… when she blogged about a British hypnotist who’d graduated from the notorious diploma mill, La Salle University. When the Daily Mail pointed out his bogus degree, the hypnotist successfully sued the newspaper and received a very large sum of money.

Mr Justice Eady, who heard the case without a jury, said he could not accept that the newspaper had discharged the burden of proving that the sting of the words complained of was substantially true.

Huh? La Salle’s bogosity is easily discovered; the paper said nothing that wasn’t true. How could this have happened?

And now there’s the Simon Singh thing. Singh said nothing that wasn’t true of chiropractors, but their organization sued him for libel anyway. And they might win, because it’s England, land of loony libel laws.

There’s now a Libel Reform Campaign in England, acting in support of Singh and for reform of the libel laws.

UD, a signer of the Libel Reform petition, received from them an email about an event she’d love to attend but can’t. If you can go, go to the “Houses of Parliament next Tuesday, 23 March, for a mass meeting with MPs to convince them to commit to libel reform.”

The Libel Reform Campaign has booked Committee Room 15 at Parliament, and MPs know that we’re coming. Please, if you can, come and join us. Simon Singh will be joining us to tell MPs about the real effect of our libel laws.

The political parties are on the verge of signing up to once in a generation reform of our libel laws. But we don’t have them signed up yet. This is our last chance to lobby parliamentarians before the general election.

Social critics, inside and outside of universities, can’t function – as Singh himself explains – if they’re afraid of being sued for telling the truth.

I mean, imagine if Freehold New Jersey’s James Wasser had been able, after taking money from the school district to pay for his diploma mill degree, to sue the system – shaking it down for yet more money – when it named him as a bogus degree holder. That’s England today.