On this day in 1849, Elizabeth Blackwell became the first female doctor in American history. Of course, that was at the time when being a doctor was mostly about being strong enough to saw people’s limbs off. Still, that really wasn’t that long ago, and it is hard not to say, “You’ve come a long way, baby!” Yes, I understand that the diminutive is sexist in this context. I bring it up only because it was the slogan for Virginia Slims cigarettes. Elizabeth Blackwell was born in 1821. Had she been born in 1921, she almost certainly would have been a smoker, and thus not have lived to be 89 years old.

Of course, Elizabeth Blackwell’s efforts at being a doctor were not terribly successful for exactly the reasons you would expect. And she is probably more important today as a civil rights pioneer than as a doctor. She was very big in pushing for the education of women. And not surprisingly, she was a major abolitionist. She and her sisters (her sister Emily was the third woman to get a medical degree in the US) helped to start a nursing program during the Civil War — something that the male doctors were none too happy about. But that’s only because they were men and men are, in general, awful.

On this day in 1890, the United Mine Workers was formed when the Knights of Labor Trade Assembly No 135 and the National Progressive Miners Union merged. These were in the days when unions were quire literally illegal. And this is, to some extent why people always associate unions with violence. Labor organizers and members were commonly murdered. So you might wonder why it is that people don’t get more behind unions today. After all, they are legal — just largely legally neutered.

One reason that does not explain why people don’t get behind unions is that things are so great now. They aren’t. Income inequality is as bad as it ever was. The reason that I find most compelling is that people are used to the way it is now. For one thing, the power elite are a whole lot better at getting their message out. But more important: things have gotten worse inch by inch where most people today don’t know that it was ever different.

In the late 19th century and early 20th century, people still remembered what it was like to have an agrarian lifestyle. Now that’s not to say that it was great. People were still poor. But I’ve felt that the big issue has never been wealth; the issue is control. And if you look at happiness, what you find is that people get happier the more wealthy they are — but only up to a certain point. And I think this is just because when you are in the upper middle class, you feel like you are in control of our life. (Although as Barbara Ehrenreich documents in Bait and Switch, that’s mostly an illusion.)

Unions have never been primarily about money. They too have been about control. Why did unions push for the minimum wage? It didn’t affect them. They didn’t earn the minimum wage. But it was about providing a sense of control for all workers. It was also about providing a sense of solidarity. And this, above all else, is what the power elite cannot abide. Because the power elite know that if working people band together, the power elite are powerless. And this is why unions must be destroyed.

On this day in 1981, the remaining 52 hostages were released by the Iranian government after 444 days. This was also the day that Ronald Reagan was inaugurated fortieth President of the United States. For years, this has been part of the Republican myth that Carter was weak and Reagan strong. Indeed, just last weekend, Marco Rubio was on Meet the Press, where he made the de rigueur Republican claim that the world only respects and fears America when a dry mouthed Eagle Scout brays and beats his chest. He said, “When I become president of the United States, our adversaries around the world will know that America is no longer under the command of someone weak like Barack Obama, and it will be like Ronald Reagan, where as soon as he took office the hostages were released from Iran.”

If you look at the timeline of the Iranian hostages crisis, you will see that the Carter administration was not sitting on its hands. The first attempts at negotiation were on 7 November 1979 — three days after the attack on the embassy. The Iranians would not meet with the US, so Carter froze their assets. Originally, there were 66 hostages taken. On 17 November 1979, Iran released all the female and African American hostages — reducing the number down to 53. On 11 July 1980, another hostage was released due to illness. That left the 52 who were released on 20 January 1981.

On 12 September 1980, Iran declared that they would release the hostages if the Shah’s assets were given to Iran and if Iran’s assets were released. The Iranians went to the Carter administration that month with the offer to negotiate. From then through January of 1981, Warren Christopher led the US delegation in negotiations with the Iranians. On 19 January, a deal was settled — the Iranian hostages were exchanged for roughly $10 billion in Iranian assets. And the next day, the hostages were released.

According to PolitiFact (which has debunked this claim before because Republicans so like it), there were a couple of reasons for the Iranian hostages release. First, the Iranians were tired of keeping the hostages. They had to take care of them and keep them from escaping — at the same time having to worry about an American attack, which would have been widely seen as justified. Second, they had been negotiating for months and they didn’t want to start all over with a new administration. And third, the Iranians wanted to insult Carter as the symbol of the United States.

It’s interesting how often Republicans align themselves with enemies of this country just to score cheap domestic political points. Remember Tom Cotton’s ridiculous letter to the Iranians that totally disrespected the office of the president just to make a grand statement? Remember what the letter actually communicated: you should not trust the United States of America.

As for the Iranian hostages deal, no one from Ronald Reagan’s administration took any part in the negotiations. The deal was finalized because of negotiations with the Carter administration. And it was all about money. Nothing else. Rubio is an idiot. But that’s what Republicans are. In 2012, Mitt Romney said the same thing. That’s because chest thumping is the extent to which Republicans think about foreign policy.

On this day in 1974, Dennis Rader (known as the BTK killer — “BTK” standing for “bind, torture, kill”) started his string of murders with the Otero family. He tortured them and then killed them. He’s a classic psychopath. In total, he killed ten people. The authorities in Kansas searched desperately for any other murders he might have been guilty of, hoping that one of them might have been after Kansas had enacted the death penalty, so they could kill him.

I understand this. It would be hard to feel too bad for this guy if he were killed. Just the same, he’s a classic example of what I think of as a grizzly bear murderer. It’s just what he does. What was done to him seems appropriate: put him in jail for the rest of his life so that he couldn’t hurt anyone else. I still don’t quite understand a society that thinks that sinking to the level of its worst individuals is a good idea.

One interesting thing about the BTK killer is that from 1974 through 1988 — the time during which he committed 9 of his 10 murders — he worked as an installer for ADT Security Services in Wichita. A lot of the people getting ADT installed were doing so because of their fear of the BTK killer. I don’t know if he ever killed anyone who had an ADT system installed. I do know that they are mostly useless.

He had a wife and two kids. He had been elected president of the council of his local Christ Lutheran Church. He was a Cub Scott leader. And he didn’t seem to have a problem getting or keeping jobs. None of this surprises me. I think that psychopaths are really in a much better position in this regard than normal people. I’ve often noticed in business how total idiots — incompetent in their work — are rewarded because they are so confident.

It seems natural that the United States would have far more than its fair share of serial killers. We are that kind of country. In a fundamental way, we love psychopaths. Sure, we would prefer that they didn’t kill and torture people. But other than that, the BTK killer was kind of the perfect American. It’s no wonder they are so hard to find. In fact, the BTK killer would never have been caught if he hadn’t decided he wanted to get attention long after he had stopped killing. He should have focused his efforts on teaching Sunday School instead.

On this day in 2010 was the 7.0 M earthquake in Haiti that killed well over 100,000 people. The death toll was so high because it struck the most populated area of the country. In all, over three million people were affected by it. I think Haiti is an embarrassment to the west. There is no reason for us to allow its people to live in such poverty and suffer so much. But of course, that’s the modern American way: people are divided into the winners and the losers — the producers and the moochers. If someone was a winner, they would be smart enough not to be born in Haiti.