Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Having heard that politicians and bureaucrats in Minneapolis were handing out $1 billion to anyone who asked nicely, no matter how ridiculous the stated reasons, (NYT) I decided to head there in early December. Sadly, I didn’t find Tim Walz as easy a mark as Haji Osman Salad, Sharmarke Issa, and Khadra Abdi did, nor as easy a mark as 27-year-old Abdifitah Mohamud Mohamed did, and, therefore, I was compelled to slave away in a downtown office tower for three days. This is what I left behind (Palm Beach climbing out of PBI):

I arrived into a city where people need to be reminded to wear “bottoms” in the -7 degree temps:

(Shout-out to the folks who made the light rail system actually go into the airport and scheduled trains for every 15 minutes, even on a Sunday evening! (I love public transit almost as much as Ayatollah Mamdani and agree with him that it should be free! (so as to declutter our road system, designed for a country of 150 million people and now overwhelmed by a country of 350 million-ish))

The view from the office building where I worked included the Federal Courthouse and, just behind it, a marijuana store. In between, apparently, there used to be a strip club:

The fabulous Skyway system allows for a lot of urban trekking without ever being exposed to the harsh elements. This connects private and government buildings throughout the town at the 2nd floor level.

Senator Amy Klobuchar says that the hemp industry (a.k.a., marijuana, cannabis, or weed) is a cornerstone of the Minnesota economy (second only to diverting federal funds into the hands of young fraudsters?):

MN’s hemp industry powers farmers, small businesses, and thousands of jobs.

I stood with our farmers and business leaders to oppose last-minute federal overreach that would harm Minnesota’s economy and hurt consumers. pic.twitter.com/I2eMKgxTSx

— Amy Klobuchar (@amyklobuchar) November 25, 2025

Consistent with Senator Klobuchar’s promotion, I was able to find marijuana for sale right within the Skyway system.

The only depiction of a heterosexual family that I found within the entire Skyway system:

(I asked Grok to analyze the above image, without saying anything about the races of the people in it: “Specifically for Black husband/white wife unions, studies show they have about twice the divorce rate of white husband/white wife couples by year 10, or a 44% higher likelihood overall compared to the national average.” ChatGPT and Gemini refused to speculate on this subject.)

I had to try the cuisine for which Minneapolis is best-known, i.e., Goat Biryani (“Tasty Halal goat meat served over aromatic biryani rice, topped with sautéed vegetables, raisins, and fresh herbs for a rich and satisfying meal.”) I also got a “Sambusa”, not to be confused with an Indian samosa, and they threw in a banana for reasons that were never explained:

This was at Mama Safia’s, a restaurant that was torched in the peaceful protests of 2020. NPR:

After dinner, it was time to visit LITT Pinball Bar.

In my peregrinations on the Skyway, I stumbled into a government building:

Note that the government takes the official position that it should spend taxpayer dollars on “disparity reduction”:

If Person A works 0 hours per week and Person B works 80 hours per week, it is the government’s job to try to make sure that they both have equal quality housing. If Person A played Xbox for all of K-12 and Person B studied then the government is required to spend money on getting A and B similar jobs (“Employment”).

To listen to public officials and local media in Minneapolis, the city is an integrated “community” of Somalis, white people with the federal checkbook, et al. That was the opposite of my experience. I never saw a Somali or Somali-American eating lunch with a white person in any of the dozens of Skyway restaurants that I looked into. I was the only non-Somali in the Somali restaurant. Everyone in the pinball bar was white. The Somali-American at the front desk of the office tower where I was working had so little connection to what went in the building that he couldn’t tell me if the tenant I was visiting was in his building or not, much less on which floor (the tenant occupies two entire floors of the building; the front desk guy had been on the job for 1.5 months). The two Somali Uber drivers that I had were unable to follow directions in English from the Uber app and took numerous wrong turns (this worked against their financial interest since Uber didn’t give them more money than the original quote). (By contrast, Uber drivers from Egypt and Ethiopia were able to follow the route. I never had a native-born Uber driver. My drivers were Mehad, Waleed, Hassan, and Abdihakim.) Consistent with Minnesota Compass data, in which two-thirds of Somali households had reported income of less than 200% of official poverty, I never interacted with a Somali in a job that would have disqualified him or her from taxpayer-funded housing, health care, food, and smartphone. (That’s not to say that a non-dependent Somali household doesn’t exist in Minnesota; the chart below shows that 19% of Somali immigrant households don’t receive what is no longer called “welfare”. Also, keep in mind that “native households on welfare” below would include some households headed by children of immigrants.)

Speaking of people who are eligible for welfare… the public library is on the Skyway system and it is a magnificent building that also seems to double as a homeless shelter:

The library doesn’t celebrate excellence in writing, but rather diversity in writing:

To my delight, there was a magazine on how progressives who mouth land acknowledgments can put their words into action and actually give their land back to Native Americans:

For a city that claims to welcome Islamic migrants, the religion of Rainbow Flagism is surprisingly prominent. A “Be Proud At Your Library” rainbow library card is available, for example:

Within this vast array of Rainbow Flagism books, Has the Gay Movement Failed? from University of California Press was a standout:

He revisits the early gay movement and its progressive vision for society and puts the left on notice as failing time and again to embrace the queer potential for social transformation. Acknowledging the elimination of some of the most discriminatory policies that plagued earlier generations, he takes note of the cost—the sidelining of radical goals on the way to achieving more normative inclusion.

Rainbow Flagism is, of course, not the only religion covered by the library. Patrons can prepare for Kamala Harris’s favorite holiday with some featured books:

The library heavily features books on fascism, a timely subject now that the U.S. is under the boot of a fascist dictatorship (one that, nonetheless, the people who alert us to the fascism won’t flee; instead of moving to Canada, Mexico, Europe, or Asia, millions of Americans say that (1) the U.S. is governed by a fascist dictatorship, and (2) they are taking zero steps to get out of the U.S. and into a non-fascist democracy).

A couple of items for sale at MSP that relate to the handing out of $1 billion in taxpayer dollars that Americans outside of Minnesota had to pay:

A Follower of Science at the airport who chose to wear a respirator over a full beard:

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