I yesterday focused on Cuba and America's vision of Manifest Destiny. Coincidentally, I saw a Quora contribution about Stanford University, which I will insert later.  As, in my memory, I can still vividly recall how I almost went to Cuba when I was at Stanford, I thought I'd see how these two entities are connected.   I began by asking Google AI about the two. Stanford University has a direct academic and research connection with Cuba primarily through The Cuba Observatory, [ 1 ]  the Center for Latin American Studies. Specific connections and initiatives include: The Cuba Observatory: This academic initiative is affiliated with Stanford's Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLAS). It brings together scholarship, media, and public research to analyze Cuba's socio-economic, political, and cultural landscape. Visiting Professorships: Stanford frequently hosts Cuban scholars, such as Dr. Ernesto Domínguez López from the University of Havana, who served...

My Sundays are usually devoted to something spiritual, and sometimes personal.  About the latter topic, in May of 2014 I began a 15-part series on my life transitions.    Part 1   dealt with an overview and my early youth, while  Part 15E  a couple months later was on the afterlife. Transitions  6  and 7 caught my attention, so today, I'll focus on one of them.  After graduating from high school in 1958, off I flew to Los Angeles.  This was the first time I had left Hawaii, and this was perhaps my most monumental transition: I was fortunate that my older brother was a structural engineer with the Naval Civil Engineering Laboratory (NCEL) at Port Hueneme, California.  He got me a slot as a draftsman there and I also stayed with he and his family the whole summer ( and repeated this two more times, with the summer between my junior and senior years in Hilo, Hawaii with C. Brewer--where the   little league baseball team   pla...