Saw Franchise Quotes

Back at home, I caught up on TV shows Bill had been saving. We raced through old episodes of The Good Wife, Madam Secretary, Blue Bloods, and NCIS: Los Angeles, which Bill insists is the best of the franchise. I also finally saw the last season of Downton Abbey.

Lagos, typically for a nonbusinessman, had a fatal flaw: he thought too small. He figured that with a little venture capital, this neurolinguistic hacking could be developed as a new technology that would enable Rife to maintain possession of information that had passed into the brains of his programmers. Which, moral considerations aside, wasn't a bad idea. "Rife likes to think big. He immediately saw that this idea could be much more powerful. He took Lagos's idea and told Lagos himself to buzz off. Then he started dumping a lot of money into Pentecostal churches. He took a small church in Bayview, Texas, and built it up into a university. He took a smalltime preacher, the Reverend Wayne Bedford, and made him more important than the Pope. He constructed a string of self-supporting religious franchises all over the world, and used his university, and its Metaverse campus, to crank out tens of thousands of missionaries, who fanned out all over the Third World and began converting people by the hundreds of thousands, just like St. Louis Bertrand. L. Bob Rife's glossolalia cult is the most successful religion since the creation of Islam. They do a lot of talking about Jesus, but like many selfdescribed Christian churches, it has nothing to do with Christianity except that they use his name. It's a postrational religion. "He also wanted to spread the biological virus as a promoter or enhancer of the cult, but he couldn't really get away with doing that through the use of cult prostitution because it is flagrantly anti-Christian. But one of the major functions of his Third World missionaries was to go out into the hinterlands and vaccinate people -- and there was more than just vaccine in those needles. "Here in the First World, everyone has already been vaccinated, and we don't let religious fanatics come up and poke needles into us. But we do take a lot of drugs. So for us, he devised a means for extracting the virus from human blood serum and packaged it as a drug known as Snow Crash.

The racial tension in our nation was being played up for ratings on the show. Mark Burnett was the mastermind of creating conflict. Burnett had been in the British military, where he’d learned tactics like creating conflict to divide the enemy and conquer them. I’d been involved in the franchise from the very beginning, and I saw how he divided teams by gender, by class, by race. He honed this type of conflict-baiting on the social experiment of Survivor, and he naturally brought those tactics to The Apprentice.

Both Bush and Vail saw their jobs as managing the touch and the balance between loonshots and franchises—between scientists exploring the bizarre and soldiers assembling munitions; between the blue-sky research of Bell Labs and the daily grind of telephone operations. Rather than dive deep into one or the other, they focused on the transfer between the two.

I always said I wanted Essence to be like Time Warner, the publishing empire that had movies, books, and television, as well as magazines in its vast holdings. I saw ECI as a miniconglomerate within the African American community. But I knew we had to expend our core magazine business into other magazine ventures if we were going to grow the franchise.

We have just been seeing political power concerned to break a "clandom" which preceded it in time. Let us now see how it behaves in regard to a clandom which is its contemporary. It may be said in effect, paraphrasing Shakespeare: "Monarchy and feudal aristocracy are two lions born on the same day." There was something of an act of piracy about the foundation of the European states. The Franks who conquered Gaul, the Normans who conquered England and Sicily, and even the Crusaders who went to Palestine, all behaved like bands of adventurers, dividing the spoil. What was there to divide? First of all, the ready cash. Afterwards, there were the lands; no deserts, these, but furnished with men whose labor was to maintain the victor. To every man, then, his share in the prize. And there we have the man-at-arms turned baron. This is shown to the evolution of the world of the word baro, which in Germany meant "freeman" and in Gaul denoted the name of the class. There the remains for seizure the apparatus of state, which there was one: naturally it is the share of the chief. But when a barbarian like Clovis found himself confronted with the administrative machine of the Late Empire, he did not understand it. All he saw in it was a system of suction pumps, bringing him a steady flow of riches on which he made merry with no thought for the public services for which these resources were intended. In the result, then, he divided up along among his foremost companions the treasure of the state, whether in the form of lands or fiscal revenues. In this way, civilized government was gradually brought to ruin, and Gaul of the ninth and 10th centuries, was reduced to the same condition as that in which William of Normandy was to find England of the 11th. There was imposed the system of barbarian government known as government by retainers. Let the Charlemagne use as points d'appui of Power, the influential men who are already on the spot, or let William create his own influential men by a share-out of big fiefs in England - it was all one. The important thing to note is that the central authority appoints as its representatives in a given district either the chief proprietors of the soil who were there already, or those whom it sets up in their place. By a slant common to the barbarian mind, or rather by an inclination which is natural to all men, but in barbarians encounters no opposing principle, these influential men soon confound their function with their property and exercise the former as though it were the latter. Each little local tyrant then becomes legislature, judge and administrator of a more or less extensive principality; and on the tribute paid by it he lives, along with his servants and his men-at-arms. Power thus expelled soon returns, however, under the spur of its requirements. The resources at his disposal are absurdly out of proportion to the area, which depends on it and to the population, which calls it the sovereign. The reason is that the manpower has been taken over by the barons. What was in other days a tax is now a feudal due. The only way is to rob the baronial cell of its withheld resources. That is why monarchy establishes townships on the confines of the baronial lands; they act as cupping-glasses, drawing away the best elements in the population. In that way, the barons will get fewer villeins, and the king more bourgeoisie who will be grateful for the franchises conferred on them and will help the king in his necessities from their purses.

This strategy was central to AFP’s role in Koch’s political network. From the earliest days of AFP’s inception, the group operated as something like a fast-food franchise. AFP was composed of semiautonomous state chapters, but all of them served products from the same menu. The menu was designed with great care and specificity by Charles and David Koch and their lieutenants in Koch’s lobbying operations. This meant that state-level directors had a lot of autonomy. Lonegan developed his own pool of local donors and had the freedom to hire his own field directors and to determine where he spoke. But ultimately Lonegan and other state directors were told by AFP headquarters what they should say and how they should say it. “I had to report to the national office,” Lonegan recalled. “They gave guidance on where our issues would lie. . . . So, I would report regularly to my boss on what issues were emerging, and then we’d determine how they’d want to address it. Not every issue that I saw as an issue did they think was an issue.” This blend of local autonomy with centralized control created a political organization that was uniquely powerful and effective. AFP could mobilize the type of popular citizen involvement that most people referred to as grassroots support. But it coupled this popular support with intelligence and guidance developed inside one of the most well-funded corporate lobbying operations in America. This meant that AFP could get people marching in the streets, and it could get them marching in the exact streets and zip codes of congressional districts where their marching would most effectively benefit Koch Industries’ strategic interests.

His eyes go wide. “Murder, huh? My adviser would probably think that’s wicked cool.” I wonder if I can blame the “wicked cool” Saw movie franchise for this kind of dumbass wanting to be a medical examiner.

Dallas. The scriptwriters have each of the actresses in the soap opera play the death scene in the swimming pool: they do not know which of them is to die, and hence disappear from the series. The 'soap' becomes their destiny. If they should die in reality, a way is devised for writing them out of the script. If they are sacrificed in the script, their stardom inevitably comes to an end in real life too, since they are identified with the characters they play. It is the same as in a ceremony: outside the ritual, you count for nothing, but the ritual is flexible enough to make use of all the chance happenings of life. Dallas 's secret lies in its closeness to tribal and initiatory stereotypes. That is why there is never any laughter in it: no wit, no humour, no comic episodes, no happy coincidences. It is a closed world in which everything leads inevitably to fatality, perfidy, sentimental incest or magical cannibalism. Such is the tribal law, of which J.R. is the emblem, which gives rise to the desperate efforts on the part of the women to escape from this archaic trap. In its artless cruelty, Dallas is superior to any 'intelligent' critique that can be made of it. That is why intellectual snobbery meets its match here. In a dream I saw the face of servitude. It is the face of a woman with heavy lidded, blue, expressionless eyes. The crescent shapes of her breasts are asymmetrical. She always has a smile for the poorest as she crawls off daintily towards infinity. Boredom is like a pitiless zooming in on the epidermis of time. Every instant is dilated and magnified like the pores of the face.

Why go to the movie theater at all, audiences have asked over the past few years, when movie tickets, snacks, and a babysitter can easily cost a hundred bucks and there is so much good TV to watch and so many apps on their tablets to interact with? Moviegoing is no longer a habit the way it used to be, particularly for people ages eighteen through forty-nine. They saw two fewer films per year on average in 2016 than they did in 2012. When they do go to the cinema, modern consumers increasingly prefer to know what they’re in for, which means a brand-name franchise. Even big-budget, star-driven action movies with stellar reviews, like Tom Cruise’s excellent Edge of Tomorrow, have struggled. And in the same year, Star Wars: The Force Awakens destroyed box-office records by essentially re-creating a movie from forty years ago.

Vail similarly stayed out of the details of the technical program. Both Bush and Vail saw their jobs as managing the touch and the balance between loonshots and franchises—between scientists exploring the bizarre and soldiers assembling munitions; between the blue-sky research of Bell Labs and the daily grind of telephone operations. Rather than dive deep into one or the other, they focused on the transfer between the two.

The less-famous history of an ultra-famous icon captures one person’s evolution toward this balance. During Steve Jobs’s first stint at Apple, he called his loonshot group working on the Mac “pirates” or “artists” (he saw himself, of course, as the ultimate pirate-artist). Jobs dismissed the group working on the Apple II franchise as “regular Navy.” The hostility he created between the two groups, by lionizing the artists and belittling the soldiers, was so great that the street between their two buildings was known as the DMZ—the demilitarized zone. The hostility undermined both products. Steve Wozniak, Apple’s cofounder along with Jobs, who was working on the Apple II franchise, left, along with other critical employees; the Mac launch failed commercially; Apple faced severe financial pressure; Jobs was exiled; and John Sculley took over (eventually rescuing the Mac and restoring financial stability). When Jobs returned twelve years later, he had learned to love his artists (Jony Ive) and soldiers (Tim Cook) equally.

Each of those visionary leaders created a brilliant loonshot nursery; they achieved Bush-Vail rule #1: phase separation. But they remained judge and jury of new ideas. Unlike Bush and Vail, who saw their role as gardeners tending to the touch and balance between loonshots and franchises, encouraging transfer and exchange, those three master P-type innovators saw themselves as Moses, raising their staffs, anointing the chosen loonshot.