Joseph L. Flatley

Written with Matt Stroud. Additional reporting and significant editorial heavy lifting by Jesse Hicks.

This one focuses on the business practices of the company responsible for all those terrible Income At Home ads, and makes the case that for-sale “business opportunities” are the real source of Herbalife’s wealth. Trust me, it’s a lot more fun than it sounds!

Following the publication of this story, the company, an off-shore shell corporation in Barbados named Centurion Media group, switched its affiliation from Herbalife to something called Vemma. And by “following the publication,” I mean, “the very same day.”

The fact that Vemma is basically “Herbalife without all the negative media attention from hedge fund managers and federal investigative agencies,” as we write in an update to the story, says a lot about Herbalife, and the real source of its profits.

As Frank Kern, one of the stars of “Scamworld,” once said: “The product is really irrelevant.” 

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Around 8:15 AM, a twenty-something individual walked into CW Breitsman Associates, a benefits administration firm in downtown Pittsburgh. He asked to speak to the owner, Charles Breitsman. As they entered a private office and the door closed behind them, Breitsman told his daughter to call 911. The office soon cleared of everyone but the two men, and for almost six hours the city had a full-blown hostage situation on its hands.

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One of the biggest boiler rooms in America has ties that could lead all the way to the White House

Commenters on The Verge agree!

Congratulations, Joseph L. Flatley. Your poor attempt at a political hit piece, complete with sensationalized headline just cost The Verge a regular reader. Sad to see what is otherwise an excellent tech site stoop to this kind of “journalism.”
— ljc1423

This was disingenuous and in poor taste.
— Modred189

Add me as another name on the pile who thinks that this, while mostly an interesting follow-up to Scamworld, ends up feeling like a lefty hit piece with an atrociously irresponsible headline.
— RainingGlitteryMind

This “Romney to Scamworld” is nothing more than a lame, deceptively titled hit piece. I am extremely disappointed, as I have quickly come to expect much better than this here at the Verge.

This Joseph Flatley character, if that is his real name, should be ashamed of his laziness and unprofessionalism, and he no longer has any credibility with this reader. The Verge has seriously damaged its brand with this garbage.

Both the author and the editors owe the readers a sincere apology.
— ffarkle

If I wanted to read thinly veiled hit pieces on the GOP then I would go to MSNBC.
— mike.may85

Read it now on The Verge

(photo credit: Xavdog)

As pre-millenials, The Vergecasters are ancient enough to remember when an IM was no more ruthless than a little yellow man that said “ding” a lot through a crusty ol’ 2400-baud Sportster. Now, all the IM’s come through FiOS and look more like D-grade Bollywood stars…or do they? Hear the complex story of the modern Internet Marketer unfold before your ears here, in this, the Thirtieth Vergecast of the twenty-first century.

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The following review first appeared in The Final Incident, the Deek Magazine anthology edited by Joseph L. Flatley, Matt Stroud, and Jesse Hicks.

Timothy Leary: A Biography by Robert Greenfield
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 704 pages

I Have America Surrounded: A Biography of Timothy Leary by John Higgs
Barricade Books; 320 pages

The first exhaustive look at Leary, Timothy Leary: A Biography by Robert Greenfield, begins on a poignant note, where the young Leary hides on the roof to escape from his drunken father; and it ends on a note of righteous indignation. In between those two poles lay a phone book’s worth of vitriol. Greenfield obviously has some kind of searing hatred for Timothy Leary, which he may be too much of a gentleman to mention, but which nonetheless bleeds onto every page.

One could read the entire Greenfield book and think that Leary never had an original idea in his life, let alone author over thirty books. The Annotated Bibliography of Timothy Leary itself weighs in at over three hundred pages! True, some of Leary’s work can be difficult — and not in the good way; but even that stuff will often teach you something if you let it. (more…)

The ease with which folks are able to blog, reblog, and otherwise reproduce (as well as remix) other people’s work is definitely among the revolutionary powers of the internet — at the heart of which is the reduction of everything to ones and zeros, which lends itself not only to obscuring the provenance of a particular work, but also to reducing the perceived value of content in general. This is a concern to anyone who values quality content, of course: if people and organizations aren’t getting paid to create, their ability to create is severely limited.

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Joseph Flatley, Features Editor with The Verge, discusses his recent article entitled, “Condo at the End of the World.” Flatley first gives an overview of The Verge, a new website dedicated to in-depth reporting usually seen in traditional media such as newspapers and magazines. He describes The Verge as a website dedicated not only to what technology means, but also to how it affects our lives. The discussion then turns to Flately’s article on survival condos, which have attracted the attention of wealthy citizens concerned about end of the world calamity and economic collapse. According to Flatley, the interest in survival condos has increased after 9/11, and after the recent economic downturn. The “condos” are abandoned missile silos that date back to the cold war. Flatley describes his interviews with different people who are carving out a market for high-end survival real estate, turning these abandoned missile silos into luxury living. He describes how survivalists might live in an end of the world scenario, including what they will eat and how they will stay properly hydrated.

Listen at Surprisingly Free

This piece originally appeared in Deek Magazine on September 23, 2005.

Little Richard was born Richard Wayne Penniman on December 5, 1932 in Macon, Georgia. The Deep South (like most of America) was a wild place in those days. Richard’s father was a preacher and a bootlegger, selling hooch and salvation as an adherent of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church — a sect of Christianity founded by a farmer named William Miller, who once wrote a book with the unwieldy title, Evidences from Scripture and History of the Second Coming of Christ about the Year 1843.

Richard spent his youth on the dirt street where hustlers of all types would hang out in the hot, dusty Georgia afternoons, singing to snare marks and move goods. There were old men with vegetable carts, ward heelers making the rounds, soap box preachers selling religion… people hustled whatever they had to get by.

(more…)

A new breed of survivalist is wealthy, educated, and plans to ride out 2012 in style

Somewhere in the old Cincinnati-Dayton Defense Area that spans Southwest Ohio and Southeast Indiana sits a $1.5 million “man cave.” I made my way to the site on a warm fall morning with Google Maps and GPS coordinates supplied by my real estate advisers, Matthew and Leigh Ann Fulkerson of 20th Century Castles, LLC. Built in a decommissioned Nike missile site, the residence boasts a kitchen, four bedrooms, two baths, an exercise room, indoor swimming pool, jacuzzi, and an elevator for lowering the owner’s classic automobiles below the surface. On clear days, the doors that once exposed anti-ballistic missile for launch can be opened to let sunshine penetrate the otherwise dimly lit basement.

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