re: Let them eat cake?
I support our mayor and her policies on RVs, 100%. I oppose allowing RVs to park on City streets and look forward to the day when the police enforce the parking laws. As I've said, time after time: if you cant afford to live here, move somewhere where you can afford to live. I'd love to live in Atherton, but I'm realistic enough to know that I cannot afford to live there.
I've seen firsthand how gross these RV's can be (from allowing their dogs to poop around them without picking up, to dumping their human waste on the streets and down the drains, to crazy RV owners threatening people).

ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!

HI. I JUST READ THE PALO ALTO WEEKLY NEWSPAPER. (JULY 12, 2019. IT PUT COLOR PICTURES OF THE RV DWELLERS ALONG EL CAMINO REAL IN PALO ALTO. AND ITS A MAIN STORY. TAKE A LOOK MOUNTAIN VIEW. CLEAN PEOPLE. A FAMILY. A COUPLE. AN OLDER GENTLEMAN GOING TO WORK. I THINK THE VOICE COULD DO THE SAME. IT MIGHT ALLEVIATE NEGATIVES I AM HEARING, AND FEARS. MOST OF THE RV PEOPLE AND RVS I HAVE SEEN ARE CLEAN AND RESPONSIBLE. I HAVE SEEN MANY ALL OVER MTN. VIEW. I LIVE IN MTN. VIEW. LETS BE HONEST AND FAIR ABOUT IT. OK. THANK YOU. DEBORAH

Perhaps the mayor should solve the housing issue instead.

Favoring the rich RV dwellers over the tent dwellers; what an elitist!

What is the "housing issue" you want the Mayor to solve?

I have never heard of a METRIC that would measure a "Housing issue"
What METRIC would you use to measure the "housing issue?"


How would we know when the "housing issue" was solved?

What makes you think the issue you have outlined can be solved by anyone?

As a person of French descent, I suggest that Jane Horton read a history book. That Marie Antoinette said let them eat cake is a myth. The facts of the historical story are that many French people were starving and the bread that was available was very expensive, and cake was much cheaper. The Queen, having been asked what the people who could not afford to buy or make bread should do, she answered then they should eat cake. Anti-monarchists twisted the Queen's words to help justify their persecution of royalty and upper class citizens of France at Napoleon's orders. The Queen was not callous and uncaring; to her this made sense; if you cannot afford expensive food, eat cheaper food. Something that all of us do today if we don't live in Atherton.

Thanks for that, Mummzie!

There are even several more misconceptions in the way that phrase is carelessly attributed to Marie Antionette within US pop culture -- but what you gave is enough to demonstrate the problems with it.

It's perfect that Mummzie is so close to being correct but yet so very very far. The Marie Antoinette story is almost certainly apocryphal, but somehow you've created another false story that has an even more ridiculous message. This is like Christians who come up with strange stories about the Eye of the Needle in order to justify keeping their wealth.

No, the Marie Antoinette story is not "almost certainly" apocryphal, it's phenomenally so -- wrong in amazingly many ways at once, and everyone who has looked into it at all knows that. Which is the main point here, and Mummzie's comment gets at that point, even though fancifully.

- The phrase in question never concerned cake at all, but brioche ("Qu'ils mangent des brioches"), a fancy type of bread. The "cake" nonsense was a dumbing-down for Americans that its author presumed to all be both ignorant of brioche and incapable of looking it up. (Brioche is hardly unknown in the US: most general cookbooks have long had recipes, it's not hard to make at home, and lately it's even popular in commercial breads or buns for toasted sandwiches.)

- The phrase was popularized by Rousseau in a fictionalized story when Marie Antoinette was still a little girl in Austria, long before she moved to France. It may have been around earlier than that. It didn't even start becoming attributed to Marie at all until half a century after her death, very plausibly lifted from Rousseau's earlier popular writing. Those factors have long completely discredited the pop-culture myth even without the "cake" distortion.

- There are other complications. As French queen, despite faults, Marie-Antoinette was especially noted for her charity. She'd grown up a Habsburg princess in a household where diverse baked goods were available; if one ran out, you naturally substituted something similar. And at times, market conditions may well have priced ordinary bread higher than brioche (their production costs weren't all that different), as suggested in Mummzie's charming story.

The upshot here is that it's one thing to casually accept a clueless myth about "let them eat cake," but to repeat it in letter for publication, read by thousands of people, raises reasonable concerns about what else you got very wrong.