Have you seen the latest numbers out from the U.S. Geological Survey that the Colorado River is down 20 percent since 2000 and expected to be down 25 percent by 2050 due to snow melt on the Rockies and global warming?

Teresa and I just returned from visiting friends and family in Florida, the first time we ever went away for a couple of days without any business agenda.  We've done lots of fun stuff, but always piggybacked on a speaking engagement or business need; this is the first time in our marriage (40 years) that we just took off with no agenda, no business element, just for fun.  We can't even say the word "vacation.”

I appreciate the many comments regarding my post regarding the lead actor Joaquin Phoenix acceptance speech at the Oscars.  Some of you ripped me for rewording into it more than he said--equating humans with scallops--and pointing out that he never said the word "vegan."    I appreciate all the comments and have watched the entire speech.

One area of policy I admit to being unsure about is free markets, free trade, tariffs, and protectionism. I don't have an answer. But I do want to share something that's interesting.

By now you've certainly seen the video clips of Michael Bloomberg's 2016 Oxford University presentation about the kind of mental capacity needed in different economies:  agricultural, industrial, informational.

 You may be aware of efforts in numerous cities to ban gun stores through the use of zoning ordinances.  By and large, courts have struck down these regulations as being unconstitutional.

On this day devoted to love, perhaps focusing on the statement made by Joaquin Phoenix at the Oscars is in order.  If you missed it, he won Lead Actor at the Oscars and in an emotional and undoubtedly heartfelt plea, asked us all to become vegans and said the life of a scallop is worth same as the life of a human.

For the last week I've been hunkered down at the desk going over the final layout of a new book BEY0ND LABELS: A Doctor and a Farmer Conquer Food Confusion One Bite at a Time.

The dairy industry is imploding. Cow milk sales are down nearly 40 percent nationwide in just the last three decades. Can you imagine? Replaced with rice milk, soy milk and others, traditional cow milk's position at the table is now no longer.

A study released in Nature and reported in The Economist, conducted at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg shows much farther-ranging affects in the human micro-biome than originally thought.

 I just finished a wonderful book, Undaunted Courage, by Stephen Ambrose, subtitled "Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West."  It's a long read and daunting to look at, but when I started, I couldn't put it down and have stayed up late finishing it.