Remembering P.J. O'Rourke... We're going beyond newsletters... Four years in the making... A better way to follow and use our research... The Stansberry Research Investor Platform... Introducing the 'Stansberry Score'... Link your brokerage account... Take a look around...

Editor's note: The Stansberry Research family is heartbroken today. We learned last night that our colleague P.J. O'Rourke passed away at the age of 74 from complications of lung cancer. So before we get to today's regular content, highlighting the new Stansberry Research Investor Platform, please give us a moment to pay tribute to our truly talented friend.

You can find myriad appreciations of P.J. across the web today that detail the stops in his remarkable career and that cite the famous magazines that published his articles... National Lampoon, Rolling Stone, the Atlantic, the Weekly Standard, the American Spectator, among others. We prefer to focus on the P.J. we knew...

When P.J. began writing for Stansberry in October 2015, he was already one of America's most renowned political satirists. He had authored three New York Times bestselling books ‒ including Eat the Rich, Parliament of Whores, and Give War a Chance. We had long admired him and were thrilled by the opportunity to publish the work of someone so talented and accomplished under our banner.

In fact, the pieces P.J. wrote for us – first in his Digest essays from 2015 to 2017 and then in our American Consequences magazine – are among the work we are most proud of...

But the real blessing of our time with P.J. was the opportunity to work with such a wonderful person. P.J. was a true gentleman ‒ in the best sense of the word. His warmth and kindness put everyone who worked with him at ease. He was generous with compliments and was simply a fun ‒ and funny ‒ guy to chat with. He was a friend and mentor to many of us and a presence that cannot be replaced.

Today, at the end of the Digest, we're republishing the last essay that P.J. wrote for this e-letter. He penned it in June 2017 as we were preparing to launch American Consequences, with him as editor-in-chief. In it, P.J. shares his thoughts on humor and how to use it to discuss serious issues.

And to commemorate our partnership with P.J., we would also like to give all Stansberry Research subscribers access to the 2021 edition of his classic best-seller Eat the Rich. He updated in collaboration with American Consequences and envisioned it as a gift to the readers, whom he deeply appreciated. You can download a free pdf version here. We hope it gives you a laugh... That's the best way we know to remember P.J. O'Rourke...

This day has been years in the making...

Longtime subscribers probably remember our founder Porter Stansberry's announcement in the December 15, 2017 Digest...

I'm writing today's Digest to share something extremely personal with you. I doubt many entrepreneurs or business owners would share this with their customers... I'm making the decision to leave the financial-newsletter business...

Given that this statement was made in a daily financial newsletter, it was shocking to hear at first, but what Porter really was saying is that he wanted Stansberry Research's work to go beyond simply publishing "newsletters."

Today, I (Corey McLaughlin) am pleased to tell you that the reality Porter imagined has now arrived. If you are a current subscriber to any of our publications, you have the chance to experience it firsthand...

As of this morning, if you go to StansberryResearch.com, you will find the new Stansberry Research Investor Platform... This is the culmination of years of work – and $10 million invested – to further Porter's simple yet powerful founding philosophy and culture for the company...

It's what we would want if our roles were reversed...

Specifically, what we're talking about today is how you can experience – and use – our research to secure your financial future. Because we know that doing the work – or paying for it – is no good if you can't put our guidance into action in way that makes sense for you...

In an era of smartphones, seemingly endless streams of data, and round-the-clock TV news... we know it can feel difficult to figure out how best to consume all the information available to you... and that goes for Stansberry Research publications alone.

More than two decades into our existence as a company, we now have more than 30 publications, covering everything from stocks, bonds, and gold... to real estate, cryptocurrencies, and advanced options trading.

It's a lot... We know. And what's more, we understand that knowing how to apply our ideas and research to your own portfolio can be even harder. Our loyal Stansberry Alliance members have often told us as much...

That's why, five years ago, we debuted our Stansberry Portfolio Solutions products, which have proven to be a much better and more comprehensive way to use our research than we had before.

From my view, this "too much information" quandary is why I stress knowing what your goals are first... and then figuring how our research fits into them, whenever I have the opportunity here in the Digest.

Still, as it's my job to keep tabs on everything we publish and share the most critical ideas with all subscribers each day, I know it can be challenging to feel like you're not missing anything important... much less feel like you are "connecting the dots." Then, finally, you need to feel comfortable acting based off our research in your own portfolio. That's ultimately what matters.

And this is an important issue to confront, of course, for you and for us. It's where the "rubber meets the road" and the difference between hearing your success stories or deserved complaints.

So, as our publisher Brett Aitken wrote in a special announcement to all subscribers last week, that's why back in 2017 we set out to answer a very important question...

In this ever-changing digital world, what's the next best thing we could do for our subscribers? How can we help them consume our work easier and faster... and also apply the investing principles we teach here to other facets of their financial life?

We know of no other financial publishing company that has anything like we came up with and rolled out to all subscribers earlier today... but we know that we would want it for ourselves.

As Brett said last week – and as our Stansberry Alliance members who have had early access to this new platform know – the Stansberry Research Investor Platform is a complete ecosystem for the individual investor.

A team including some of the best and brightest programmers around the world... who are savvy in both financial markets and software development... has worked extremely hard to build this platform over the last four or so years.

Simply visit our homepage – StansberryResearch.com – and start using the platform.

Better than anything we had before...

Fortunately, our newsletters are not going anywhere... Our research isn't fundamentally changing... We'll keep doing what we do... But how we share it is expanding and how you can use it is becoming easier. We believe it is real progress.

In short, you have the opportunity to enjoy a customized StansberryResearch.com experience to fit your portfolio, goals, needs, and wants... and what you want to know more than ever.

The best thing I can tell you is that it's better than anything we had before. As Brett said last week, the Stansberry Research Investor Platform includes...

A place where you can easily store and access your portfolios, directly from your brokerage account... and apply our best financial models, data, and tools directly against them in real-time.

Or take a deeper dive through advanced charting and trading statistics... and farm brand-new ideas based on the very same ideas we've preached about for years, like capital efficiency.

And of course, read all your Stansberry Research content.

As with many things, "learning by doing" might be the best way to see how these features work... To that point, I suggest you log-in to our website soon to see firsthand what we're talking about...

But before you do, and before we sign off today, I want to highlight some of the great new features and tools that are now available to you and how you might be able to use them...

Introducing the 'Stansberry Score'...

This is a single, easy-to-digest number that gives you an instant snapshot of a company's overall financial health, based on our four proprietary financial indicators... Capital Efficiency, Valuation, Financial, and Momentum.

The Stansberry Score is available for more than 4,500 companies, nearly 2,000 exchange-traded funds ("ETFs"), and more than 15,000 mutual funds...

Click here for more details on this and all of our indicators – including our Stansberry Rating for cryptos and Stansberry's Investment Advisory Complacency Indicator and Money Flow Gauge.

You can also find the Stansberry Score for a particular company on the top right of a company's information page... This is also a new feature on the Platform, more on that below.

Securely track your investments with our Portfolio Manager...

You can now directly link your brokerage account to our Investor Platform and get a score for your portfolio, track news about your holdings, and so on...

For added flexibility, you can also manually upload an Excel spreadsheet of your portfolio holdings and history to our platform if you prefer...

As someone who still uses a good old Excel spreadsheet to track his own portfolio – which is tedious – I'll be giving this feature a try soon... Old habits die slowly, but they do die!

Individual company pages ‒ full of detail, regular updates, and links to proprietary research...

Until this morning, we didn't have anything like this on our member site...

Type in a ticker or company name, and you'll find everything you would want to know about that company – from financial details to recent news – and, perhaps most important, what other Stansberry Research publications might be saying about a stock that you own.

Using the individual company pages is also an easy way to see the most important historical articles on a company. For example, here's what you can find on the page for one of our favorite stocks, Hershey (HSY)...

The circular, blue "SR" icons on the x-axis along the bottom indicate when we've talked about the company in a more visual way... Hover over the icons, and you'll see the related headline... Click on it, and it will appear instantly.

Stay current with our Media page...

This is where subscribers can view all the videos and podcasts that our colleagues publish... such as senior analyst Matt McCall, editor-at-large Daniela Cambone, Extreme Value editor and regular Digest contributor Dan Ferris, and American Consequences editor Trish Regan.

And there's much more... including an investor dashboard, charting options, a place to manage alerts and subscriptions, and a one-stop shop for our familiar Stansberry Data Monitors.

Log in today, and you'll find a welcome video that talks more about all the exciting new features... and how we think they will help you navigate the financial markets better and upgrade the way you use our research forever.

We encourage everyone to start using these new tools now...

So, please, poke around your new StansberryResearch.com experience... check out the new features... start putting them to good use... and tell us what you think, what you like the most, or what you miss or can't find.

As always, you can send your comments and questions to feedback@stansberryresearch.com... and you can also contact our Customer Service Center directly and find many more helpful subscriber resources through the "Help Center" section of the new website.

Our contact information, Customer Service Center hours, answers to frequently asked questions, tutorial videos, and more can be found in the Help Center, located under the "My Account" tab at the top right of the screen once you are logged in.

We hope you enjoy the new tools and experience.

New 52-week highs (as of 2/15/22): Alcoa (AA), AbbVie (ABBV), Altius Minerals (ALS.TO), Altius Renewable Royalties (ARR.TO), American Express (AXP), Enstar (ESGR), Expedia (EXPE), Freehold Royalties (FRU.TO), Telekomunikasi Indonesia (TLK ), and Zeta Global (ZETA).

We're going to skip the mailbag today and go right to our "best of" essay from former Digest contributor and legendary American satirist P.J. O'Rourke. But we welcome your thoughts on P.J. for tomorrow's mailbag. You can e-mail them to feedback@stansberryresearch.com.

All the best,

Corey McLaughlin
Baltimore, Maryland
February 16, 2022

What's Humor Good For?

By P.J. O'Rourke

Originally published June 28, 2017

If you want to understand humor, try explaining the Volga River to a Marxist...

I got my start as a journalist trying to be "seriously funny" back when the Cold War was still icy cold and Leonid Brezhnev was the dictator of the U.S.S.R.

Harper's Magazine assigned me to travel on a three-week riverboat luxury cruise through the Soviet Union with a group of aging American leftists. These were not your Elizabeth Warrens or Nancy Pelosis, but real unreconstructed 1930s Stalinist types. They were to the left of – and even older than – Bernie Sanders, if you can imagine.

Watching this bunch of geriatric Reds trying to put a good face on Brezhnev's Russia was a remarkable experience.

The trip reached its peak while we were going through one of the enormous locks on the Don-Volga canal. A very old, very Marxist lady came up next to me at the boat's railing. She was staring at the gigantic blank wall of concrete on that side of the lock.

"Marvelous! Marvelous!" she said. "They're such marvelous engineers in the Soviet Union." I agreed with her that it certainly was one really big wall of concrete. "Marvelous engineers!" she said, peeking over the side of the boat. "And where do they get all the water?"

I had an epiphany right then and there. I realized that, for the rest of my life, I would never lack things to write about. All I had to do was put myself in foolish situations (something I'm good at) and keep my eyes and ears open.

I'd go on to cover six wars, two revolutions, two Palestinian Intifadas, seven or eight local insurrections, a number of Third World elections ‒ which combine the worst aspects of combat, civil disturbance, and U.S. presidential candidate debates ‒ plus any number of other places exhibiting garden-variety hatred and repression... U.S. presidential candidate debates, for instance. I have found them all humorous.

In general, there are three kinds of humor...

Parody – where you make fun of people who are smarter than you are.

Satire – where you make fun of people who are richer than you are.

Burlesque – where you do both, while taking off your clothes.

I don't personally attempt any of these (especially, you'll be relieved to know, the last one).

Instead, I try to use humor as a journalistic technique for covering serious stories such as war, revolution... and health care reform.

The Democratic politicians who passed Obamacare and the Republicans who are trying to replace Obamacare are all telling us that we can increase the amount of medical treatment, increase the number of people who receive medical treatment, and decrease the total cost of medical treatment.

I only got as far as Practical Math in high school, but this doesn't add up. It's like saying I can smoke, drink, gain 200 pounds, and then, when I've reached age 95, win an Ironman Triathlon.

Federal "health care reform" is a tragedy. But humor has nothing to do with the charming or the cheerful. Humor is how we cope with violated taboos and rising anxieties (and rising gorges, too). Humor is our response to the void of absurdity. Humor comes to the fore when events render us impotent. And as men my age know, all events eventually do.

We laugh when we don't know what the hell else to do. Humor is not about a kitten tangled in a ball of yarn, unless – to borrow a line from my late colleague at National Lampoon, Michael O'Donoghue – the kitten strangles.

I had spent most of the 1970s, along with O'Donoghue, as an editor at National Lampoon. Meanwhile, the real world seemed like a bigger joke than anything we could come up with.

Mark Twain said, "The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow." I wanted to get at that awful secret source.

After going to Russia for Harper's, I got an idea to take the skills of humor writing and apply them to reporting on actual news events. Convince editors to pay my way to Lebanon, El Salvador, South Africa, etc. I wanted to know where trouble came from.

I was curious about the kind of trouble humans cause for themselves – the kind of trouble that humans could, presumably, quit causing at the drop of a hat... or at the drop of a gun, anyway.

I wasn't curious about natural disasters – earthquakes, mudslides, hurricanes, and floods.

How do you laugh off a flood ‒ I mean unless you worked for FEMA under George W. Bush during Hurricane Katrina?

And the one thing I really like about being a humorist is that I'm not expected to have any answers. It's the great benefit to humor as a trade. Ignorance has a positive value.

I mean when I'm covering a story, I'm free to just come right out and say that I don't understand the big issues.

Like the 2008-2009 financial crisis... I didn't understand it one bit. The guy down the road from me with a lot of cars up on blocks in his yard fell behind on his mortgage payments and the world economy exploded.

I'm ignorant. I find this to be an advantage. It was an especially big advantage when I was a foreign correspondent. I was so ignorant that I was willing to admit curiosity about even the most basic aspects of international political troubles, social squabbles, and armed strife.

And this basic, primitive level of curiosity allowed me to avoid some of the pitfalls of more sophisticated journalism. I never interviewed any heads of state or highly placed sources (not that they'd let me, but that was fine). These people didn't get to where they were by being dumb enough to tell the truth to reporters. And although I'll admit to most faults, I do not have the network-news-anchor-sized self-conceit that makes me think that Vladimir Putin is suddenly going to confide in me... "Just between us, P.J., on Monday, Russia nukes Latvia."

A humorist necessarily writes from a worm's-eye point of view. The things I discuss with my fellow members of the blind, spineless worm phylum are things like, "What's for dinner?" and "Please don't kill me." In other words, I asked what ordinary people ask during periods of confusion and strife.

I stay away from earnest messages. Well, I don't really stay away from them. Half the world's suffering (and hence, per Twain, half the world's humor) is caused by earnest messages contained in grand theories bearing no relation to reality – radical Islamism and Federal Reserve monetary policy, to name two. But I try – sometimes unsuccessfully – to avoid promoting any earnest messages myself.

The opposite of humor is not seriousness. Humor, by its nature, has to have serious content. That kitten tangled in the ball of yarn, even if the poor thing doesn't strangle... The situation is, from the kitten's point of view, fraught with serious contradiction and frustration. This is why puns are oppressive and shaggy-dog stories are obnoxious – they are "humor" without the necessary serious content.

The opposite of humor is earnestness. Earnestness is not about how serious an issue is. Earnestness is about how seriously the person talking about the issue takes himself. A serious person says... "It's important to lower the federal deficit." An earnest person says... "I'm important for saying it's important to lower the federal deficit."

No matter how serious things are, taking ourselves seriously about them does not improve the fate of the people involved. By being terribly, terribly earnest about AIDS, we could not save a single life. The condom machine in the gas station men's room was doing more good than we were.

Fifty years of being earnest about the Holocaust did nothing to prevent genocide in Cambodia, Rwanda, or Bosnia.

Earnestness is stupidity sent to college ‒ specifically, I'd say, journalism school.

If you'll indulge an old liberal arts major for a moment... The serious purpose of humor can be seen in Aristotle's distinction between comedy and tragedy. It's not that awful things don't happen in comedies. For example, in the ancient Greek comedy Lysistrata by Aristophanes, the women kick the men out of bed until the men stop fighting wars.

Lysistrata is about two awful things... war and not having sex. But comedy, said Aristotle, concerns ordinary people in everyday circumstances, while tragedy concerns great men and important events. Well, as you may have noticed, the world is a bit short of great men.

As for important events, we all know what kind of everyday circumstances important events – like the London terror attacks – can cause for ordinary people.

Aristotle said that the other important distinction between comedy and tragedy is that tragedy captures the emotions – "freezes us between pity and terror."

Frozen between pity and terror – that's watching your kids become teenagers. Not much you can do to help it, and nothing you can do to stop it. Being frozen between pity and terror is not a great place to be.

Comedy shakes us out of this stupor. Anger will do it too. But comedy has the advantage of giving us some emotional distance on what we're dealing with. I mean, I'm a Republican, so lately I've been really angry – at the Republicans.

The Republicans have the Oval Office, the House, the Senate, and half of the Supreme Court, and they still can't get any place. They're just standing there like kids waiting for mom to help them cross the street.

Thank goodness I don't have to make sense of politics. I just have to make fun of it.

Real seriousness is involuntary. If you're an American soldier trying to stem the violence in Afghanistan, you'll be serious about it. If you're a decent person, you'll also have serious feelings witnessing that violence.

In fact, if you're a decent person, faced with all the world's catastrophes, horrors, and pleas for help, you'll make a serious attempt to perform the right acts – whether you're serious-acting or not.

St. Thomas More, the Lord High Chancellor of England martyred by Henry VIII for refusing to become Protestant, joked with his head on the block. "My neck is very short," he told the executioner. "Take heed, therefore, thou strike not awry – for saving thy honesty."

The Persian King Xerxes was amazed when his spies told him that the doomed Spartans holding the pass at Thermopylae were combing their hair and changing into clean clothes for battle. It seemed a far too serious moment for such gallantry.

But gallantry and good humor are the proper attitudes for people who are worth taking seriously. Or so the gallant humorist likes to think.

There is one exception, however – one situation in which taking yourself seriously and being self-important are completely appropriate. A haughty attitude and an earnest tone are always needed when calling the dog.