Keith Raniere seems to have gotten out of prison for Halloween. At least in spirit. There are apparently people who are dressing up in Raniere costumes.
I hope this fun trend continues.
Keith Raniere Halloween Costume
Keith Raniere Halloween Costume
Nxivm License Plate
That’s one brave driver–
One of our readers wrote, “Actually saw this car in West Hollywood last night. The license plate definitely appears just as it does in the photo with nothing in the place of the last two digits, for what that’s worth. I took a photo if it from within my car and didn’t think anything of the fact that it wasn’t centered or I would have looked up close.
Funny Meme
Not a bad photo of Judge Nicholas Garaufis.
Rosa Laura Junco and Emiliano Salinas Cartoon
LOS JUNIORS DE NXIVM
Raniere claims to have scored two million on PacMan
Look who shows up on this news clip from the 1980s — Keith Alan Raniere.
https://frankreport.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Raniere-Sequence-pacman.mp4
Highest IQ?
Thanks to Jaclyn Cangro, we finally have photos of the 1989 Australian Edition of the Guinness Book of Records where Keith Raniere’s IQ is listed.
The Guinness Book of Records 1989 — Does Keith Raniere’s IQ claim pan out?
Keith Raniere’s IQ in the Guiness Book
So we find an accomplishment that Keith Raniere claimed that appears to be true.
As a little context, I am going to republish an article I wrote in January 29, 2016, long before I broke the DOS story and when Raniere was at the top of their game. This is when he had his top enemies indicted – Barbara Bouchey, Joe O’Hara, John Tighe, Toni Natalie and myself. He must have been in heaven.
He was also suing Microsoft and AT&T for supposedly stealing his patented invention of SKYPE [He later lost that case] and had recently started DOS where the women were being branded, something I did not know at the time I wrote the story about Keith Raniere’s IQ.
I was digging around looking for anything that might discredit him, knowing that I would find something sooner or later. The 2016 headline was:
Raniere claim of super-intelligence based on little known and controversial ‘take-home’ IQ test
Here is the Jan. 2016 story:
As I mentioned in my last post, one of the most basic claims of NXIVM is that its founder, Keith Raniere, is one of the smartest people in the world. This claim is based almost entirely on a single, unsupervised test he took in the 1980’s.
This is an extremely important claim since NXIVM purports to teach people life skills and deep truths about humanity and philosophy and success. Consequently, if it is true that the leader is smarter than almost everyone else, he may know something that a student doesn’t.
If, on the other hand, the claim is bogus, then the student could ask, “what does he know that I don’t know that I should pay him?”
The super-intelligence claim is a bedrock claim of NXIVM.
The test that NXIVM uses to establish Raniere as one of the smartest men comes from the Mega Society, founded 1982. It is a so-called “High IQ society”
Its website http://www.megasociety.org.
The Mega society was founded by Ronald K. Hoeflin and it claims it is open to people who have scored at the one-in-a-million level of general intelligence on a test the society created. The Mega Society claims it is able to discriminate at that one in a million level.
The popular Guinness Book of World Records once stated in its 1989 Australian edition that the Mega Society is the most elite ultra High IQ Society with percentiles of 99.9999 or 1 in a million required for admission, but offered no independent proof of this and based it evidently on the society’s own claim.
The Guinness Book of Records did not repeat the claim in subsequent editions and has failed to mention the Mega Society in any other edition since 1989.
[In fact, Guinness retired the category of Highest IQ in 1989, the year Raniere appeared in it.]
The Mega Test was published in 1985 by Hoeflin. Some notable people have taken the Mega Test, meeting the Mega Society entrance requirements which the society has used to validate its authority to judge the super-intelligent. These prominent people include Chris Langan, author and columnist Marilyn vos Savant, mathematician Solomon W. Golomb, former governor of New Hampshire and former White House Chief of Staff, John H. Sununu, and Keith Raniere.
The problem with the Mega test is that it is a test that claims what it is without anyone else agreeing. No other professionally designed and validated IQ test claims to distinguish test-takers at a one-in-a-million level of rarity of score. The standard score range of the Stanford-Binet IQ test is 40 to 160.
The standard scores on most other currently normed IQ tests fall in the same range. A score of 160 corresponds to a rarity of about 1 person in 30,000.
The Mega claims its members achieved one in a million status or better. The test author claims the tests have been normalized using standard statistical methods.
There is controversy about whether these tests have been properly validated. Some claim the Mega test is a “nonstandardized test”.
Here’s part of the reason why: To qualify for membership in the Mega Society via the Mega Test, aspirants must earn a score corresponding to an IQ of 171 or more on a test accepted for admission by the society, although no currently normed and professionally validated IQ test yields such a score….
Another serious problem with the Mega Society test is that it accepts members [based on] untimed, unsupervised IQ tests.
[In other words, the Mega IQ test Keith Raniere took to get into the Guinness Book of Records was a take home test. He took about a month to complete it and some say he help completing it.]
It seems obvious that if the test is unsupervised … there is no guarantee that the person who claims he took the test did not get help from others or a team of people. Raniere in an interview with the Times Union said that Mega test takers are on the honor system.
At the end of the day, an objective person might require more than this to conclude Raniere is among those … with the highest intelligence.
What we have now is that Raniere took an unsupervised, take home, IQ test some 25 plus years ago, designed by a largely unaccredited, so-called IQ society with only a handful of members and a questionable method of selecting admission.
The logo of the Mega Society.
Since I published the article in 2016, I learned that Guinness decided to drop the Highest IQ category and never brought it back. According to a report, the editors realized that IQ tests, in general, are unreliable, and take-home IQ tests are especially unreliable. The editors may have learned that Raniere coopted the Mega Society, actually taking control of it for a time. He proposed changing the name of the society, as part of his plan to get his own name in Guinness. He then did his own study where he “proved” that his score on the Mega IQ test established that he was one of the top three problem solvers in the world.
He took a take-home IQ test, then did a study on the score he got on the test to prove how smart he was. One of the problems with the study is that Raniere lacked documentary evidence of comparative scores of SAT tests, so he claimed he got them orally and put the numbers in that supported his conclusion: He was one of the top three problem solvers in the world.
After including Raniere in their Australian edition, Guinness chose not to include him [or for that matter anyone] in the US or UK editions and retired the category of Highest IQ in all future editions.
Still, Raniere was able to use this mention in Guinness for almost three decades as the hallmark of his business and personal operations – from Consumers’ Buyline to Nxivm and to impress a bevy of women who were attracted to the charm of being with the smartest man in the world.
One other tidbit: After Raniere completed his take-home IQ test and turned it in to Hoefler for the Mega Society, he called a few days later and asked Hoefler if he could change one answer. To show how sloppy this all was, Hoefler let him change the answer. The result was instead of a score of 45 he got his score of 46. Had he not found out about the correct answer and had Hoefler not agreed to change it after he turned it in, Raniere would have lost out to Marylin Dos Savant and Eric Hart and could not have claimed he was the smartest man in the world.
How did he figure out the answer after he turned in his test? Maybe he had a revelation or maybe it was that he found that the entire test had been published a few years before in Omni Magazine and some people had apparently compared notes and quite possibly shared answers to some of the questions – which had been out there for years.
Viva Executive Success!
