Operation Misery: Month 2, Week 1, Day 3.

On Monday (8/4/13) Rihanna performed at the Staples Centre in Los Angeles. Essentially Rihanna's home town concert this should have been a particularly tough test for her especially as the concert was attended by lots of Rihanna's peers and superiors in the entertainment industry such as Elton John, Christina Aguilera, Kylie Minogue, Julia Roberts, Kirsten Dunst and Selena Gomez who having also attended the San Jose concert a few days earlier now seems to be actively stalking Rihanna. Rihanna seemed to take all this in her stride arriving on stage at 21:45 to perform a strong and confident set that included her standard costume changes and the standard set-list with Act 3 (Man Down) again appearing before Act 2 (Jump).

The main political purpose of the concert was of course to convince everybody that Chris Brown and Rihanna had broken up in order to reduce the pressure for Brown's restraining order to be reinstated while promoting a discussion about the Hollywood community (John, Aquilera, Roberts etc) containing the threat posed by Chris Brown. In order to help sell this deception Brown did attend the concert but was very noticeably snubbed by Rihanna while much was made about Rihanna making a speech to the audience about her not knowing what love was about. The problem with that was that anybody who has been paying attention to the tour knows that Rihanna makes effectively the same speech at every concert as a way to introduce the song "What Now." Therefore absolutely no-one in the business was in any way fooled by this charade and many had their responses (such as yesterday's twist in the Paris Brown story) ready before the concert had even taken place. What really let her down though was Rihanna's performance. Rather then performing with the distracted depression of someone who had just gone through an emotional break-up Rihanna instead performed with the smug confidence of someone who thought they'd succeeded in pulling the wool over the world's eyes. She clearly hadn't and this was something that was commented on widely by most everybody in the business. I won't expand further because it hardly enhances Rihanna's reputation.

If Rihanna and Brown's CIA handlers needed further evidence that the game is already over it came in the embarrassing climb down they were forced to make over Rihanna's mentor Jay-Z and his wife Beyonce's recent trip to Cuba. Due to long standing trade and travel sanctions between the US and Cuba the US were hoping that this would provoke a frantic discussion about seeking permission to travel and pre-approved travel itineraries that could be used as a metaphor Chris Brown's role in the non-US legs of Rihanna's tour. On Tuesday (9/4/13) the US Treasury department were forced to confirm that they had prior knowledge of and gave permission for Jay-Z and Beyonce's trip to Cuba. The US received even worse news through their follow up operation which involved sending Joshua and Sharyn Hakken to kidnap their children from Florida before fleeing to Cuba. The intention here was to trap the Cubans into a lenghty discussion about the US/Cuba sanctions and extradition treaties that should have rivalled the almost year long case of Elian Gonzalez that took place between 1999-2000. Instead the Cubans immediately returned the Hakkens to the US with no questions asked.

On Tuesday Rihanna performed in Anaheim which is located in the wealthy Orange County of California. Again the concert was attended by LA based celebrities including Amber Rose who is the ex-girlfriend of Rihanna's friend Kanye West and current finance and mother to the child of rapper Wiz Khalifa, comedienne Kathy Griffin and singer/songwriter Miranda Cosgrove although I think that last one just wanted to enjoy the show. Rihanna's performance was slightly more subdued than the LA concert but was still strong, confident and competent. She worked through her usual costume changes and set-list although on this occasion Act 2 (Jump) and Act 3 (Man Down) appeared in their original order. Again Chris Brown attended and was noticeably snubbed and Rihanna made the same speech about love. However as this didn't work the first time around simply repeating it only further reduces its credibility.

Most crucially the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (DPRK) did not test fire their missile during Rihanna's performance. This made the US absolutely furious and they've spent most of the day now challenging the DPRK to test fire three missiles rather than just one. This naked provocation was clearly intended to assess reaction the the US' provocation of the DPRK at the G8 Foreign Ministers meeting in London. I can only hope that those ministers repeated what I said to the US last week - that is rather then wasting time provoking the DPRK they should have instead used the time ahead of Chris Brown's April 5th (5/4/13) Court appearance to have a long, hard think about what is still achievable from this operation. After all through today's recall of some 500,000 tonnes of beef in the latest twist in the horse meat scandal even the Dutch who were hoping to be among the big winners of the Rihanna operation are now saying it's dead in the water.

There has of course still been no official confirmation from the Tour promoters Live Nation of Rihanna's South African concerts. However everybody knows that they will take place at the FNB Stadium in Johannesburg (Soweto) on October 13th (13/10/13) and the Cape Town Stadium in Cape Town on October 16th (16/10/13). The reason why Live Nation are being a bit shameful in confirming these concerts might be because I've been doing some back of an envelope calculations about the cost of these concerts.

For both they're charging the equivalent of USD3 per ticket. The FNB stadium holds 94,000 people while the Cape Town Stadium holds 64,000. So although a bit of those capacities is likely to be lost through putting a stage in assuming a full sell-out the gross receipt from the Johannesburg concert will be USD282,000 while the gross receipt from the Cape Town concert will be USD192,000. Obviously a percentage of this money will go straight to the stadiums themselves to meet their overheads such as staffing costs and electricity. I don't know the exactly details of the deals so I'll make a conservative estimate of 15%. This gives a net figure of USD239,700 for Johannesburg and USD163,200 for Cape Town or combined figure of USD402,900. From that you've got to deduct a further 5% for staff wages and other costs such as accomadation leaving a total of USD382,755. Then you've got the cost of transporting the tour equipment from New Zealand to South Africa. As they're intending to do this in 4 days this means flying and with a 10 truck caravan this mean chartering at least 1 C-17 type transport aircraft which have a fuel economy of around 0.12km/g. With jet fuel costing around USD5 per gallon and the distance between New Zealand being around 12,000km this means it will cost roughly USD500,000 in fuel alone simply to get the tour to South Africa. Therefore from Rihanna's perspective the only good thing I can say about the South African leg is that it will help convince the Inland Revenue Service (IRS) that she can indeed go on an 8 month sell-ot world tour and still make a loss.

Rihanna's CIA handlers true purpose in sending her to South Africa is of course to trick the South Africans into sending troops to Mali in the hope that they can use the privilege of inspecting Rihanna first hand to gain a competitive advantage over their African neighbours. This looks like it's going to be even less successful because due to recent events in the Central African Republic (CAR) there is now very strong opposition in South Africa to sending their troops anywhere. As a result the US Defence Department today ended up throwing the diplomatic equivalent of a very large tantrum accusing the Economic  Community of West African States (ECOWAS) of being incompetent and not doing enough to help in Mali. Hopefully when then Pentagon has calmed down a bit they'll come to terms with the fact they can either keep Chris Brown out of prison or they can have an international force to fight the Islamists in Mali. They simply cannot have both.

22:30 on 10/4/13.