Inrix, the Kirkland, WA based international traffic data gatherer, is making news with a study showing a steep--30 percent--decline in traffic in the US this year. As CEO Bryan Mistele explains on FOX Business report, that is good news for you as a driver, but a serious caution for our economy. Higher fuel prices are part of the explanation, but so, apparently, are decreased employment and construction.

Misele, among his distinctions, is a Board Member of Discovery Institute.

A paper published in Social Psychological and Personality Science says that eating organic foods can tend to make people judgmental. At least, that is the way the story is being covered in a number of places. The journal's abstract seems to bear that out.

A number of commentators are having fun with this, as well they should, though perhaps for reasons not connected to organic food. First, this is another example of misleading "science" studies that actually are little more than Onion-style pieces taken seriously. Surely, it is not the eating of organic food that makes one judgmental, but rather, some judgmental people gravitate to any life-style appurtenance that allows them to feel superior to other people--to put others in the wrong, as C. S. Lewis said. It could be diet or politics or religion or even musical preferences. Jerks are jerks and will find ways to exhibit their disposition. In other words, the premise of the study would seem to be wrong, and not "science" anyhow.

Second, materialism is the superstition--disguised as science--that wants to assert a material cause for practically anything. In this case, we have the amusing post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc error of thinking that because someone eats organic food and also is judgmental, that the action causes the attitude.

I know organic enthusiasts who are delightful people. Same with vegetarians (my wife, for example). And I know other people who believe that chemicals grow produce bigger and better (and cheaper) and in seasons when they might not otherwise be available--and some of those people are jerks.

In any event, I have a particular affection for "Scientists Say" headlines. They often reduce to government-financed fairy tales. The only element missing in the present story is that there is an evolutionary cause for linking mean people and organic foods. Maybe it's that humans were so much more violent in ages past when all the food was organic, while the introduction of pesticides and additives, canning and freezing, etc. have bred our present race of relatively pacifistic people. Quick, we have our theme, so get me a grant!

The clumsy actions of the Obama Administration to require church-related institutions such as hospitals and schools to provide insurance covering contraceptives, sterilization and abortifacents, has been turned into a question of feminist rights by some in the media and politics. So it is useful to review just what has happened and where the debate is headed. George Weigel's article in National Review is the best summary of this topic I have seen.

Meanwhile, the political class is about to get a surprise in the form of two films on an era in Mexico--80 years ago--when an anti-religious government turned persecution of the Catholic Church into a physical policy of oppression. Two films about the Cristero rebellion happen to be coming out at the same time. For Greater Glory (Cristiada, in its Spanish version), starring Andy Garcia, Peter O'Toole and Mexican star Eduardo Verastigui, is being screened privately around the country this month. Meanwhile, at The Seattle International Film Festival and elsewhere, a Mexican/Dutch film, only in Spanish, Los Ultimos Cristeros (The Last Christeros), is seeing its first performances in America.

I haven't seen either film yet. However, I know enough about the Cristeros to note that even in the depths of the US Depression, at a time when anti-Catholic sentiment was strong, the US government was appalled by the killing and harassment of the Church by the Marxist regime in Mexico. It might bear notice by contemporary progressives in this country that while the government prevailed in the short term in Mexico, that country went on to become one of the most religious in the world. The history of persecution suggests that fierce secularism often backfires.

Unemployment in Nashville is 6.6 percent (in contrast to 8.1 percent nationally). In Chattanooga, where I also visited last week, it is 6.9 percent. These cities and the state of Tennessee are a refreshment for a public policy wonk who is used to following the job markets of states oppressed by public employee unions, high taxes and regulation (e.g., California and New York). Moreover, construction is booming in Nashville, in particular, as the capital of the state government and the capital of country music adds to already imposing health care and tourism resources.

The contentment is shown in the demeanor of the citizenry, unfailingly friendly and outgoing. The ladies call you "darlin'", apparently without fear of sex discrimination suits, and waiters wish you "a blessed evening" as you leave a restaurant, unintimidated by possible threats from the ACLU. The air is clean, the water tasty, the rolling countryside picturesque. The food's delicious--if you go for Southern cooking, which I do at every opportunity.

Locals are proud that when floods swamped Nashville, the city recovered quickly, unlike New Orleans. The difference? Nashville didn't look to Washington for help. Tennessee is one of the nine states (so far) that have no income tax. It's a good place for business.

The state legislature recently passed a law making sure that science teachers are allowed to present all scientific sides of controversial issues such as Darwinian evolution or global warming. It took some courage as well as a good sense to do this. Yes, the president of Vanderbilt, making $1.9 million a year, meanwhile has done his best to run Christian student organizations off campus and the pliant trustees have gone along. Yes, the major newspapers are just as biased to the left as in the rest of the country and even more out of touch with their communities. And, yes, Al Gore lives in the sumptuous suburb of Belle Meade, from which his private jets fly off with huge contrails to save the world from global warming.

But mostly there is a gentle, common sense peace about Tennessee. Twenty minutes outside Nashville is Franklin, looking like an idealized Disneyland small town, except that there are churches on every corner downtown and a booming Christian music industry. (It also is rising population, as is Murfreesboro, one of the fastest growing cities in the nation.) Up in the countryside nearby is a tiny crossroads, Leipers Fork, with a single supermarket--Puckett's Bi-Rite--that closes at dusk to become a bustling country music venue. Their first rate musical fare can be found, streaming, on the Internet.

Even the tourist sites seem well-done. Rock City on Lookout Mountain, above Chattanooga, provides a tasteful and amusing geological visit, and the mountain's Point Park and the Civil War battlefields there and below (Missionary Ridge) offer careful and provocative educational experiences for all ages. They might hate the description, but "wholesome" might describe the bars downtown, and they certainly can wear out anyone's desire for non-stop live musical tourism. For a refresher course on their provenance, try the Country Music Hall of Fame.

Tennessee's population (6.5 million) is going up faster than that of the nation as a whole, and the eastern part of the state seems especially prosperous and vital. I have a short list of the nation's most under-appreciated states. Pennsylvania would be on the list in the North. Indiana in the Middle West. Utah in the West. Tennessee in the South. I make a deep and courtly bow in its direction.

Slowly the stock market is telling us to expect another recession, even while there is a kind of wobbling improvement in the depressed housing sector and the unemployment ranks.

Writes Comstock Partners to investors:

"At best, we think the economy will be disappointing in the period ahead. Consumers, who account for about 70% of GDP, are hamstrung by debt. In addition they have kept up their spending only by running their savings rate back down to 3.8% of disposable income, only the fifth month below 4% since 2007. Other limiting factors are low wage growth, high unemployment, the large numbers of workers who have dropped out of the labor force, declining home prices, higher tax payments and a flattening out of transfer payments. Therefore it no wonder that consumer confidence still remains at recessionary levels.

"Still ahead is the so-called "fiscal cliff", another conflict as we approach the debt ceiling again, a contentious election, and the continued inability of a dysfunctional congress to get anything done."

To that you can add the worsening credit crises and an accompanying slump in most of Europe and the slowing of growth in China and India.

The policy purveyors on both sides of the Atlantic, at least, are at odds within their own countries and trans-nationally. Germany, for now, is doing well, obviously, as is adjacent Austria. The Merkel regimen of low and declining deficits, relatively low taxes and reduced regulations, along with cuts in entitlement spending have kept Germany out of the grim conditions prevailing in Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy. Looking over here, the Germans find it hard to believe there is any merit to the stimulus practices of the Obama Administration, since their whole policy is to avoid that approach.

Surely the Germans mostly have it right. What is lacking, however, is a strong enough supply side focus: extensive lowering of tax rates and reductions in regulations. Even though, as in Canada, the locals can see that they are doing better than citizens in more profligate lands, sobriety alone doesn't sell.

Much of the West has been on a binge. The left offers Hair of the Dog, though the pleasant effects are fleeting. Vitamins, solid food and exercise surely are in order; but it helps to emphasize as well the brighter future ahead. Mr. Romney needs and the Republicans in Congress need to get this advoce even more urgently than Mrs. Merkel.

Open Europe reports that new Greek elections now seem likely as a technocratic caretaker administration takes over after failure of any party to form a governing coalition. However, it is hard for anyone to imagine a sustainable coalition resulting from the new elections, either.

The debate among German leaders is whether to pull the subsidy plug now or later. If money is cut off for Greece now the nation's economy could collapse even before the new elections. One wonders whether in that event the present number two party, the public employee-dominated Syriza, will gain or lose. Their whole claim is that Germany is bluffing. How credible will that claim be once the Germans follow through?

Whenever the collapse occurs and Greece pulls out of the Eurozone--or is thrown out--the cost to the French government alone is estimated at between 50 billion Euros and 58 billion, not counting private banks' exposure. The official amount alone comes to about $1,200 US for each Frenchman. Germans and Dutch will be hit for comparable sums.

Then, after Greece, comes potential collapses in Spain, Italy, etc.

The big spending gravy train is in a slow rollover.

Photo Credit: Getty Images

It isn't The Hunger Games, but for a non-fiction book, Indivisible by James Robison and (Discovery Sr. Fellow) Jay Richards is doing very well. It's now number 24 on the Top 100 Bestsellers of the Year at Barnes & Noble. Our folks are right between John Grisham and Stephen King, make of that what you will.

The Open Europe organ of the European Union is a commendably fair daily account of news about Europe--from within Europe itself. Today brings the news I haven't seen much elsewhere that a possible (or is it probable) collapse of the Greek government's agreements on austerity measures already is being discounted by European central banks.

Reports an Open Europe headline, "Belgian and Irish Central Bank Governors suggest a Greek exit would be manageable".

Euro finance ministers were meeting today as conflicting stories come out of Greece. One is that polls show support for staying in Europe and using the Euro. But other polls show no appetite at all for sacrifice. The way this commonly is represented is, "We stay in, the Germans pay our bills." That doesn't sound so good to, say, the Germans.

Continues Open Europe, "Luc Coene, Governor of the Central Bank of Belgium, said in an interview with the FT (Financial Times) that, 'I guess an amicable divorce [between Greece and the eurozone] would be possible, but I would still regret it.' Patrick Honohan, Irish Central Bank Governor, told a conference in Estonia at the weekend, 'Things can happen that are not imagined in the treaties...Technically, [a Greek exit] can be managed...It is not necessarily fatal, but it is not attractive.'"

Open Europe also notes that "Der Spiegel reported over the weekend that, according to a leaked document from the German Finance Ministry, even if Greece leaves the euro, it will still require financial support and as an EU member, this could be provided by all EU member states. However, today's front-page of the magazine still calls for Greece to leave the euro." (My added emphasis.)

Meanwhile, in Britain, the Cameron government's Foreign Secretary William Hague says this would not be a timely occasion for a vote on whether the UK should reduce its ties to the EU. I'd say he's got that right!

The good news today is that unemployment has dropped from 8.2 percent to 8.1 percent, entirely because so many workers are dropping out of the job market and no longer are listed as "looking for work." These are "discouraged workers."

When all of us lose our jobs and finally give up hope of finding new ones America will reach zero unemployment and zero employment at the same time. Then President Obama can boast that we have finally achieved a balanced economy.

Liberal Seattlites, which is to say nearly all the politicos and media, are eager to deplore the anarchists who trashed the downtown on May Day, but they are just as eager to assert their sympathy for the concerns of the Occupy protestors. The anarchists, they declare, are detracting from the reform appeal of the Occupy crowd. The trouble is, those fine Occupy folk don't necessarily see it that way.

A Seattle Times editorial this morning preached to the Occupiers, "The reminder for the legitimate marchers is to never forget their efforts are ripe for exploitation by costumed poseurs from a graphic novel" (the anarchists). The Times and other writers want the Occupy movement to focus on "educational" efforts to show how the economy was damaged and the Great Recession caused by privileged elites (banks and the "One Percent," I guess). "Help citizens understand what happened and how it can be corrected," proposes the Times. "Next time the crowd could be 10 times larger. And the feckless punks even more irrelevant."

Maybe the Occupy people could gather in city parks to read out loud past Seattle Times editorials on the roots of the recession.

You would think that the term"Occupy" meant "hold peaceful demonstrations," instead of, well, occupy public buildings and spaces and shut down normal business activities. Of course, that is not how the Occupy movement has been defined since its beginning, how it broke the law last fall and set up camps at Westlake Mall and the Seattle Community College campus, and why it is not disposed to disown the anarchists and bar them from its ranks. Indeed, last year, the Occupy movement really was "10 times larger", but the "feckless punks" were just as "relevant" then.

Occupy members themselves are refreshingly unencumbered by the the bourgeois illusions of the media and political left. For example, deep in The Times' own news story today on the riot aftermath, we learn that "Ian Finkenbinder, an Occupy Seattle member who helped organize the May Day protests" says "he doesn't 'support or condemn' the property destruction and violence." (My emphasis.) Finkenbinder, a fellow with a dazzling pink Mohawk, displayed in a front page Times photo, said "he wasn't surprised by the turn of events, given the public anger with the government and corporate America. 'When you have the inequality we see today, there will be a few broken window,' he said."

So, maybe Mr. Finkenbinder is not exactly the best instructor to conduct a course in economics.

If progressives do want such an educational course they might start by presenting the public with more than one point of view on what really did cause the economic meltdown, and what perpetuates the slow growth economy the nation is enduring now. It isn't just elites on Wall Street, a good number of whom, by the way, are liberals in good standing. (Does the name Jon Corzine ring a bell?) Rather, it largely is the government, aiming to do good with mandates for sub-prime mortgages and doing damage instead.

Meanwhile, there is a reason that places like Seattle and Oakland and Berkeley tend to have riots and less progressive cities do not. Elsewhere, there is less cooing over "legitimate" radicals.