Feel our souls wear out and our laces break

• Here is a story attempting to explain the role agriculture played in the rise of ancient totalitarian regimes. And here is another story attempting to explain the role agriculture played in the rise of ancient totalitarian regimes.

• The good news: New rules in the way FICO calculates credit scores will mean less harm done to those with medical debt.

The bad news: Unaccountable, unelected, secretive credit-scoring agencies still control vastly more of our lives than any free people should tolerate.

• Pastor Rick Joyner, I’d like you to meet Kate and her son and Mrs. Houlami’s surprise.

• Blog series you should read: Dianna E. Anderson on Unlearning Purity Culture.

• Mark Silk on schadenfreude: “The Bible also has its nanny-nanny-boo-boo moments. Like the beloved Psalm 23‘s ‘Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies.'”

• This is one of the reasons I expected a different result in the Hobby Lobby ruling:

GOODWYN: This is where it starts to get tricky because if the Supreme Court has confirmed that closely held corporations have religious rights what then do those corporations believe? The answer is nothing, of course, because a corporation isn’t raised Catholic or Jewish. It’s a legal entity. So in order to exercise its newfound religious freedoms, a corporation must import religious beliefs from a real person or a group of people. The question is, when an owner decides to assert my corporation myself, our religious beliefs are one, has he then torn a hole in his corporate veil? Professor Crespi.

CRESPI: And if the owner himself, as in Hobby Lobby, has asserted, the corporation and I are one, complete congruence, we’re not separate — that could be turned around conceivably against them when a creditor of the corporation is trying to sue and the owner now wants to put some distance between himself and the corporation.

• This is something to see, but part of me is happy to have seen it online and not standing there in the boat with Linda McNamara as she filmed this (via Phil Plait):