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Barret Baumgart

@barretbaumgart

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Author of the new book YUCK 🏜️ and China Lake "An apocalypse of the weird" ¶ Los Angeles ¶ Weird Nonfiction ¶ Dumpster Fires

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From WORTHLESSNESS to WEALTH 🏜️💰 Nobody ever went bigger than George Chaffey Jr 🇺🇸 💦

And yet nobody seems to have ever heard of this most brilliant and doomed would-be Empire Builder, father of the rotting Salton Sea.

#worthlessness #wealth #entrepreneur #history #california #ontario #georgechaffey #statue #upland #weird #saltonsea #imperialvalley #coachella #water #environment #YUCK #doomed #dude #deaf taken in Bombay Beach, Salton Sea by @barretbaumgart

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10 months ago

A desert city built below a mountain wall 💦⛰️ What could go wrong? Even the most bare bones facts about the San Gabriel Mountains are kinda insane.

Follow to learn more weird history & check out my two award-winning nonfiction books 🔗 in bio.

#history #nature #mountains #rain #flood taken in Los Angeles, California by @barretbaumgart

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8 months ago

Uncanny Chumash rock art 🐎 A defense contractor who sold helicopters to North Korea 🚁 11,000 avocado trees lll dead in one night 💀

Saddleranch is the most sacred and deranged piece of land in your backyard 🖤

#history #california #hiddenhistory #malibu #secretla

Bonus info: Incredibly, in a last-ditch effort, one of Ronald Reagan’s aides, a man named Tisler, actually wrote a letter to Saudi Arabian billionaire Sheik Mohammed al-Fassi asking for a donation to help purchase the ranch. The sheik never responded but his brother-in-law, Prince Turki bin Abdul Azziz, sent $200 🤣

For a deeper discussion on issues related to Native American rock art and defense contractors, check out my book China Lake 🔗 Link in bio.

⛰️❗RESPECT NATIVE AMERICAN ROCK ART❗⛰️
TAKE NOTHING BUT PHOTOS
LEAVING NOTHING BUT FOOTPRINTS by @barretbaumgart

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6 months ago

Read JA Baker's remarkable "The Peregrine" this fall, following him one journal entry at a time, from October onward into Spring 🖤

Scope my humble ode to this fierce and once forgotten masterpiece @ Dumpster Fires 🔗 Link in bio

#books #nature #business #cryptotrading #ceolifestyle by @barretbaumgart

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4 days ago

The view of Southern California from above, the actual Aleph-like appearance of its manufactured totality, is something that’s always fascinated me 🖤

"Even when I was a kid, long-before I read Pynchon or any of the other authors quoted ad nauseum below, I thought the endlessly extending sprawl resembled something like a printed circuit board, 'a microchip' I used to say—like something you might find after smashing the console of your frozen Super Nintendo and discovering its creepy silicone-copper innards gleaming up at you beneath the TV glow. The first conclusion available to a lonely seven-year-old only child: We are trapped in a cruel and meaningless game and we must escape.

Throughout everything I’ve written on Southern California, from my earliest published essays to both my books and the ongoing project, there is this undercurrent of paranoia and unease, a secret suspicion that beneath our feet we may be constructing something we cannot fathom, inadvertently summoning a force we don’t control, conjuring into being a weird and nameless entity we can’t yet know—a monstrous intelligence not our own."

Read the new essay on my Substack @ Dumpster Fires

Link in bio 🔗

#family #business #wealth #control #influence by @barretbaumgart

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11 days ago

500-year-old sacred Chumash rock art hiding out in a suburban backyard of the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles 🖤

Grateful for the rare privilege to visit and study these sacred sites. History runs deeper than you think in Southern California. The Chumash, Tongva, Gabrieleño and Fernandeño were here flourishing with complex cultures and rituals long before Vivid, Lockheed, Hollywood, the Ranchos, the Mexicans, Spanish and Kim Kardashian staked their claims. They are still here 🖤

#rockart #nativeamerican #sacred #mysteriumtremendum #hiddenhistory by @barretbaumgart

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a month ago

700+ articles about a food warehouse fire | 85 million pounds of rotting meat | Nobody asked what that number actually means 😶‍🌫️ So I did…

“Initially it was reported to us that the majority of that product was bread and wheat products,” said Los Angeles Fire Department Chief, Jaime Moore. But that intel changed. “We’re slowly learning as we get into this building that it’s far from that,” Chief Moore clarified. “There’s a lot of meat products.” 🥩

Full essay "Top of the Food Chain" on my Substack 🔥Dumpster Fires, link in bio.

Of course it's not just cows and pigs we consume. Chickens make up a far larger share and seafood dwarfs all of it combined, with an estimated 1 to 3 trillion fish killed every year, plus tens of trillions more crustaceans, mollusks, and other marine life.

Wednesday Wisdom:

“In this country, people think a ham sandwich comes from a refrigerator. People that are highly educated and live in urban centers, they go to the refrigerator, they open it up, they take the ham sandwich out of the refrigerator. There’s 30 million pigs a month being slaughtered in a river of bl**d outside Chicago.”

—Robert Friedland @ivanhoe_mines billionaire investor, USC Marshall School, 2025 Energy Business Summit

#foodporn #costco #ufos #environment #consciousness by @barretbaumgart

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a month ago

I realized recently that a large chunk of my past ten years has been spent working, living, and making art in and around the cold storage warehouses near the LA River 🔥 In the wake of the stench and rot from 85 million pounds of meat left behind by the recent @onelineage Boyle Heights Fire... I started to reflect.

Read the latest Dumpster Fires essay on my Substack🔥
Link in bio 🔗

"There’s something weirdly fitting in this cornucopia of stored life just sitting there beside the river. A journal entry from John S. Hittel, writing in 1863, captures the typical impression the LA River made on visitors to the city as it flowed beneath Boyle Heights and onward into Vernon.

'The song of Mignon came vividly to me as I walked through the gardens of the city of Los Angeles… Luscious fruits, of many species and unnumbered varieties, loaded the trees. Gentle breezes came through the bowers… The water rippled musically through the zanjas. Delicious odors came from all the most fragrant flowers… The general impression upon my mind, after spending the last week in September in the place, is that it is one of the most pleasant places in the world.'

Of course, today, the river has been paved over and the vineyards and fruit trees are gone, but a trace of that plenitude, of the breadth and bounty of nature, still endures along its banks. You can feel it sometimes. Even under the hundred-degree sun. It is a cold feeling..."

#investing #meat #losangeles #womeninbusiness #ufos by @barretbaumgart

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a month ago

Excited to announce our newest employee, Arden River Baumgart 🖤 She has a lot to read before she's up to speed but she's showing early promise and we're excited to see what she can bring to our third quarter push.

#entrepreneur #business #womeninbusiness #finance
#ceolifestyle

This will be my first and last post about offspring creation and continuance. Dialing in live to Niyazi Harmanbasi nihilism class now. Only $19.99 with discount code: VOID. Don't let the smiling timeless depths of an infant's eyes distract you from the duty to create content 🇺🇸 Sign up today! by @barretbaumgart

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2 months ago

Of course a man who maintains a Los Angeles-based blog called DUMPSTER FIRES was compelled to respond 🖤

Link in bio 🔗

85 MILLION POUNDS OF MEAT
Part 1/2

#meat #fire #humanevil #business #entrepreneur by @barretbaumgart

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3 months ago

🖤 Futility, Umami, and Fear 💀

Book your next special event, coffee coworking crunch, or patented full-family compássion euthanasia package at HAIR.

DM credit card information to reserve your spot today #entrepreneur #lifecoach #community
#womeninbusiness #hair taken in Los Angeles, California by @barretbaumgart

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4 months ago

Bring your own @koolaid

🖤 Corporate indifference brings your favorite brewery to a close tonight 💀

#nike #beer #party #funeral #craftbeer

Angel City Brewery Staff feel free to stop by after your final pint. Festivities end on the dot at 10pm 🖤 by @barretbaumgart

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5 months ago