All right, here we go.

Ladies and gentlemen and assorted other, today I will be starting what I hope to be a series of blogs listing and explaining the Wizard's Rules, as created by Terry Goodkind.

These are not laws, and should not be confused with laws. They are, however extremely powerful when one knows how to use them.

The Wizard's First rule is... People are stupid. They will believe any lie, either because they wish it to be true, or because they are afraid it is true.

People are stupid; given proper motivation, almost anyone will believe almost anything. Because people are stupid, they will believe a lie because they want to believe it's true, or because they are afraid it might be true. People’s heads are full of knowledge, facts, and beliefs, and most of it is false, yet they think it's all true. People are stupid; they can only rarely tell the difference between a lie and the truth, and yet they are confident they can, and so are all the easier to fool.

For example: Several years ago for April fool's day my girlfriend convinced me to help her play a joke on her father. We went over to her house and sat him down on the couch, saying we had something important to tell him.

My girlfriend, bless her evil little heart, said with a perfectly strait face, "Dad, I'm pregnant."

The poor man almost had a heart attack before we could calm him down and tell him it was a joke.

Here is the point. Her father knew it was April fool's day. He knew she would prank him. (She gets him every year.) He was suspicious when we told him we had something to say to him. But for all of that, he still went into shock upon hearing his daughter say she was pregnant.

He believed it was true, because he was afraid it was true.