Reason I Like FG, Number 112:

[Catoneinutica]

[Taro Toporific]

It's not JapanProbe...Nirvana Sucktastique
[INDENT]China finds tainted Japanese soy sauce and coffee
Food inspectors in Northern China claim to have examined food imported from Japan and found dangerous levels of arsenic and copper.http://www.japanprobe.com/?p=7105[/INDENT]
And you get this response from a savant ...that's this obviously an answer to the numerous poisonings happening back in China.

Oxman's Electric Butt-n-Back Razor(tm) says it just might be greed.

[Mulboyne]

I quite like Japan Probe. James makes some good choices in his selection of news and often includes video clips from the TV news which he appears to be recording himself. However, he has tweaked it to boost his page views and, presumably, his ad revenue. It's very reasonable for him to do that, because it must be time consuming, but one side effect is the site's tendency to follow Japan Today's path in posting some deliberately controversial posts to stoke up the comments. As Catoneinutica notes, there aren't enough decent commenters to generate a quality dialogue. I had thought to lower the tone by commenting myself a while back but the site required registration which was a turn-off. However, I just noticed today that anyone can post which might also explain why there seem to be more dingbats. (I know you need to register on FG but it seems fair given that any member can start a thread rather than just comment).

[Mike Oxlong]

I do believe that's one Mr. James Hardy, a Daily Yomiuri man, over there on Japan Probe. I like the cut of his jib...

[Catoneinutica]

Mea culpa for my ill-thought-out criticism of JapanProbe. It really is one of the better news aggregators, including the video content Mulboyne references. The abject inanity of most of the comment-posters is what annoys me about it - not that my comments here are any great shakes.

And the original JP post was indeed interesting: the Chinese aren't deterred by the claims of cultural exceptionalism that Japanese gov't and industry likes to squirt around like squid ink, and which are so effective against Western trade negotiators. The Chinese seem to simply take a tit-for-tat approach, which is amusing to watch play out here in Japan.

[Mulboyne]

Mea culpa for my ill-thought-out criticism of JapanProbe. It really is one of the better news aggregators, including the video content Mulboyne references. The abject inanity of most of the comment-posters is what annoys me about it - not that my comments here are any great shakes.

I thought your description of the site was a good one and I don't pay too much attention to the comments there for that reason. The one site I really can't be bothered with is Dannychoo.com. The man himself seems decent enough and perhaps he still enjoys dancing in his stormtrooper suit but every video he makes now seems geared solely towards generating page views and ad revenue. He's never made any secret of the fact that he wants to maximize his income from running his sites so good luck to him. However, sites tend to deteriorate when they include items just to bring in traffic rather than because the site owner thinks it is intrinsically interesting.