Mostly, people do respond accordingly, and they follow up via email. Still, the old-fashioned crowd leaves me old-fashioned voice mails, and there they sit, sometimes for days or weeks. I made my point, so it’s up to them to either adhere to my wishes or take their chances with waiting for me to find the time to sift through multiple, blabbing voice mails.

DDOT (Detroit Department of Transportation) officials have said the placement of benches has not followed protocol, and therefore the benches are not approved and must be removed. However, knowing the city’s inability to do such day-to-day things as keeping the streetlights on, it is unlikely that any effort to remove the benches will take place in the near future. People attempting to do good things for a community in spite of the government and its bureaucracy, and being able to accomplish these things due to the ineptness of that same bureaucracy, is a wonderful – if only small – accomplishment of anarchy in a city of voluntaryist warriors who refuse to wait for bungling government paper-and-permit shufflers to grant them permission to perform random acts of community service.

Finally, folks are declaring that the cupcake craze was indeed a bubble and it was indeed ludicrous. Yahoo writes, “More Evidence That the Gourmet Cupcake Bubble Has Popped.” Forbes writes, “RIP Cupcakes, Long Live Juice Cleanses? Inside the Fickle Food Trend Bubble.” An NPR story asks, “Has the Cupcake Bubble Finally Popped?” And finally, the Wall Street Journal wrote, “Forget Gold, the Gourmet-Cupcake Market is Crashing.”

In January 2011, I wrote about the announcement that Crumbs Bake Shop was going public via a $66M merger. I mentioned that the stock was a terrific target for a short sell. I was then attacked by cupcake-loving readers who were upset that I would cast aspersions on an industry that was representative of the free market, free choice, and non-coercion. However, there’s a major distinction between (1) criticizing a trend or fad for its underlying cultural-financial inanities and (2) calling for government intervention to coerce peaceful people during the course of their voluntary transactions. I never did the latter, so why all of the outrage? The stock for Crumbs Bake Shop nows sits at just above $1/share.

I said the trend wasn’t based on real wealth, but instead, the inane obsession with cupcakes was born out of credit expansion and artifically low interest rates. The cupcake craze has been a great example of malinvestment - too many people with too much credit spending too much money building up and/or expanding businesses based in faddish fixations that appeared, to them, to be prime investments. Thus small cupcake bakeries became booming businesses with hordes of consumers trying to become a part of the latest trend that was made popular by such cultural icons as “Sex in the City.” Cupcakes became the “hot” item for all of the wannabee consumers who had a need to fit in with the latest cultural rage. Therefore, the $5 cupcake became a statement of fashion. As Joe Queenan once wrote, America has had a “fawning subservience to the cupcake.”

However, the one thing all the media stories are missing on this issue is that this cupcake craze was one of many puerile trends that came about as a result of cultural changes spurred on by the boom-bubble-bust economic period. Dumbed-down, adult America became infatuated with cupcakes. The more outlandish and childish, the better. And then, stimulus policies, along with the Federal Reserve’s fight to keep credit cheap and money plentiful, kept skewing the market and distorting time preferences, making even the ridiculous seem profitable and real. Adults developed a strange obsession with enormous, sugar-laden, pricey mounds of sweets all dressed up in toppings and flavors suitable for the most discriminating 5-year-olds.

And now, the cupcake investors are the latest laughingstock of the financial world. Seeking Alpha put together a fantastic financial obituary of Crumbs Bake Shop for your reading pleasure. Except when challenged with the question, “What went wrong,” the author notes:

Based on the pricing, Crumbs has no reason not to be successful. Following a sampling of several cupcake stores in the Washington, DC area, Crumbs cupcakes appear to be the least expensive, and the shareable “signature size” cupcakes offer very good value. Reviews on Yelp seem relatively good, and the cupcakes are tasty (in my opinion, at least). Perhaps cupcakes have just been a fad and is now in secular decline? I have little hard evidence for or against this, but let’s take a look at the Google search trends for Crumbs and its two most famous competitors: Sprinkles and Georgetown Cupcakes.

The cupcake boom-bust has little to do with pricing strategies, perceived value, Yelp reviews, taste, or pure fads. These people who address these market quirks just don’t understand basic economics, including business cycles and economic intervention on the part of government and it’s monetary-banking sector.

With all things considered, the cupcake novelty has worn off, so get over it people. Thanks to the many wonderful readers who sent me these articles.

My local news played back some comments from local listeners on the Boston Marathon blasts, and one lady stated, “it’s because we have taken prayer and God out of our schools that these violent events are happening.” But then again, Mike Huckabee invoked similar utterances after the Sandy Hook shooting.

The fundamentalists can’t let go of the fact that personal and voluntary prayer to one’s God is not compatible with a compulsory and despotic government school system that suppresses individuality in order to indoctrinate children collectively. And these schools that formerly embraced God are the same schools that have always promoted the worship of the state, its flag, its wars, its military superiority, and American exceptionalism, all while paying lip service to the tenets of diversity and political correctness.

The photos and video of first responders rushing to secure the homeland are pasted everywhere to pay homage to the state and its agents of glory. Not only has Sports Illustrated put the famed Boston cops on the cover of its current issue, but the media has not been shy about boasting that one of the cops on the cover is an openly gay cop. So the guy is not only a hero for reacting to a bomb blast, but he is also a part of the special victim class, which makes him doubly heroic.

My friend was given a hefty ticket, and she could only avoid the monetary punishment by producing a prescription or a note from a doctor. She only recently bought the car, in used condition, with the windows already tinted. So she immediately reached out to two doctors she sees regularly, and she obtained, yes, a prescription from one doctor and a ‘doctor note’ from her second doctor. It’s easy to make crap up – these docs can spin it any way they want. She sent me copies of the doc note and the prescription, and I found both of them to be hilarious and heroic.

I have another friend who lives in the city of Detroit, where he has been ticketed numerous times for his window tint. He usually gets stopped by the same couple of cops. He is black, a large man, and he is a Muslim – and with his facial hair one can certainly tell that he is a Muslim. Each time he is stopped he is needlessly harassed, and still, he has refused to get rid of the tint. He is a very security-oriented person, and he likes his privacy, especially for his wife when she is driving alone.

On that note, I’ve always wanted a dark tint for both of my front windows, but I haven’t wanted to bring on the harassment that is sure to come with it. When I am stopped by bully cops for other reasons, the results have never been gainful. I have a Honda Element that has the rear windows tinted dark at 35% (legal in Michigan), with no significant tint on the front windows. Quite frankly, I am tired of being ‘checked out’ by strangers in vehicles next to me, especially at red lights.

I often have males – usually in work trucks or raggedy jalopies –  making very blatant and unshakable visual contact with me. Even if I creep upward a few feet at the light to avoid their disturbing stare, they also creep up in order to roll right next to me. I’ll creep forward again, and they do the same…again. These are not rare occurrences. It’s gone so far as to have men (and cars full of male teenagers) roll down their windows and verbally harass me, even while I continue to look straight ahead and ignore them.

Dark tinted windows would help to solve some of these troubles I experience. Additionally, here in Detroit it is disturbingly common to have your windows punched out in order for thieves to steal the contents inside the vehicle, even when vehicles are parked in very public (busy) places. One bag or box in your vehicle is a huge enticement for the scavenger thieves to bust in. Dark windows are an impediment to theft because street criminals are more likely to take the risk of breaking into a vehicle when they can observe the vehicle’s contents.

The tale is that tinted windows became an enemy of the police state because of cops being shot while approaching vehicles with dark tinted windows. Dark windows do limit visibility, but if that were true, the same could happen with passengers behind the front seat in any car, or especially from the rear in an SUV. However, many states allow darker tinted (or unlimited tint) windows in the back of vehicles, as well as the rear of SUVs. Often, the allowance for tint on the front windows is dictated by how dark the back windows are tinted.

One reason the cops hate dark windows is because they serve as an impediment to the cause of breaking down individuality and suppressing driver autonomy. Since the roads have become a virtual forum for perpetual police harassment, road stops nowadays are anything but routine. Even the most harmless traffic violations end up with drivers being intimidated and interrogated by legal gangsters with plastic badges and plastic glocks. If you have ever been stopped in recent times, you will note how cops will approach your car – even when they have full visibility – as if you are a criminal, and they will talk to you as if you are guilty of a crime until deemed innocent upon their cross-examination. Though the law enforcement harassment community claims this approach is necessary for officer safety, there are far more sinister reasons as to why innocent citizens who are being stopped for myriad “violations” are being treated as road felons.

The other issue with tinted windows is seat belt regulation. That is, the revenue raisers aren’t able to observe the lack of a seat belt through dark windows. That makes it impossible for them to stop and ticket peaceful drivers in order to keep the dough flowing into the local coffers to pay for the enlargement and advancement of the militarized-bureaucratic police state as well as the magnificent retirement bonanzas for its dedicated soldiers.

The crusade to harass drivers with tinted windows has become so villainous that the cops are now using light transmittance meters to measure the amount of light that comes through the windows. An article from Government Technology states:

Police around the country are starting to use a $200 device to crack down on vehicle window tint violators.

…Most states have had regulations in place for years limiting the amount of tint allowed on the front windows of a vehicle, but the availability and lowering cost of technology is allowing police to concentrate on enforcing such regulations more aggressively. In Aurora, police issued 291 citations for illegal window tint during the first five months of this year, whereas last year, officers only issued two citations during the first five months.

In fact, in Aurora (IL), events are held where the voluntary slaves can show up and have their windows checked by the bullies – for free! – and thus know whether or not they need to have the tint removed. That reminds me of my Neighborhood Watch group that holds an annual “Fingerprint Festival” where all the gleeful serfs show up at the neighborhood park to get their free hot dogs and partake in an ice cream social while they get voluntarily fingerprinted by the local police department as a way of showing their obedience to their Masters. I wish I was making that up, but alas, this is my neighborhood’s annual celebration of freedom.

Always remember that the real reason trotted out for this inane regulation restricting your rights with your own property is to protect you from yourself while also protecting innocent citizens who may be a casualty of your domain of darkness.

“The dark tinting found on some vehicles can result in reduced visibility for those drivers in their ability to see other traffic or objects, especially at night,” Ferguson said in a news release.

“The intent of our enforcement is to target violators that have modified their vehicles beyond factory specifications and what is allowed by law with excessively dark tinting on their vehicles that creates a hazard to others.”

In that case, there’s a whole lot more that has to be heavily regulated, including a driver’s mental faculties, driver age, car design, the visually bothersome sunset and sunrise, and even weather and darkness.

As to my friend, her ticket was dismissed by the magistrate. Next month I have to see my doc for some routine stuff, and I hope to wheedle him into giving me one of those permission slips. I’m sure if I look hard enough I can find something in my medical history that can justify it.

Perhaps the biggest challenge for Penney is to sell shoppers on its new pricing. For years, Penney, like many other stores, has propped up price. The intent: to make it look like shoppers are getting great discounts when items go on sale.

The increased discounting has been a vicious cycle that only feeds into shoppers’ insatiable appetite for bigger and better discounts. In fact, whereas it took 38 percent off to get shoppers to buy 10 years ago, it now takes discounts of 60 percent, Johnson says.

I love this quote because as a very astute shopper who can quickly analyze and calculate all facets of a transaction, I am dumbfounded at how “sales” are becoming so dumbed down in order to attract and fool the masses. I love marketing, but I am also capable of not being tricked by marketing and shopping gimmicks. Yet folks, generally speaking, are easily maneuvered, as described above in the Yahoo article.

The breaking news is that the new J.C. Penny CEO, Ron Johnson, has been canned. Johnson, when he took the helm at the retailer, rolled out a strategy of “everyday prices,” new price tags that eliminated gimmicky markdowns, and whole figure pricing. Johnson, who came from Apple, brought his Apple-like strategy of shunning discount pricing while focusing on service and product offerings. J.C. Penny is a very traditional, old retailer with a core customer base that is not as sophisticated as the Apple customer base, hence the inability to sell sophistication to the masses seeking bargains – even if they are only perceived bargains.

As I noted in my previous post, Mr. Johnson’s fail may have been economics, and not marketing. The average shopper has been trained to see sales, and not the real value of the products they buy. The cheap-and-easy credit era helped to fuel that ignorance because the abuse of credit has been justified by folks who believe that there is an upside to all the debt: they are buying value because goods appear to be listed at bargain prices. In reality, they are overpaying for products and getting sucked into buying things they didn’t plan on buying, and the end result is more stuff, more debt, and a skewed perception of value.

Mr. Johnson tried to change all of that, at least for his customer base, but the world was not ready for a boutique J.C. Penney or a brutally honest retailer selling service and reality over perceptions. Wall Street, investors, and corporate boards want strategies and promises constructed around the easy-money economy. I say good luck to Mr. Johnson, because I think there is a place for his game plan somewhere in the modern retail world.