KEYSTONE FALLOUT: Canada’s Harper talks oil with China as U.S. faces $4 gas.

LEADERSHIP: In the Oval Office, President Obama refuses to answer if he stands by contraception rule. Says to reporter: “Come on guys.”

UPDATE: Reader Michael Nessler writes: “That’s not leadership, that’s ownership. How dare one of the scriveners ask an off-limits question.”

PROFESSOR BAINBRIDGE: “I’m going to buy some of these note sets and outlines being sold for my classes. I’ll go through them and find all the mistakes. And then I’ll write exam questions testing on those very same mistakes. If we all did that, the market would dry up pretty quick.”

WILLIAM GIBSON ON NOSTALGIA FOR A FUTURE PAST.

Futurists get to a certain age and, as one does, they suddenly recognize their own mortality, and they often decide that what’s going on is that everything is just totally screwed and shabby now, whereas when they were younger everything was better.

It’s an ancient, somewhat universal human attitude, and often they give it full voice. But it’s been being given voice for thousands and thousands of years. You can go back and see the ancient Greeks doing it. You know, “All that is good is gone. These young people are incapable of making art, or blue jeans, or whatever.” It’s just an ancient thing, and it’s so ancient that I’m inclined to think it’s never actually true. And I’ve always been deeply, deeply distrustful of anybody’s “golden age” — that one in which we no longer live.

Plus, reason to distrust apocalyptic attention-seeking.

A PRO-OBAMACARE PRECEDENT: “We are all familiar with an individual mandate that was authorized by the U.S. Congress and notoriously upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court: the affirmative duty of persons of Japanese descent to report to a Civil Control Station. Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1943). The distinction between mere prohibition and command played a large role in the internment cases. . . . Korematsu is a perfectly fine precedent: it has never been overruled. Moreover, it is the feds’ best and only precedent. So why don’t they cite it?”

MEGAN MCARDLE: Battle Over California Medicaid Reimbursement is a Preview of Our Future. And it’s not pretty. “It is, of course, absolutely true that you can save a great deal of money by forcing providers to sell things below their cost of goods. It is not necessarily true that this is a sustainable long-term strategy.”

NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: New coating promises to turn an atomic force microscope into an even more useful tool.

ADULT STEM CELLS and “fracture putty.”

AT AMAZON, bestselling laptops.

Plus, markdowns on HP laptops.

WILL FRACKING SAVE OBAMA?

Related: North Dakota produced 534884 barrels of oil per day in December 2011.

BRAVE NEW WORLD: The EU is Considering Using Drones to Police Farm Subsidies, Enforce Environmental Rules.

SCIENCE FICTION HEROINES: Funny, I loved A Wrinkle In Time, but I never thought of it as a girls’ book.

UPDATE: Jane Gawthrop writes: “Madeleine would have loved the fact that you didn’t consider ‘Wrinkle’ a ‘girl’s’ book. My favorite quote from her is ‘A “children’s book” is any book a child will read’. Gracious lady, wonderful writer, sorely missed.”

TEN HANDY smartphone apps for drivers.

STEVE JURVETSON’S PERSONAL APOLLO COLLECTION. I can’t compete, although in my office I do have a piece of Skylab and some plastic spheres manufactured aboard Challenger.

TEST DRIVE: The 2013 Volkswagen Jetta Hybrid.

ANN ALTHOUSE ON Justice Sotomayor’s Sesame Street jurisprudence.

RUNNING FOR GABBY GIFFORDS’ SEAT: Col. Martha McSally, First Woman To Command A Fighter Squadron.

AN ADMISSION OF DEFEAT? “Announcing layoffs along with a stock buyback – let’s think about what that means. AstraZeneca did that just the other day, and they’re far from the only ones in this industry (or others) spending billions to buy back their own shares while they’re cutting costs elsewhere.”

Plus: “Here we have all these companies obsessed, basically with keeping their stock prices up, and saying the best thing that they can do with their money is spend billions of dollars on stock. And my view of that is, any company that says that they have nothing to better do with their money, the CEO should be fired.”

NEWT COURTS CPAC with Pizza and $2 Beers.

MORE HUMAN-RIGHTS HYPOCRISY: Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón found guilty in wiretapping case. “The Spanish judge celebrated for pursuing international human rights cases was convicted of overstepping his jurisdiction in a domestic corruption investigation on Thursday, the culmination of a spectacular fall from grace.”

(Via Jose Guardia, who offers much more background.)

MARGOT KAMINSKI: Enough, Already: The SOPA Debate Ignores How Much Copyright Protection We Already Have.

DEREK THOMPSON IN THE ATLANTIC: Rick Santorum Is Right: Gas Prices Caused the Great Recession. “This sounds stupid to some writers. (Most of these writers were more likely to find Santorum stupid before he made that comment.) But it’s not very stupid, at all.”

So what does it mean now, when gas prices are predicted to spike 60 cents by May?

GEORGE LEEF: After College, What?

What the study found is not the least bit surprising. Students who learned little in college (as evidenced by scoring in the bottom quintile on the College Learning Assessment) were three times as likely to be unemployed as students who scored in the top quintile, twice as likely to be living at home, and somewhat more likely to have run up credit card debts.

Those findings throw cold water on the smiley face idea that going to college is necessarily a good “investment.” Even some of the top graduates were unemployed and living with their parents and a much higher number of low-performing graduates were. Unfortunately, the study did not seek to find out how many of those graduates were “underemployed” in jobs that high schoolers can do. (Perhaps no further evidence on that is necessary, though, in view of this study.)

Read the whole thing. More grist for the bursting of the higher education bubble.

OBAMA EXPORT ADVISER EXPORTS JOBS. Obvious defense: See, he’s an expert at exports!