It was 10 years ago today when I launched this website with a simple announcement on Facebook. When I started, I was very unclear about what I was going to do with it. If I had never had lunch with an old friend, it never would have happened.
Tom Briscoe had been the editorial cartoonist for a newspaper I had owned and he and I got together for lunch one day in the spring of 2011. He told me I had to start publishing a blog. I gave him all sorts of excuses about why it was a bad idea, but he somehow talked me into doing it anyway.
For the first couple of months, the content was all over the chart. It was mostly bad. By summer, I had settled into writing something that was heavily political and I gained a nice little following that amounted to a couple thousand readers a day.
My big break came when something I wrote — some original reporting from an event I happened to cover — was shared on a popular national political blog called Instapundit. From there, the piece was picked up by conservative and libertarian radio shows around the country, including that of the late Rush Limbaugh. I had 30,000 readers that day — and many of them stayed with me.

As world descends into madness, back away and guard your heart
Unexpected proposal leaves me pondering my craving to be loved
For rest of my life, I’ll constantly re-interpret mother I didn’t know
They’re just images of past love, but I can’t make them go away
My old fear of looking foolish is strong incentive to do good work
Are you living the life you wanted when everything seemed possible?
‘What’s the worth of one warm smile? Go and ask the dead man’