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Sen. Joe Manchin's(D-W.Va.)defection from the Democrats' big spending bill has produced a lot of talk about whether states like West Virginia should have this much power in our constitutional structure in the first place. Complaints about the influence accorded to smaller states are no longer limited to progressive academics. They'vegone mainstream.

But the argument that institutions like the Senate (balanced by the House), the Electoral College, and federalism among states with populations of vastly different size are anachronistic is wrong. Our polarized country needs more space for team red and blue to get away from each other, not less. Allowing one to impose its will on the other by the smallest margins will only make our divisions more bitter.

To be sure, much has changed since the Constitution was originally ratified. But the valuein how the House and Senate were structured hasnot. Wyoming and West Virginia residents would no more consent to be in a political union where everything was decided by California and New York than New Englanders and Southerners would strike the same deal at the founding.

"One person, one vote" is an important principle. But so is the ability to escape the tyrannies of majority rule, something our system has always tried to balance, however imperfectly. If the issue was gay marriage circa 2004, liberals would see this fact as clearly as conservatives do now. The contempt members of each political tribe feel for the residents of states dominated by the other is evident.

And for all the talk by big-d Democrats about small-d democracy, everything liberals have ever accomplished, from the New Deal to ObamaCare, they have achieved through the existing constitutional system. They are failing to achieve more now because they have less popular support than they did when those programs passed. Yes, President Biden won 81 million votes and the barest 51 percent majority, not the landslides of Presidents FDR or LBJ, much less Ronald Reagan or Richard Nixon. Even Senate rules like the filibuster require consensus, which our existing political moment surely lacks.

Greater ability to retreat to red and blue enclaves, voting with one's feet, could do more to lower the temperature on our country's politics than letting 51-50 Senates pass "transformational" legislation, then lose the next election. The Founding Fathers, for all their faults, understood this better than Bette Midler does.

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The Senate isn't what's holding progressives back - The Week Magazine

Recognition, Redirection, and Renewal is the answer. Whats the question? Here it is: What should appear in a progressive race narrative?

Heres the backstory question. Why is it that America, like a family car stuck in a Minnesota snow, only spins its wheels on matters of race? Here is my answer. Because of the absence of a progressive race narrativeor worldviewwith the traction that could move the society forward toward a healthy democracy?[1]

This post is the first of a Patheos series, A Progressive Race Narrative, within a larger series on public theology within a still larger series dedicated to Progressive Christianity. This includes an interview with African Public Theologian Mwaambi Gideon Mbi and Asian public theologian Paul S. Chung as well as prominent American public theologian Katie Day. Now, lets turn to the challenge of constructing a progressive race narrative that will give us hope.

I recommend we construct a progressive race narrative out of existing materialsthat is, out of selected values already alive in our culture. I recommend we lift up a vision of the near, medium, and long range futures.Discourse clarification and worldview construction are in the futures business.

First, in the near future we lay a foundation of recognition. This recognition revises Americas story to include an objective and realistic account of the role racial injustice has played in the course of events. It also includes confession of the sins perpetrated by white supremacism.

Second, for the medium range future, we redirect institutional policies to consciously embrace racial diversity, even cultural diversity. Affirmative Action programs in recent decades were largely effective, despite pockets of resentment. For the time being, affirmative policies could help redress imbalances that have led to institutional racism in mortgage finance, law enforcement, imprisonment, and corporate board rooms.

Third, renewal for the long range future is predicated on a colorblind vision of a single universal humanum. Yes, Im aware that the term, colorblind, is controversial. Even so, nothing less than colorblindness is requisite for reconciliation, justice, and filial love.

This long range vision, like a rainbow, should include all colors. Its a mistake to continually formulate the race question in binary fashion as either white versus black or white versus non-white. The American family includes adoptees from every clime and continent.

If we are to keep our democracy from dying of racial cancer only to be trumped by totalitarianism, a progressive race theory becomes as urgent as emergency surgery. (Heart photo from Keith Giles Patheos column where a black American, Kyle Butler writes, Racism: My Answer To It.)

Might the public theologian provide emergency room therapy? The public theologian has high motivation drawn from two sources. One is scripture. St. Paul in Galatians 3:28: There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. Can such a biblical mandate be translated into a cultural vision?

The second source for the public theologian is the traditional triad of confession, repentance, and reconciliation. Might we translate this triad for the wider public as recognition, redirection, and renewal? Recognition plus repentance are prerequisite to redirection and healthy renewal.

In recent posts I have described public theology as conceived in the church, critically honed in the academy, and meshed with the world for the sake of the world. Might the progressive Christian contribute to an inclusive progressive race narrative that inspires unity rather than division?

The frenzied question of race is one of the most urgent on the public theologians agenda. In our series on public theology, we have tried to clarify the confusion over Critical Race Theory in contemporary discourse. Weve appealed to Gods identification with us in the incarnation as a divine conferral of dignity on each of us, regardless of race.

Turning from the wider public back to the church for a moment, its distressing to find the same divisiveness within the churches that are fracturing the wider society. Worse. We find the same competing ideologies generated in the public sphere ripping apart the communal fabric within the church sphere.

Evangelical theologian Roger Olson throws up his hands.I find the condition of Christian ethics absolutely appalling and sickening. It lacks any center, anything like doctrinal orthodoxy. Highly respected, allegedly devout Christian ethicists disagree radically with each other over questions such as war, capital punishment, poverty, abortion, biomedical ethics, and just about everything where there should be some kind of at least rough consensus. (Art: Jesus and the Children by John Lautermilch)

Progressives have contributed to this disintegration by judging as immoral other Christian communions. Fundamentalists and some evangelicals have not done any better, constantly complaining that liberal Protestants and Roman Catholics are no longer Christian. What St. Paul called party spirit continues to dismember the one Body of Christ.

What this means is that a new Progressive Race Narrative for the wider public should look for healing divisiveness within the plurality of Christian communions in the process. Healing by leading.

For the discussion that follows in Part 2, I will prosecute discourse clarification of the narratives touted by the scolders [2] and the deniers. These two narratives dominate the self-interpretations of todays Americans. Like piranha fish in a frenzy, the scolders and deniers eat up the minority narratives of the Neo-Nazis and white supremacists. Should the public theologian join the frenzy? Yes.

[1] The need for such a progressive narrative has been suggested by Noah Feldman of Harvard Law School. Feldman suggested this when appearing on the Fareed Zakaria television show, 12/26/2021.

Ted Peters is a Lutheran pastor and emeritus seminary professor. His one volume systematic theology is now in its 3rd edition, GodThe Worlds Future (Fortress 2015). He has undertaken a thorough examination of the sin-and-grace dialectic in two works, Sin: Radical Evil in Soul and Society (Eerdmans 1994) and Sin Boldly! (Fortress 2015). Watch for his forthcoming, The Voice of Public Christian Theology (ATF 2022). See his website: TedsTimelyTake.com.

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A Progressive Race Narrative (Part 1) | Recognition, Redirection, and Renewal - Patheos

Major government security agencies around the world have issued a joint advisory on the Apache Log4j vulnerability that offers technical details, mitigations and resources on what top security officials are calling one of the most severe vulnerabilities ever discovered.

The agencies taking the lead in the United States include the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the National Security Agency (NSA) and the FBI. Other nations involved include Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom.

The joint advisory is a response to the active, worldwide exploitationby numerous threat actors including two ransomware groups thus far of vulnerabilities foundinthewidely-used Java-based logging package Log4j. The security world has been on edge since Log4j was first reported publicly last week. The first attack on a government agency was sustained earlier this week by the Ministry of Defense in Belgium when its email servers went down.

Log4j vulnerabilities present a severe and ongoing threat to organizations and governments around the world, said CISA Director Jen Easterly. We implore all entities to take immediate action to implement the latest mitigation guidance to protect their networks. CISA is working shoulder-to-shoulder with our interagency, private sector, and international partners to understand the severe risks associated with Log4j vulnerabilities and provide actionable information for all organizations to promptly implement appropriate mitigations.

FBI Cyber Division Assistant Director Bryan Vorndran, urged any organization impacted by the Log4j vulnerability to apply all the mitigations recommended by CISA and visit fbi.gov/log4j to report details of any suspected compromises.

CISAhas created a dedicatedLog4j webpageto offer an authoritative, up-to-date resource withmitigation guidance andresources for network defenders, as well as a community-sourcedGitHubrepositoryof affected devices and services.Organizational leaders should also review the blog post by the UK's National Cyber Security Centre: Log4j vulnerability: what should boards be asking?, for information on Log4Shells possible impact on their organization as well as response recommendations.

CISA today also notified the industry in a tweet about #HackDHS, Homeland Securitys expanded bug bounty program to find and patch Log4j-related vulnerabilities in DHS systems. CISA Director Jen Easterly said the hacker community plays a strong role in keeping the government safe, and looks forward to working more closely.

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CISA, FBI and NSA issue joint advisory on Log4j with international security agencies - SC Magazine

Following the incident, the BJP workers raised slogans outside the Lohamandi Police station, demanding the arrest of all accused. (Image: India Today)

Ten people have been arrested in connection with an attack on Seva Bharati office in Agras Motikunj on Sunday night. The police are also trying to identify other miscreants who were reportedly involved in the attack.

The incident took place on December 26 when some youths, who were reportedly under the influence of alcohol, created a ruckus near the Seva Bharati office in Agra. When they were asked to stop, the youths started pelting stones at the office.

The police reached the spot soon after getting information about the incident and a case was registered.

ALSO READ: Chandigarh: Auto driver throws stones at cop after being pulled up over parking

BJP MLA Yogendra Upadhyay, along with supporters, also reached the spot and demanded the arrest of the youths involved. The BJP workers created a ruckus for hours at the Lohamandi Police station. They raised slogans and demanded the arrest of all accused.

Senior Superintendent of Police Sudhir Kumar Singh pacified the matter and assured that strict action would be taken.

Speaking to India Today, Sudhir Kumar Singh said that action is being taken against the accused under the Gangster Act and National Security Act (NSA). He said that five workers, including office in-charge Shivam, were injured in an attack by antisocial elements on the Seva Bharati office in Moti Kunj last night, following which a case was registered against two known and 40-50 unidentified assailants.

Shivam and Vikas, who sustained injuries in the attack, reside in the Seva Bharati office. Both are residents of Fatehabad.

Sami Aghai, president of the Bharatiya Muslim Development Council, said that no culprit should be spared, but innocents should not be harassed. Aghai claimed that some people are unnecessarily trying to pollute the environment and appealed to the administrative officers to keep an eye on such elements and take strict action.

ALSO READ: Uttar Pradesh: Body found in Kanpur, police suspect doctor accused of killing wife, kids killed self

Click here for IndiaToday.ins complete coverage of the coronavirus pandemic.

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Agra: 10 held in connection with attack on Seva Bharati office; NSA invoked against accused - India Today

Cybersecurity researchers have offered a detailed glimpse into a system called DoubleFeature that's dedicated to logging the different stages of post-exploitation stemming from the deployment of DanderSpritz, a full-featured malware framework used by the Equation Group.

DanderSpritz came to light on April 14, 2017, when a hacking group known as the Shadow Brokers leaked the exploit tool, among others, under a dispatch titled "Lost in Translation." Also included in the leaks was EternalBlue, a cyberattack exploit developed by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) that enabled threat actors to carry out the NotPetya ransomware attack on unpatched Windows computers.

The tool is a modular, stealthy, and fully functional framework that relies on dozens of plugins for post-exploitation activities on Windows and Linux hosts. DoubleFeature is one among them, which functions as a "diagnostic tool for victim machines carrying DanderSpritz," researchers from Check Point said in a new report published Monday.

"DoubleFeature could be used as a sort of Rosetta Stone for better understanding DanderSpritz modules, and systems compromised by them," the Israeli cybersecurity firm added. "It's an incident response team's pipe dream."

Designed to maintain a log of the types of tools that could be deployed on a target machine, DoubleFeature is a Python-based dashboard that also doubles up as a reporting utility to exfiltrate the logging information from the infected machine to an attacker-controlled server. The output is interpreted using a specialized executable named "DoubleFeatureReader.exe."

Some of the plugins monitored by DoubleFeature include remote access tools called UnitedRake (aka EquationDrug) and PeddleCheap, a stealthy data exfiltration backdoor dubbed StraitBizarre, an espionage platform called KillSuit (aka GrayFish), a persistence toolset named DiveBar, a covert network access driver called FlewAvenue, and a validator implant named MistyVeal that verifies if the compromised system is indeed an authentic victim machine and not a research environment.

"Sometimes, the world of high-tier APT tools and the world of ordinary malware can seem like two parallel universes," the researchers said. "Nation-state actors tend to [maintain] clandestine, gigantic codebases, sporting a huge gamut of features that have been cultivated over decades due to practical need. It turns out we too are still slowly chewing on the 4-year-old leak that revealed DanderSpritz to us, and gaining new insights."

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Experts Detail Logging Tool of DanderSpritz Framework Used by Equation Group Hackers - The Hacker News