, was this: “At Epstein’s behest,” the Gray Lady dished, “JPMorgan set up accounts — into which he routinely transferred huge sums — for young women who turned out to be victims of his sex-trafficking operations.” Well-compensated victims, but still.

Believe it or not, I recommend this article if you are an Epstein watcher. It is well-sourced, journalistic, and fact-forward. And if you have a half day to digest it. But set that aside. For this morning, I’d like to focus on what was remarkably missing from the article.

🔥 The sprawling piece mentioned many of Epstein’s relationships, with well-known names like Sergey Brin, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Leon Black, Ehud Barak, Netanyahu, and others. The Times also explained Epstein’s usefulness to bankers as a “collector of important people,” for mutual legitimacy, celebrity and regulatory contacts, and even helping the bank from time to time with mergers and acquisitions. (The article explicitly denied any global-political trafficking or blackmail conspiracy.)

But despite all the article’s name-dropping, and despite its making the specific point that Epstein collected VIPs, there was one particular name that was missing from the list, AWOL, nowhere to be found, not among any of the 20,000+ words: the name of Donald J. Trump.

It’s so curious. Nothing in the Times’ blockbuster article was “new.” The paper said it had reviewed tens of thousands of pages disclosed during the 2023-2024 lawsuits filed against JPMorgan by the victims and the Virgin Islands. Therefore, it could have been published this story last year or anytime this year.

So, why now?

Maybe the reason is that last week, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) purposely (or accidentally) mentioned Trump’s role as an FBI informant against Epstein. (On Sunday, WaPo reported that Johnson has ‘backed off’ the claim.) I’d bet two Teslas that the Times frantically checked that out, called its sources, and didn’t like whatever it discovered. Hold up, guys, this story might not make Trump look like a horny goat, but like -the- G.O.A.T.

In other words, this JPMorgan blockbuster is a narrative cruise ship, sailed into harbor to hide an ugly port-construction messup. They just dropped a book-length narrative switcheroo, right on top of their burgeoning, nonstop Trump-Epstein coverage. This is how they pivot back, to a “new focus” on “systemic enablers” like banks and regulators rather than “mere personalities.”

It’s also not surprising that, since JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon has joined Team Trump, his company has now become a fair target for the Times’s baleful eye of criticism.

Of course, I could be wrong. But if the Trump-Epstein coverage suddenly becomes less frenzied and more circumspect, and the Democrats’ ardor plunges into ice water, then it could be more likely that President Trump comes out of this looking like the Epstein story’s hero.

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Finally! How much do we love our new HHS Secretary? Let us count the ways. Over the weekend, in his media tour defending his Senate comments, Secretary Kennedy dropped an inconvenient CDC truth we have long repeated here, but which hasn’t gotten any traction in the national conversation.

CLIP: HHS Secretary Kennedy rips the band-aid off CDC failure (1:31).

On Fox & Friends this weekend, Kennedy was asked and answered the most important question about the Centers for Disease Control:

ANCHOR: “What would you say is the last great success that our government public health agencies have had?”

RFK JR: “I don't think there have been successes. I think we've seen a 30- or 40-year decline in the agency because it's been infiltrated by the pharmaceutical companies. They’ve made a series of bad decisions. They launched a tsunami of addiction in this country.”

It was just as we’ve long argued, but it was a verboten thought; the question wasn’t even allowed to be asked. The establishment assumed that, of course, the CDC was the most important and most successful agency in the history of the Milky Way Galaxy.

But the truth is: the CDC hasn’t “controlled” any disease! We’re sicker than ever. Worst of all, they didn’t even control the pandemic, which was their big fat excuse for existing for the last thirty years. During covid, despite the CDC getting a blank check of regulatory authority and trillions in newly minted dollars, the US did worse in every metric —including attributed deaths— than most other developed nations.

What tangible successes does the CDC have under its belt? Zero. They’ve only made things worse. Try asking a chatbot about CDC wins, and you’ll get a salad bar of bureaucratese and vaccine promotion without any clear, quantifiable accomplishment.

And bless him, Secretary Kennedy finally said it out loud, to a national audience. If you think about it, the awful Senate hearing last Thursday was really a miracle, because they are now actually debating these most important national issues— instead of lamely pretending they don’t exist. More, please.

Have a marvelous Monday! Circle back tomorrow morning for another installment of Coffee & Covid’s essential news and commentary.

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