Hippy beggars are a colossal drag. They are all losers, parasites. Their begging is a way of saying that somebody else should take care of you and you don’t much care who it is.

Hippy beggars are worse than most because 1) they hit on their brothers too often; 2) most of them have parents who could and would pay their bills; and 3) lazy, whining kids are an aesthetic bring-down as well as a lousy advertisement for the whole community—any community.

Louis Harris just published the results of a new “poll.” This one says that although you might think people oppose the draft, it isn’t really true: “A survey of a cross section of the American people...reveals that a majority back the present draft.”

The “cross-section” is what’s significant. Who is Louis Harris working for? Who are the people he interviews and how many of them?

A poll stops when it’s got the results that it wants (and it doesn’t interview hippy types, anyway); have you ever met anybody who was interviewed by Louis Harris or one of his minions? No, and you probably never will.

Concern growing in SF about seismologists’ predictions that a major earthquake is due for the Bay area within the next decade. Last quake, fairly minor, was 1957...

If you want a Doctor of Divinity degree—it supposedly allows freedom from the draft as well as clergy discounts for travel etc.—you can buy one for $12.50 from California’s Church of the Universal Brotherhood (6311 Yucca St., Hollywood 90028)...

Ed Sanders’ “Fuck You/A Magazine of the Arts,” too shocking for the NY Times to mention, is already being used as textual material in NYU classes on the arts...

After trying for three years, Time magazine finally installed a teletype link to its Moscow office...

Lady Scott toilet rolls (how appropriate) are offering a portfolio of Dwight D. Eisenhower paintings in return for $1.50 and a couple of wrappers. You fuck around with shit, you get more shit in return...

NY Sunday News ran an editorial defending cigarette smoking, accused the American Cancer Society of peddling “alarmist propaganda”...

Japanese Post Office is releasing a stamp next month with a nude chick, fresh out of a bathtub on it...

“The search for freedom is the essence of the experience and polemic of Timothy Leary. He was run out of Harvard and Mexico, he is hounded by the police, he is bullied or ignored by members of his profession, by doctors, educators, theologians and journalists.

“The enemies of Leary responsible for these harassments are attempting to deprive him of his earned right to be taken seriously; they are trying desperately to discredit a man and his vision out of fear, ignorance and traditionalism. Leary’s writings on the freedom of the individual threaten their establishment’s programs for education—the conditioning of the masses to obey and to buy...”

—H.C. Garwicker, reviewing “High Priest” and “The Politics of Ecstasy” in Rolling Stone.

Britain’s Illustrated London News chose to introduce the 3-D photo technique to its readers with a cover pic of Tricky Dick...

Plastic packets of water from Scotland’s Loch Lomond are being given away with bottles of J&B Scotch in England. If they’re going to all that trouble why not ship the water to where it might save a life or two (the Negev Desert?) But then that wouldn’t get as much publicity, would it?

After letting all those ghoulish entrepreneurs clean up with glossy Martin Luther King buttons (some people will do anything for money), Dr. Abernathy’s SCLC is belatedly getting into the act with a worthwhile Martin Luther King tag day on April 5 first. anniversary of King’s murder (ain’t you glad it was solved already?)...

Nation magazine says current tendency to impose severe sentences on pot offenses (a Miami man was given 3-1/2 years for possession) has “dangerous implications.” As social problems get more serious, the magazine adds, a savage crackdown on minor offenses “diverts attention from issues of greater urgency while conveying the impression of strict law enforcement.”

CONDENSED HISTORY OF THE NEXT TEN YEARS: Astronauts from U.S. reach moon, closely followed by the Russians on Venus. One planet quickly discovered to be of overwhelming strategic importance and the race to get there, prompted by increasing fears—the Doom theory—that the earth will shortly disintegrate brings about widespread international maneuvering, miscalculation and devastation.

The first ones out, naturally, want to ensure their rivals don’t follow, do their best to destroy what’s left behind them. But, as always, there are survivors, mutants, a hardy breed of gypsies who roam the earth—an earth which, ironically, no longer has national boundaries—living off the land as gypsies always have. And you wonder why people are so interested in survival techniques?