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.
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
Rosa Laura Junco and Emiliano Salinas Cartoon
Raniere claims to have scored two million on PacMan
Look who shows up on this news clip from the 1980s — Keith Alan Raniere.
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.
So we find an accomplishment that Keith Raniere claimed that appears to be true.
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.
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!
[…] in Dec. 2019 and again in Nov. 2020 we published pictures of a Range Rover sporting the much-vaunted NXIVM vanity license […]
Whatever happened to the lady who started the auto maintenance/detailing bullshit. The company was called “KARMA”, or something equally stupid like that. Hm? I wonder where her inspiration came from naming her auto porter/maintenance company based on Keith’s initials. From what I gather, she certainly bite hard on the apple and Keith rewarded her for some hot sex in the woods.
I’d also love an update on Dawn. For the record, I always liked her and thought she was nice. I hope she has woken up. Not seeing her twerking on Friday nights must be a good sign
KAR_MA, Car Ma, as in mother of cars. Or his initials LOL
I was curious who the hell Eric Hart is. Turns out Eric Hart is a pseudonym of Christopher Langan. Apparently, Chris Langan took the test once and got 42, and then took it again and got 46. Somehow that still counted. I call BS on the whole thing.
The Raniere volleyball costumes – I am a strange mixture of amused and disturbed by those.
The 2,000,000 PacMan score I can corroborate. He would spend hours playing. For a while, we lived in an apartment across from a pizza place (the owner of the pizza place also owned the apartment building). Keith would go across the street to play PacMan. Once the owner pulled the plug on the machine and kicked Raniere out because he was tired of Keith tying up the machine and loitering in his place for so long. Man – he came home that day raging at the unfairness of it. Frankly, I wasn’t terribly impressed by his skill at PacMan – it’s meant to be a fun game, not some proof of your extraordinary ability.
As for the Rubiks cube – I have a vague recollection that Keith got a solution out of a magazine and then memorized moves. He did not solve that himself. I learned the patterns to solve the cube too at the time. Couldn’t remember it now if I tried – it just wasn’t interesting enough to me to hold that info in my head forever.
Thanks for sharing.
You jogged my memory. I remember when I was a kid in the 80, some managers/owners of arcades or pizza parlors with a few arcade games would pull the plug to erase your high score just too be dicks.
Do you believe Keith’s title of Vanguard is from the game?
Thanks
I know he played the game, so I think it is possible. But he chose that title for himself many years after I left so I can’t really say either way from my own experience.
Too funny! Love the volleyball attire parody. Absolutely perfect. So, did Keith actually work up a sweat in playing volleyball, enough to wear a headband? And, did he actually use those knee-pads the size of loaves of bread? Perhaps those present could provide some insight.
Sorry, Girl Scout Cookies. Those with knowledge of Keith playing volleyball refuse to share. It is as much of a mystery as how much soap Scott’s parents are still storing in their garage. We have people sharing memories of going against Keith in a youth Judo match. People sharing Keith piano playing stories. L just hooked us up with both Pac Man and Rubik’s cube gold. But the dozens of rat bastards who played volleyball with Keith refuse to share their glorious stories of Keith jumping out of the gym to spike Del Negro in the face – or something like that. Hell, I’d take a “Keith was good at setting the ball.” All I know is Keith didn’t like Lauren flirting with dudes during volleyball, and he looked hot in his volleyball garb.
such a darn shame Nutjob! would love to see a pic of little Keith sliding on his knees and making a spectacular dig. Oh well.
He was actually decent as a volleyball player. always the setter, never the spiker. he would challenge students by taking them as a second player on his team, versus 6 on the other. To push them to work harder. But never the spiker. Just too fucking short but wouldn’t admit it.
Thanks for sharing. Though I have a million questions, I’ll try not to scare you away.
Do you mean he’d sometimes play 2 on 6?
Did he have a jump serve?
Did people take it easy on him or go at him?
Who were the best players you saw?
Wasn’t that the test that Karen Unterreiner and Gina and Heidi Hutchinson, completed for him?
Yep
If his IQ was so high, he would have listened to his defense attorney before the verdict was announced and not started a campaign of discrediting the judiciary against that background, with such charges.
Damn. Volleyball Keith costume, that is too funny. Brilliant. I might have nightmares but that still made my day.
Meanwhile, Clare Bronfman continues to rot in MDC…
Oh yes, I almost forgot about her. Please update us, Frank!
Aren’t people tested for IQ prior to incarceration just as a security requirement? I’ve read several stories over the years about inmates who had high IQs and subsequently escaped, and disappeared for years.
Federal inmates are not administered any sort of IQ test – and I doubt very much that any State prisoners are either.
Any news of Hector still helping raise his grandchild? I hope that kid isn’t around him anymore. Something should be done if he is.
Betcha anything Keith learned the moonwalk, can say the alphabet backwards, can roller skate backwards, knows magic tricks, and can’t catch a football.
Screw it. I refuse to miss this hysterical boat, and I don’t care if Halloween has passed. I’m dressing up as Vanguard.
I’m thinking the in bed with gambling book, the dorky CBI promotional video, the prancing around Knox Woods, a redo of Keith’s bathrobe Halloween costume with the money shot fitting Cami’s description. This is gonna be awesome!
—in bed with gambling book
Sorry NutJob, but I am wearing a white bathrobe bare-assed, holding my gambling book, with my spectacles at the bridge of my nose. I even glued dog hair too my chest for the full Keith effect.
BTW: The extra chest hair is great to catch crumbs when I’m eating in bed.
The gambling book photo was priceless! Lounging in a white Walmart bathrobe with his hairy legs exposed. Looks like he was laying on a bed in cheap hotel in Vegas.
Very simple solution: see if he’ll retake a test!
Bonnie Piesse is blocked on Twitter again. Yesterday, it was not yet like that. Bonnie, you got a problem?
On the IQ test, that is one reason I first got interested in KR. It is an obscure test that he did and it was unsupervised. He probably is good at general knowledge and IQ but over-egged the pudding in letting it be suggested he is the world’s smartest man. If he were that smart, he would not have allowed any potential law violations in his activities that are actually dead easy to achieve. He and I are of similar age and I remember doing a Mensa IQ test when about aged 21 just out of curiosity. At that time, they gave you a home test first (I got 159 which is pretty high) and then had to travel to a city centre in the UK (Yes, I went as far as going that) to an examination hall with invigilators watching about 30 of us at all times and I got 152 and membership (Not that I went to any of their meetings ever).
One reason I was interested was as children our doctor father, a psychiatrist, allowed a psychologist to test our IQs as they were practising testing and I was so shy and some questions were verbal I answered I did not know to some and “just” got 120 whereas my younger sister was over 130. Our parents would not tell us the score (presumably they did not want me to think I was worse than she was) although about 5 years later I sneaked in and looked it up. Anyway, roll forward to age 21 and it seemed to matter to me and at the peak of the academic /learning stage of my life , studying law, etc., I did quite well. After she died, I found my mother’s mensa home test with results of 136 and 141 (she had two attempts) which was pretty good for being in her 50s.
[Important note… I am not the world’s smartest woman… laughing as I type]
Actually, if he was that smart, he would be watched closely by many groups, lest he discover or create something of value for national security, particularly during the rise of the computer age. If you actually read and parse his speech patterns you’ll discover he speaks poetry……; frequently starting with words like imagine, and using metaphors in unfinished sentences, to “stack” one emotion upon another, to give a “feeling” of logic in a “story universe” of his own false idealism.
I believe he is a poetic theoretician, with no foundation in reality, except the consummation of personal desire. It would be an interesting enterprise to take one of the transcripts of his conversations on this blog and re-parse it as poetry.
Cadence and rhythm are both used in hypnosis; the effect you’re referring to, his supposed use of ‘poetry,’ is a method he stole from NLP. The rest is bullshit, commonly referred to as ‘word salad.’ If you listen carefully, you’ll find he’s often not making any sense at all. It’s not poetry, although maybe it sounds rhythmic or ‘poetic’ to the ear. The best way to determine that he’s not saying anything that makes any sense is to turn off the sound, put on subtitles, and read what they say.