Welcome to I Found This - a weekly competition between two old friends, your hosts, James and Keith. Here each week, you’ll decide who’s find made your eyebrow raise higher.

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 Happy Wednesday!

Ballot Box Brawl

In There aren’t enough hours in the day to count the number of towns that transformed into battlefields abroad in the 1940s. But did you know one town right here in the US made this very same transformation in the fall of 1946? That town was Athens, Tennessee and the battle was 6 hours’ worth of gunslinging and even a few blasts of dynamite over an election dispute.  

At the heart of the dispute was the wealthy Cantrell family. Paul Cantrell was sheriff in Athens for a time and later a state senator. In 1946, he was up for Sheriff again but a coalition of local veterans had their own man up for the job in the hopes of ridding McMinn County of the blatant corruption that marked its political class. The Department of Justice had actually received complaints about election fraud in the area beginning in 1940 but nothing was done. 6 years later, that group of WWII veterans had had enough.

On the morning of August 2, veteran poll watchers witnessed voter bribery and intimidation along with tampered ballot boxes. In response, they took up arms. A reporter on-site from the Chattanooga Daily summarized the ensuing chaos with this report: "Enraged by brutal denial of their rights during voting here yesterday (August 2) GI ticket supporters became the temporary law early today by shooting and dynamiting their way to supremacy after a six-hour battle.”

And there you have what is probably the greatest phrase to come out of local journalism in the history of the United States: "...shooting and dynamiting their way to supremacy after a 6 hour battle." Cheers to the Chattanooga Daily!

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Tribute to Charlie Munger

On Tuesday December 5th 2023 Charlie Munger passed away at nearly 100yrs old. For decades Munger played 2nd fiddle to Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway and influenced where over three quarters of $1T was invested. It’s hard to summarize a life quantitatively - number of days lived, numbers of $ influenced, number of lives touched? So this will be an uncannily qualitative post. After 66 years of investing wisdom, below are a few select anecdotes:

Munger’s life exemplifies overcoming setbacks - his early life with wracked with divorce, his son’s blood cancer and eventual death, loss of an eye, and financial ruin. This is a far cry from the success story we are familiar with.

This is a contrast to the Munger who claimed he avoided major catastrophes in his life because was “so cautious” and avoided obvious risks in life. “Crazy is way more common than you think. It’s easy to slip into crazy. Just avoid it, avoid it, avoid it.”

So you should avoid crazy, then what should you do? “You don’t have a lot of envy, you don’t have a lot of resentment, you don’t overspend your income, you stay cheerful in spite of your troubles, you deal with reliable people and you do what you’re supposed to do. All these simple rules work so well to make your life better.”

Additionally, “You’ll do better if you have a passion for something in which you have the aptitude. If Warren had gone into ballet, no one would have heard of him.”

Further, you should double down on your passion/aptitude “The worshipping at the altar of diversification, I think that is really crazy”

Really this is a tribute to the value of playing a slow and steady game. While the world swings up and down, left and right, it feels like we’ve lost one of the very few adults left in the room.

For the first time it is not it is all about the money - James

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