Aggregated News

If you want to get your name splattered all over the web, there’s nothing like recanting your once strongly held beliefs. Give a big mea culpa speech telling the world how wrong you have been, and you’ll get far more attention for your auto-rebuttal than you ever received for your original ideas. When it comes to ideological U-turns the media are like moths to a flame. (Never mind that, as Whitman said, “consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.”)

In this case, I’m talking about the recent “big news” that one-time GMO critic Mark Lynas — a Brit who at least once took direct action to rip GM trial crops out of the ground — has come out as a supporter of the technology he once abhorred. You can find write-ups about it from Andrew Revkin and Slate and the LA Times and The New Yorker’s Michael Specter. I even got an email from the folks at the No on 37 campaign (the people who successfully fought a GMO labeling referendum in California) trumpeting the news.

Here’s the opening...