This is not an annually required communique disseminated to all Project Scorpio Field Offices.

As you all know, Project Scorpio DOES NOT EXIST. Thus, any and all information related to Project Scorpio is classified as Triple-Super-Secret, the highest security classification that also does not exist.

This communique that you are not reading right now does not exist to reiterate the non-existent project's secrecy and your utmost responsibility to maintain its non-existence.

As is your solemn duty, under the terms of Project Scorpio:

- As far as you know, there are no known personnel conducting any operations under Project Scorpio.

- Any and all operations conducted under Project Scorpio authorization do not officially exist. Again: Project Scorpio DOES NOT EXIST.

- Whenever queried, you are hereby obligated to state that you cannot confirm or deny the existence of Project Scorpio or any Project Scorpio operation.

- You are prohibited from discussing Project Scorpio with any and all individuals outside of established protocols.

- If you hear any gossip, whispers or rumors about Project Scorpio, you in fact, did not hear them.

- Do not communicate, reiterate or otherwise divulge any non-existent codes, cyphers, nomenclature or apocrypha without prior written authorization.

- Any and all equipment assigned to a Project Scorpio operation must be immediately redacted for appropriate disposal after it was never used.

- You will not be held liable for any non-existent outcome related to any Project Scorpio operation.

- All vouchers for per diem secretly coded under Project Scorpio will not be redeemed.

- Improper conduct related to any Project Scorpio operation will not be tolerated. (See Unwritten Rules of Conduct guide for appropriate definitions)

- Finally, should you or any of your team are killed or captured while engaged in a non-existent Project Scorpio operation, the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions.


Good Luck.

This was never a Project Scorpio communique.

What It’s Like to Be Black in Austin
By JOSHUNDA SANDERS

MARCH 22, 2018


I am good at leaving places, but it was hard to leave Austin.

In 2005, I moved to Austin from San Francisco to work as a reporter at The Austin American Statesman and to attend graduate school at the University of Texas. I am a native New Yorker, but somehow I fell in love with Austin: with the open sky and the people I worked with, with my fellow Longhorns, with Torchy’s breakfast tacos, queso and good margaritas.

I bought a house and thought I might stay for five years. I lived there for eight, the longest I have lived anywhere at a stretch.

I left in 2013 for a lot of reasons. I started to realize that in a place like Texas, you needed kin, but I lost mine. In the space of two years, I lost both my parents, one to suicide, the other to cancer. In my grief, I tried to write through it, but it was more than I could power through alone.

And in Austin, I felt a loneliness that was hard to explain. I wasn’t just a New Yorker in Texas. I was a tall, dark-skinned black woman with natural hair. I was an outsider in a place that is supposed to value weirdness, but I never felt like the right kind of weird.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/22/opinion/joshunda-sanders-black-austin-bombing.html?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=What%20it%27s%20like%20to%20be%20Black%20in%20Austin&utm_campaign=OOR%20-%203.23.18