The Great Eyeglasses Rip off

By Madeleine Kando

After procrastinating for years, I finally got my new prescription for glasses. My current glasses are at least 10 years old and I had forgotten how expensive and time-consuming it is to buy new classes.

For someone who cannot even decide on which leg to get out of bed, the choice of frames is overwhelming. Besides, trying on frames is an exercise in futility since all you see is a blurred self in the mirror.

I finally selected a frame in the midrange. But frames are not much use without lenses and those make up the bulk of the cost. I finally settled on a pair of Flexon, high-index, anti-glare titanium glasses and went home with a $500 hole in my pocket.

Barely out of the door, the thought of having paid a small fortune for 3 pieces of plastic stuck together with screws that I knew doesn't cost more than $20 to produce, gave me a severe case of indigestion . I returned them the next day.

I figured there was enough juice left in my 10-year-old glasses to research why the industry puts a 1000% markup on their glasses. Especially for something that should be fully covered by insurance, like high blood pressure medication.

The reason is simple: the eyewear industry is a near-monopoly, dominated by an Italian/French company called ‘Essilor Luxottica’.

It was founded in 1961 by Leonardo Del Vecchio. The company owns the biggest retail chains, such as LensCrafters and Sunglass Hut, and controls over 80% of the major eyewear brands, including Ray-Ban, Oakley and Vogue Eyewear. Without competition, this company keeps the prices so high that it bears no relation to reality.  It even owns Eyemed, the biggest eye insurance provider in the world. So, you see quite a big party!

Is Holland the next Anglo Country?

Tom Kando 

I just returned from the Netherlands. 

We were nearly two weeks in that lovely country. It was delightful. We spent most of our time visiting with relatives and good old friends whom we had not seen in years. We enjoyed excellent Dutch cuisine, including many varieties of cheese and my favorite appetizers: herring and Carpaccio. There were concerts (Bach’s Brandenburg concertos), boat rides through the Amsterdam canals, strolling on the beach, lounging around sidewalk cafés and more. My wife Anita keeps saying: “Europeans are a café society. Why can’t Americans be more like that?” 

However, I discovered something quite odd, something that shocked me: I have long admired the Dutch for being brilliantly multi-lingual. A large majority of them are fluent in English, among other languages. This is quite convenient for American visitors. However, over the past couple of decades, the country’s entire higher education system has become Anglicized. Today, a majority of the curriculum at most Dutch universities is taught in English. I had no idea. 

I grew up in the Netherlands, I received my Master’s degree from the University of Amsterdam. I am still fluent in Dutch.

My discovery that Dutch higher education is now largely in English was fortuitous. We met a nice and very intelligent young American who is a student at the University of Groningen. He has been in Holland for several months, but he still hardly speaks a word of Dutch. I asked him how he manages to attend a Dutch university. No problem, he said, since all his classes are in English. 

This floored me. I learned from further conversation and some superficial research that a majority of university courses in the Netherlands are now taught in English. (see for example Dutch Universities Teach in English and Best English-Taught Universities in the Netherlands)

The Anti-Israel Left

By Madeleine Kando

On October 7 2023, the terrorist group Hamas butchered 260 young music lovers at the Supernova Music Festival Negev Desert. They left 1,200 Israelis dead and 2,800 more wounded. Clearly they had ‘kill as many as you can’ on their mind.

The sheer brutality of it all left me breathless. The next day, there were pro-Palestinian and left wing groups celebrating that atrocity. In Manhattan, in London, at Harvard University and other campuses, the chant was: “the Israeli regime is entirely responsible for the violence’.

I spoke to some neighbors, trying to make sense of what just happened, the sheer brutality of the attack. What I heard was ‘It’s terrible, yes, but what about the poor Palestinians?’

It almost seemed like a brainwashed response. I am a liberal and so is most of my neighborhood, but can liberals not call a spade a spade? Can they not see beyond their binary worldview of the oppressors versus the oppressed? I am all for the underdog myself, but mass murder should not be condoned by blaming Israel for imposing an “apartheid” regime on Palestinians. That response requires a much more detailed knowledge of the long lasting Palestinian/Israeli conflict, than my liberal neighbors have.