Access Denied
by Peter Moore

Last summer, a friend who works for some out of the way agency of the federal government looked me up and said, “What are you people doing at Alternatives these days?” I inquired why he asked, and he told me that he’d tried to access our website from work (slow day at the office, I guess) and bumped right up against an Access Denied screen. He said he’d seen other such screens before, usually associated with chat rooms or porn sites, but in this case, the reason to deny was different.

What was that, I wondered.

Weapons, he replied.

Weapons? Government watchdogs categorizing Alternatives Magazine as an Access Denied, forbidden weapons site? This I had to see. I asked for a screenshot, and several days later, it arrived in my email. There it was, with blood-red color effects on the word “Weapons”.

Read for yourself: “http://alternativesmagazine.com has been catagorized as Weapons. It has been blocked per your organization’s Internet Usage Policy for group Public.”

After consulting with the combined staffs of all departments within the Alternatives organization in a plenary session after midnight in the basement of an abandoned warehouse, we offer the following 7-point response:

1. Who, us?
2. You gotta be kidding!
3. You MUST be kidding!
4. Tell me you’re kidding.
5. Perhaps our pens are mightier than we thought. Who knew? Truth, the ultimate weapon. Thanks for the tip.
6. Excellent! At last, the Beast has noticed us!
7. uh-oh.

Obviously these people have way too much time on their hands and hubris in their heads. We’ll carry on independently.