At least 80,000 people died of flu last winter in U.S., CDC says
The government says it’s the highest death toll since the winter of 1976-1977.
Now available in German!
The English version will follow, hopefully soon.
Nice! It’s democritus again… the 2.0 version.
So the old boy is doing okay, then? There was a little stir a while back and everybody was wondering if and how he was.
There was no contact between me and James since January 2018. Using the material that was available to me, partially rewritten by James, I compiled and published the book myself.
So St. James is still MIA? Shirley there’s a way to find him. Can we contact any collaborators, friends, pinochle partners, or tai chi instructors he might have had? What about philosophy fora. Where was he last seen affecting his ontology?
The German version of James S. Saints RM:AO is now also available as E-book, e.g. here.
I hope that I can publish the English version in a few months.
And now the English edition of James S. Saints “Rational Metaphysics: Affectance Ontology … and its Analogies in Psychology and Sociology” is available as bound book and e-book.
Great work Mithus - I knew you would do it. I am looking forward to reading it.
I have questions for James but it seems that I got back to reading him a little too late.
I stopped watching the internet years ago while James was debating relativity with the admin on this board but then last year I ran across the following article using a word that I encountered only once before - “affectance”. The article from Cornell University’s computer science department discusses the use of affectance as a model for increasing accuracy of measurements involving networked radio telemetry.
Years ago when I first heard that word, I tried to look it up with no luck. Fortunately someone asked James about it and he provided what seemed an appropriate definition. More recently seeing this article, I had to wonder if it was the same “affectance”. After a good bit of study, although I can’t say that I totally understand it all, I realized that it was the same as James’ defined affectance - “subtle influences”, especially relating to radio transmissions. Shortly after that I had to wonder if perhaps the infamous "James S Saint’ was in fact one of those listed engineers in the article; Kowalski, Kudaravall, or Mosterio. But then I found another article from the University of Massachusetts. And today when I do a search I find definitions and all kinds of articles about “affectance”. Someone was onto something, something subtle. Something with quite subtle influence. He seemed to be quite a remarkable character.
I had been observing James decades ago after he captured my attention with a topic - “Watching the watchers watching the watchers watch”. I immediately knew what he was talking about but it took a couple of days before I realized what he was really saying. It was clear that he was aware that the people employed to observe the public live with a different frame of mind and value standard. Judgements occur that ethically shouldn’t. And I first thought that he was commenting on the observer’s supervisors watching them watch. But he wasn’t. What he was bring to light was that just as the public live in a bubble of skewed belief, unaware of the thoughts and perspectives of those observing them from above, those very observers are also living in a skewed bubble of belief, also never thinking that they too are being not merely observed, but often misjudged and misguided by a third layer of unseen eyes, attitudes, and agendas. I found that thought disturbing. And that was only the beginning of many unsettling revelations James seemed compelled to bring to light.
The next topic he raised that rocked my boat was about techniques for establishing complete social invisibility - leaving undeniable evidence that one person was actually a different person who was trying to hide his identity - a surprisingly effective trick. He explained the details and how those two topics were directly related (James, if you are still out there - How am I doing? 
). In those days it was common for discussion boards to suddenly develop a problem and disappear. In this case, I could easily see why. James had a way of blurting out things that serious people didn’t want heard. And that led to just about every organization blasting him with any kind of allegation that might stick, calling him every name in the book. In that regard he reminds me of President Trump and the liberal media. Both he and Mr T just boldly blurt it out and let the chips fall where they may as long as it gets all worked out in the end. And James too seemed to have known too much about the deep state swamp, US socialist agenda, globalism, and how they all play together. He often showed a deep disdain for people manipulating the masses no matter who they were. He was the natural whistlerblower type. I wonder how he would have been as a Fox News host.
James seemed to have a way of causing people to think and with an endless list of wizened sayings. I wish I had had the forethought to record them. On occasion I’ll be reminded of yet another one. I had to wonder where he ever came from. What kind of man when discussing religion thinks about things like what the words “god”, “Adam”, “Man”, “spirit”, and such really mean before getting into it? How did he ever find out? He was a consummate deconstructionist ensuring that everyone was on the same page. It would have been great to see him and Ben Shapiro debate something but I can’t think of anything they would argue about.
After reading up on him more and starting to think like him, I have to wonder. Is affectance a thing and substance? Or is it a philosophy of subtle influence? Seemingly both.
It’s great to see there is a book to reference.
When I was translating this text from James’ blog, I asked him about the word “Affectance”, and about “Logical Affectance” in particular, because I couldn’t find it in any dictionary or lexicon.
He answered:
James defined Affectance as:
) Subtle influence(s) {as used in Infant Psychology},ultra-minuscule, mostly randomized electromagnetic pulses,
) Actualization of potential(s) to affect
) A region of varied and subtle changes
) An amount of subtle affects
From the book:
In terms of an earlier definitions within child psychology, there is a correspondence with my view of deconstructing the psyche into earlier elements, or ‘normally’ deconstructing, or de-differenting the psychically variably established stasis(existential epoche),.
Which under unusually dramatic circumstances may subtly and negatively affect. a dramatic reversal into a pre-unified Lacanian mirror.[regression (with loss of intervening variables)].
Imputed by positive, (more actual re-cognition of richer symbolic content) or lesser, leading to negative affectance.
Absolute acceptance, implies in existential terms, a relational discordance, as in NietzcheSartre, a variable positive~negative relationship between Being < Existence > Nothingness; in re-cognition.
Re-cognition has both phenomenological and eidectic variable overlapping applications.
This is how I perceive the affectence-effectance relationship.
That is the one that I am more interested in, but so far, i’m not seeing much on this board about that.
Yes, James didn’t write much about it here. In case you haven’t seen them, maybe you’d like to read his posts in these threads:
Rewrite the Constitution
In Sight of SAM, I am
The Communal Particle
The Ant and the Übermensch
Global Information Segregation
Before the Annihilation
Will Machines completely replace all Human Beings?
Thinking about the End of History
Forms of Government
There is a treasure trove. Thanks.
This is going to take forever to catch up.
You better watch out, man. Saint jameses ‘SAM’ model is highly if not completely socialistic. Don’t let him getcha.
Now, promethean75, don’t be like so many others on the Internet who claim to know a text before they have read it. 
but three of a kind - A, C, D - beats a B high, dude.
Due to your comment I jumped ahead to research “SAM”. I know from many years ago, James was extremely anti-socialist. And he had pretty solid arguments. But since you said that and knowing James to be a theorist, I thought that perhaps he changed his mind at some point.
His explanation of a “SAM Corporation” refers to a multi-cellular type of structure. That alone infers an anti-socialist nature but isn’t conclusive.
I found more relevant and detailed description in the thread, Democratic vs undemocratic. In that thread he explains:
As I understand it, socialists seriously hate constitutions except as a prop or ruse. Constitutions limit the power of a governing body. Socialists do not tolerate anything limiting their power. That is why the US Constitution has been under such attack lately by the Left. So that is one thing.
I was familiar with James’ CRH from long ago and it poses an even greater problem for socialists.
Socialism is about the centralization of authority. James’ CRH and thus SAM is an extreme distribution of authority, the very definition of “democracy”. So it seems to me that SAM and socialism are almost exact opposites.
I’m guessing that James’ idea that people in one of his groups are very much like a tight nit family and thus strongly live for each other is similar to the socialist idea that all people are to live exclusively for sake of the social elite or upper class. That is the only place I see any association between the two. James’ groups don’t seem to have any upper class structure, merely 4 offices under constant scrutiny from the other members.
The US has 50 States with somewhat distributed authority among them. That makes the US a democracy even though the States are tied together by a republic architecture. The primary issue is just that socialism requires a central government with total authority over all people throughout a nation. Socialists don’t like that the 50 States have any degree of independence from their authority. James was talking about perhaps 50 million independent groups/States with freedom for people to swap from any one small group to another, volume permitting.
Any distributed authority, or anything democratic, is the exact opposite of socialism (the term “Democratic Socialism” is an oxymoron). It is merely an issue of distributed authority versus central authority. So even if there is some tiny element of a socialist nature inside the diverse and distributed cells or groups, the fact that the groups are their own authority absolutely forbids socialism.
So the way that I see it is that James’ SAM Corp is actually, literally, a million times less socialist than the USA and would totally forever block socialism and its big brother communism.
exotic philosophical language like ‘multi-cellular type of structure’ is really only articulating an already simple and well understood feature of government; that of seperate bodies that cooperate (and keep each other in check) to make the governing process as democratic as it can be. contrarily, any government that yields absolute executive power from a ‘single cellular structure’ - to use the language of james - is a fascist government. probably the fact that you imagine socialism as being unable to be ‘multi-cellular’ is because the historical examples of any attempts at a socialism never made it past the initial stage of its revolution… and therefore had to mainstain a stringent ‘proletarian dictatorship’ comprised of a single party. this is why its commonplace to equate communism with totalitarianism, something marx nor lenin never permanently advocated. the purpose of the temporary central party dictatorship was to concentrate control and work out the difficult organizational processes involved in stabalizing the newly revolutionized society. but instead of moving past this stage, the communist countries turned into state-capitalist models. this is largely due to the fact that there was immense economic competition with other capitalist economies… so they had to be able to compete. that, and its a natural historical trend for those in power to find ways to keep their power. but this is all 20th century stuff, and the world is now more than ever ripe for a sucessful, global revolution something along the lines of what trotsky envisioned so long ago. shame that the banner of socialism is being carried by the clowns on the left today. they’re all entirely too moderate in my opinion.
there is nothing socialists oppose about the idea of a constitution per se. moreover, if you think of a socialism in terms of a governed and government split rather than a government of the governed, you’d naturally think in such dichotomous terms as ‘the government not wanting to lose its power to the governed’. but if the governed are the government, there is no opposing body to lose power to.
and the american constitution is being attacked because of how silly some of that shit is. just read a tweet of some redneck placating to trump over the right to bear arms. dude actually thinks there is a ‘god’ that has granted him a natural right to have a gun. i mean c’mon, man. seriously?
uh-oh. my toasted asiago bagel with cream-cheese has just arrived, and i should therefore like to conclude this post with great haste.