From RachelCorrieFoundation.org, a reading of Rachel Corrie's emails to friends and family during her time volunteering with the International Solidarity Movement in Rafah. Rachel Corrie was an American college student and activist who spent winter quarter in Gaza sleeping next to water wells and protecting homes from IOF destruction. Her emails are witness to the policy of expulsion and dehumanization of the Israeli military.

Rachel Corrie was killed in March 2003 when an Israeli Caterpillar D9R bulldozer ran over her while protecting the Nasrallah family's home from demolition. To date, no justice has been served to Corrie's family, neither Caterpillar nor Israel have been found liable for Corrie's death.

This episode ends with Tom Dale's eyewitness account of the day of Corrie's death, and his comments regarding the court verdict against the Corrie family.

To celebrate the holiday season - whatever and however you're celebrating - we're celebrating the life of Rachel Corrie, the 23 year-old American college student who was killed by Israeli Occupation Forces in 2003 while protecting a Palestinian home from being demolished.

Rachel Corrie was born an activist, a true champion of the underdog. I am moved by the earnestness of her actions, by her openness and compassion for not only Palestinians, but for all in the world facing injustice.

Rachel Corrie's story is both timeless - a student with a big heart intent on making a difference - and timely. The Israeli military that Rachel encountered 20 years ago has not changed. Nor has the narrative of the Israeli government. Her story is a crucial component of deconstructing the lies we have been told about Palestinians living in Gaza, the West Bank, and Jerusalem.

UFTP took the shitshow on the road over the November holiday break, sitting down with my brother David and our mother in North Carolina to get more history on the man we knew as our father.

Spoiler: he was always a giant piece of shit.

From being a non-dancing, gaslighting, child abusing Church-of-Christ piece of shit to a one-upping, narcissistic, child abusing non-denominational piece of shit, the guy was a real piece of shit.

We do not come to terms with anything in this episode. This is a family holiday therapy session where we make fun of a piece of shit whose only place in our lives is as a punchline.

UFTP encourages you to spend your holiday season with your loved ones snuggled around the fireplace listening to this bonus episode.

Trigger Warning: This episode contains descriptions of child abuse.

Me and ol' Trademark keep pulling the thread on mental health. I go further into my personal history - the 5 year anniversary of sobriety and life itself and how I crawled out of the deepest, darkest pit of my life.

Why is the psychiatric hospital the best place ever? Are psychiatric medications worth the cost and the hassle? Can you get the therapeutic experience outside of a mental health facility? Luke says yes, absolutely. We talk about Luke's alter-ego, Trademark, the rugged outdoorsman with the swaggering beard who's in the middle of hiking the Appalachian Trail as a form of therapy and doing a "hard reset" on life.

We talk support networks, family, dealing with our shit, and how getting back to the most basic aspects of life have profound impacts on our mental health and our spirits.

Remember during the Covid lockdowns when we were all practicing self-care because life as we knew it was changing permanently and in real-time and felt like an out of control nightmare?

That's what mental health crises feel like, except there is no pandemic and the nightmare is all in your head. It's a nightmare that festers and grows out of control until you yourself lose control. And self-care? Wtf is that? It's all you can do to get out of bed in the morning.

For this 2-part series on mental health, I discuss Major Depressive Disorder (MDD), anxiety, and bipolar disorder with friend, colleague, and Appalachian Trail section-hiker Luke, aka Trademark.

Me and ol' Trademark go deep into diagnoses, treatments, and our personal stories about dealing with lifetimes of mental health issues. From not seeking treatment to inadequate treatment to meds that cause suicidal ideation to meds you can't even afford, the mental breakdown is just one component of a mental health crisis. The rest of the crisis comes from family, circumstance, and substance abuse.

Trigger warning: this episode covers the topic of suicide.

In the final episode of Beefcake Dysmorphia we discuss the communal acceptance of certain aesthetic trends: what we do because our friends do it. From botox, collagen, and steroids to plastic surgery, what will we do to our bodies to keep looking young and desirable?

We also discuss some of the beefiest bods in Hollywood: Zac Efron, Michael Keaton, David Hasselhoff, Daniel Craig, and that one guy from Jaws.

In this episode Ashe and I discuss our personal experiences with body image, the impact of social media and pop culture on how we view ourselves, the how and why of steroid use among gay men - the pros, the cons, the arbitrary side effects - and the popularity of cosmetic surgeries among increasingly younger men and women.

In this episode: body dysmorphia, Ryan Phillippe, botox, roid rage, vaping, Ashe's weird eyebrow, OnlyFans, and the Dead Kennedys.

Ashe and I are back to discuss the Stonewall Riots (but briefly), the muscle magazines of the 1950s and 60s, Hal Fisher in the 1970s, how HIV/AIDS transformed physical culture in the 80s, Hulk Hogan, monkey pox, and steroid use.

Beefcake Dysmorphia is a multi-episode series on body dysmorphia disorder in the gay community. I'm grateful to my lifelong friend Ashe for sitting down with me to discuss camp, queerness, the resiliency and reach of the gay community, and for putting up with my bullshit.

I'm writer and freelancer Joe Love, and this is my podcast where I bring you the freelance articles I pitched but couldn't sell.

One editor said my pitch on child trash pickers in Kenya was “too depressing for a children’s magazine.” That article was titled "Unfuck the Poor" and in retrospect that’s probably too aggressive for Highlights. 

I cover everything. Mental health, the environment, racism, war, pop culture, and literally all the depressing things. But the theme I return to time and again is who gets left behind while the rest of us thrive. From the trashpickers at Kenya’s Dandora landfill to survivors of sexual abuse, one person’s exploitation is another’s advantage.

The first season of Unfuck the Poor is the audiobook by the same name - it’s about the history of capitalism and economics, and why the US Dollar is the global reserve currency. There are a lot of assholes in that story - Robert Morris, the slave-shipper who funded the American Revolution, CIA Goon Allen Dulles who waged war in Guatemala over bananas, and Former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin whose bank foreclosed on nearly 30,000 homes at the height of the housing crisis, just to name a few.

You can find show notes and additional information about me and the show at UFTPUltra.com.

Is the person in the mirror worthy of love?

In this episode series I discuss body dysmorphia in the gay community with one of my oldest friends, Ashe!

We can trace the modern phenomenon of body dysmorphia down to modern advertising and three groundbreaking revelations about the consumer. If you want to keep the customer clamoring for more, just appeal to their desires, habits, and fears.

Women and gay men process advertising and media in similar ways - both groups are statistically more likely to take appeals to appearance and body image personally. Straight men, it seems, are oblivious.

While advertising has come a long way in including women of all sizes, gay men are still internalizing a lot of negative media and engaging in a lot of unhealthy behaviors.

This multi-part series covers a lot of ground. We get personal about our own body image issues and explore how gay male body image has changed throughout the 20th-21st centuries.