BOOK HER, DANNO: Arrest Rosie O’Donnell for attempted bribery, Mr. President.

21ST CENTURY DATING FOR FUN AND PROFIT: Author of online hit ‘Cat Person’ has 7-figure book deal.

Scout Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, told The Associated Press on Tuesday that Kristen Roupenian’s debut story collection “You Know You Want This” is scheduled for the spring of 2019. Scout Press did not disclose financial details for the two-book deal, which also includes a novel. But two publishing officials told the AP that bidding topped $1 million. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss negotiations. Last week, rights in the United Kingdom were obtained by publisher Jonathan Cape.

“Cat Person,” released by The New Yorker earlier this month, is the fictional story of a 20-year-old woman and a 34-year-old man who become friendly through texting and of the disillusion that follows. It quickly went viral and was widely debated and analyzed, with The Washington Post praising the story for capturing “the experience not of print-oriented, older intellectuals but of millennials.

“As some Twitter users said, young people rarely see the phenomenon of modern dating — meeting online, talking through text messages, moving to in-person encounters shadowed with the expectation of sex — taken so seriously,” wrote the Post’s Molly Roberts.

“Cat Person” was a long, hard slog of a short story, but evidently there’s an audience for that kind of thing.

AND ANOTHER ONE: Comedy Central Confirms T.J. Miller’s Show Is Canceled After He Faces Sexual Assault Allegation.

MAYBE WE CAN ALL JUST GET ALONG: Yale Secular Humanists Help New Haven Decorate for Christmas.

CHANGE: Saudi Arabia to Freeze More Bank Accounts in Crackdown.

Almost seven weeks after the purge started, authorities are detaining new suspects and releasing some of those held, the people said, asking not to be identified because the matter is private. The Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority is also telling banks to freeze the accounts of more individuals who aren’t under arrest and people linked to them, the people said.

The government’s Center for International Communication didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment. SAMA referred questions to the public prosecution, which didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

The authorities are hoping to reach agreements with detainees, who include royals and billionaires such as Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, “within weeks,” Attorney General Sheikh Saud Al Mojeb said earlier this month. The kingdom is hoping to recover as much as $100 billion from settlement deals made with detainees.

It seems Crown Prince Salman isn’t just cleaning up corruption in his modernization drive, but also topping off the Kingdom’s coffers currently drained by low oil prices.

FERTILITY: Woman gives birth to baby frozen as embryo for 24 years.

Tina and Benjamin Gibson became the proud parents of Emma Wren on Nov. 25. Emma weighed a healthy 6 pounds, 8 ounces and measured 20 inches long.

According to staff at the University of Tennessee Preston Medical Library, Emma holds the all-time record for the longest-frozen embryo to come to birth.

The Gibsons had Emma through the National Embryo Donation Center, a faith-based embryo adoption program in which couples hoping to conceive are paired with embryos that will not be used by their genetic parents. The NEDC said in a news release that it has received donated embryos from all 50 states, as well as foreign countries.

A “baby counter” on the NEDC website tallies its live births at 686 babies.

Emma was frozen in October 1992, when Tina Gibson, 26, was 18 months old. The embryo was thawed in March of this year and implanted two days later.

Wow.

BEGUN, THE FLAME WARS HAVE: 5 Best Handguns in the World.

In a pinch of course, like cameras, the best gun is the one you have on you.

A MODEST PROPOSAL: Why Leftists Should Not Be Allowed to Have Guns.

MARK STEYN: The Great Brain Drain.

As I said to Tucker Carlson the other night, the demographic transformation of the western world is “the biggest story of our time”, and it will indeed determine all the others:

~Taxes? Big Government welfare programs depend on a high degree of social solidarity between givers and takers. If you think in France or Germany that young Mohammed and Ahmed will be willing to pay higher and higher taxes so that Jean-Pierre and Fritz can continue enjoying their present thirty-year retirements, you’re deluded.

~Defense spending and ISIS? More UK and Canadian Muslims have volunteered for the Islamic State than serve as soldiers of the Queen. As you can tell from their kid-glove treatment of returning jihadists, it’s unlikely that these countries will still be willing to follow America into the sands of Araby as Islam becomes a bigger and bigger domestic and electoral consideration. As for the broader international order, two of the Big Five at the UN will be semi-Islamized (and, indeed, semi-Islamic nuclear powers).

~Abortion? Hispanics, we’re told by Charles Krauthammer et al, are “natural conservatives”, so in theory Latin-American immigration ought to be good for the pro-life lobby: After all, South America has some of the toughest anti-abortion regimes on the planet. Then again, once they get to the United States, Hispanics account for about a quarter of all abortions. So who knows?

To reprise an old line of mine from America Alone, the future belongs to those who show up for it.

Read the whole thing.

THERE’S NOTHING WRONG IN TAKING A PROFIT, MY GRANDFATHER USED TO SAY: After 7,500% Rally, Cryptocurrency Founder Sells His Coins.

Charlie Lee, creator of the world’s fifth-biggest cryptocurrency, cashed in during a 75-fold rally this year.

The San Francisco-based software engineer whose litecoin was founded in 2011 sold and donated all of his holdings over the past few days, he said in a Reddit post. The disposal was aimed at preventing a “conflict of interest” when Lee makes comments on social media about the digital currency that could influence its price, he said.

“Litecoin has been very good for me financially, so I am well off enough that I no longer need to tie my financial success to litecoin’s success,” Lee said. “For the first time in 6+ years, I no longer own a single LTC” other than a few collector’s coins.

He should buy some back as a hedge against fiat currency — after the bubble pops, of course.

OOPS: Elon Musk Accidentally Shared His Personal Phone Number On Twitter.

J CHRISTIAN ADAMS: Radical LGBT Activist Chai Feldblum Renominated to EEOC.

NOW IT’S GONE TOO FAR: Women Reportedly Ditching High Heels Amid Sexual Harassment Firestorm.

REGULATION: Uber dealt blow after EU court classifies it as transport service.

In the latest of a series of legal battles, Uber had argued it was simply a digital app that acted as an intermediary between drivers and customers looking for a ride and so should fall under lighter EU rules for online services.

“The service provided by Uber connecting individuals with non-professional drivers is covered by services in the field of transport,” the European Court of Justice (ECJ) said.

“Member states can, therefore, regulate the conditions for providing that service,” it said.

Uber’s genius in its early days was its ability to skirt the regulatory state, but that advantage was bound to fade as the company grew larger. And Uber’s toxic corporate culture virtually guaranteed that when it did come under the regulatory state’s microscope, it wouldn’t have any friends helping defend it.

WHAT COULD GO WRONG? A Federal Ban on Making Lethal Viruses Is Lifted.

Such work can now proceed, said Dr. Francis S. Collins, the head of the National Institutes of Health, but only if a scientific panel decides that the benefits justify the risks.

Some scientists are eager to pursue these studies because they may show, for example, how a bird flu could mutate to more easily infect humans, or could yield clues to making a better vaccine.

Critics say these researchers risk creating a monster germ that could escape the lab and seed a pandemic.

Now, a government panel will require that researchers show that their studies in this area are scientifically sound and that they will be done in a high-security lab.

The pathogen to be modified must pose a serious health threat, and the work must produce knowledge — such as a vaccine — that would benefit humans. Finally, there must be no safer way to do the research.

“We see this as a rigorous policy,” Dr. Collins said. “We want to be sure we’re doing this right.”

The Army of the Twelve Monkeys smiles.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Tax Reform Passes, McCabe Speaks, Haley Slays and Much, Much More.

THEY SEEM MORE LIKELY THAN SIGNS OF INTELLIGENT LIFE IN THE WHITE HOUSE PRESS CORPS: White House Reporter Asks Huckabee Sanders if Trump Believes in UFOs.

MORE PROGRESSIVE FEMALE EMPOWERMENT: Ex-‘Today’ assistant who admitted to Matt Lauer affair called ‘whore,’ ‘homewrecker.’

THESE ARE HEINLEIN’S CRAZY YEARS — WE JUST LIVE IN THEM: ‘Racist’ trees separating a black neighborhood from a golf course will come down.

RELIGION OF PEACE UPDATE: 9 Pakistani Christians Dead After ISIS Bomber Hits Church During Christmas Service.

JONAH GOLDBERG: Venezuela’s a disaster. Yet socialism’s more popular than ever.

Why the disconnect? For conservatives of my ilk, the most obvious answer is that, for the left, socialism itself is never to blame. One of my favorite guilty pleasures is the Socialist Party of Great Britain’s Twitter feed, which insists daily that the socialist ideal has never been tarnished by real-world socialists. A tweet permanently affixed to the top of their page reads: “Are you about to tell us ‘Socialism was tried in Russia’ or ‘Look at Venezuela’ etc? It has NEVER EXISTED! It comes AFTER global capitalism!”

Even mainstream liberals don’t like to concede any points in socialism’s disfavor. The late Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was a murderer and a tyrant, so was the late Cuban Communist Fidel Castro. Pinochet helped his country transition to democracy. Castro, who killed more people, left his country as a police state. But while Pinochet is a demonic figure in the liberal imagination, Castro’s status is far more complicated. He is still a hero to many.

For the last decade, the New York Times has covered the socialism of both Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez and his successor Nicolas Maduro with the same sophisticated nuance it long applied to Cuba. Over the weekend, it ran a heart-wrenching story on how Venezuela’s poor children are dying from starvation. But the culpability of Chavism, Venezuela’s brand of socialism, is something the reader has to bring to the page. Such passive detachment between cause (in this case socialist policies) and effect (mass misery and starvation) is rarely found when the Times reports on, say, Republican economic policy.

Dedicated socialists (and their even-more enthusiastic Communist comrades) claim their political philosophy is scientific, yet those doe-eyed adherents remain permanently immune to facts and reason.

BUT I HAD BEEN ASSURED HE WAS THE NEXT HITLER: Trump’s National Security Strategy Is Shockingly Normal.

MAUREEN MULLARKEY: Why Criminalizing Sexual Harassment Fosters Witch Hunts.

What we do know is that something called sexual harassment is an imprecise but stubborn old nuisance sharpened into a crime by Catherine MacKinnon in the late ‘70s and codified by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). As first introduced, the term referred to a loose chain of workplace irritants never to be confused with sexual battery, rape, or attempted rape. By now it has expanded into an all-purpose indictment, a universal solvent for turning radical feminist choler into a blunt object.

Like that shapeless thing in the old sci-fi movie, “The Blob,” the concept of sexual harassment swallows everything it meets. It digests a degenerate thug like Harvey Weinstein together with a college student who makes an awkward pass at a girl, an office worker who tells a risqué joke, or a well-intentioned boss who compliments a woman on her dress. MacKinnon’s devouring blob is covered throughout the country by a mélange of federal, state, and city laws as a form of discrimination under human rights laws.

Delirium over harassment plays out like the courtroom scene in “Alice in Wonderland.” You remember it: The Queen of Hearts had made some tarts and someone took them quite away. Who did it? Theft is pinned on the Knave of Hearts, but evidence is a shambles, scanty at best. Accusations fly; denials tumble over each other. The king calls the jury to consider its verdict. His wife interrupts: “‘No, no!’ said the Queen. ‘Sentence first—verdict afterwards.’”

That is where we find ourselves now in the flood of unverifiable allegations hemorrhaging from college campuses and corporate offices to the Capitol. Huff and wrath arriving years, even decades, beyond their sell-by date ought to make us look closer at this inquisition.

Inquisitions are launched for the benefit of the inquisitors, not of the inquisited.

CHRISTMAS MOVIE MADNESS: The 6 Worst Christmas Movies of All Time.

AND: The Best Christmas Movies of All Time.

What, no love and/or hate for Santa Claus Conquers the Martians?

PLUS, CHRISTIAN TOTO: The 10 Best Movies of 2017 (No. 1 Got Totally Ignored).

That should provide all the Netflix & Chill you need for the season.

SOMETIMES IT’S NOT SO NICE TO MAKE TWITCHY: Rosie and Joy Reid join forces to attack #TaxCutsandJobsAct, and it’s as dumb as you’d expect.