Operation Humongous Joy and Resounding Glory!

In 2013 the US staked it's entire foreign policy on the popstar Rihanna and her Diamonds World Tour. Although I have made a point of not commenting on it recently in the hope that it will die out as a political issue the US are continuing to press ahead with it.

For example on Tuesday (29/9/15) - the the midst of the opening of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) - Rihanna performed a concert in Santiago, Chile. Apart from taking a closer look at the Atacama border dispute this was intended to pose the question of whether Rihanna has slumped from being a global superstar to a regional also ran.

Immediately afterwards Rihanna flew to COP21 host city Paris, France. Officially this was for fashion week but on Friday (2/10/15) Rihanna very nearly bumped into the leaders of France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine who were meeting in their "Normandy Four" format to discuss Ukraine's ongoing civil war. However I suspect the issue of Syria also came up.

The main effort of the operation though has been to resurrect Chris Brown's career. After all the big bad CIA might be able to keep him out of prison for beating Rihanna and others but they can't force people to buy his records.

A large part of this has involved getting other singers to feature Chris Brown on their records. That way Chris Brown gets back onto radio and TV playlists but is only in the background so you sort of forget he's there. Now that he's off the blacklist the hope is that eventually he'll be able to move out of the shadows and into the spotlight.

As it was with the original plan the UK is very supportive of these attempts to resurrect Chris Brown. Their main effort has been to donate UK popstar Rita Ora to the cause with Brown and Ora recently releasing the duet "Body On Me."

Rita Ora is a reasonably successfully and heavily backed popstar - I hesitate to use either the words; "Singer" or "Artist" - within the UK. As a result it is quite difficult for UK radio and TV stations who are much more resistant to Chris Brown then their US counterparts to refuse to play a Rita Ora record even if it does feature Chris Brown.

Although I'm not sure if anyone has said it to either of their faces before but there is a long running and rather sick joke that Rita Ora is simply a cheap Rihanna clone that the record company are keeping reserve for when Chris Brown finally beats Rihanna to death.

Throughout 2013 and beyond the US has tried to present Rihanna as a talking point about immigration reform. If you were to go down that route you would describe Rihanna as the type of highly-skilled migrant that the US should been trying to attract through reform to their greencard lottery rather then the type of low-skilled, Hispanic ballot stuffers that Obama is trying to throw America's borders open to in time for the 2016 Presidential Election.

In mean that in the sense that the record company couldn't one day tell Robyn Fenty that she's been made redundant and they've employed an American born citizen to replace her as "Rihanna The Popstar!" The presence of Rita Ora casts doubt on that assertion.

Really driving home this narrative of Rihanna meeting her replacement it's recently been announced that Rihanna will be make guest appearances on the US version of "The Voice." As it is in many other countries The Voice is really the premier singing competition of it's type in America.

However in the UK it's considered a joke and is routinely smashed in both the ratings and the sales charts by the "X-Factor." Last year Rita Ora was a judge on The Voice in the UK but this year has been promoted to being a judge on X-Factor.

Therefore to a UK audience the news that Rihanna is joining The Voice while Rita Ora is joining X-Factor sounds a lot like Rita Ora is moving up in the world while Rihanna is sinking down.

Rita Ora of course should be use to all this because her entire career has just been one overly long Eurovision Song Contest entry. For example she claims to be Kosovan but rather then accepting she is a Serbian citizen born it's southern Kosovo province she keeps talking about her Albanian roots.

The cause of her confusion seems to stem from the 1998/9 scandal over the failed impeachment of US President Bill Clinton over allegations that he lied about having sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky rather then his wife - 2016 Democrat Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

In order to distract from this scandal Bill Clinton decided to launch a 'humanitarian intervention' which saw the US lead a NATO invasion of Serbia which led to the southern province of Kosovo being snapped off from Serbia and effectively handed to Albania.

16 years later this remains a hugely controversial issue not least because it represents a complete violation of the United Nations (UN) Charter which was supposed to ensure Serbia's sovereignty and territorial integrity. To this day many UN members and even European Union (EU) nations refuse to acknowledge Kosovo as anything other then a Serbian province.

In light of the Syrian refugee crisis it has recently become even more controversial because the Greater Albania movement was not sated by the Kosovo intervention. They are currently trying to gobble up other Serbian provinces and provinces in their other neighbour Macedonia.

This already unstable situation is being unsettled further by the influx of predominately Muslim refugees into Macedonia and Serbia. The problem is that to the man in the street in those countries "Muslim" means "Albanian" and Albanian means "Thief." A massive flood of these 'thieves' into those countries could well lead to a situation like the one we've seen in the Central African Republic (CAR) since, well, 2013 and the Diamonds World Tour.

As a result there are probably many people in the EU thinking it would have been a lot easier if Bill Clinton had been prepared to take the hit.

Although the UK seems desperate to bring Chris Brown from the dead Australia - that rebellious member of the UK Commonwealth Realm - seems much less keen on the idea.

After a fortnight of speculation last Sunday (27/9/15) the Australian government served notice on Chris Brown that due to his domestic violence conviction - against Rihanna - he has been declared Persona Non Grata and is therefore banned from ever entering the country. There are still 21 days left for Brown to appeal but it looks like his career in Australia is now over.

As a result lots of people suddenly became extremely interested in tonight's match between England and Australia in the Rugby Union World Cup.

From the moment it was awarded this contest has been rigged not only to ensure that England do really well but also their obnoxious fans are the centre of attention throughout. For example Wales were forced to play their third game on Thursday (1/10/15) giving England two more days recovery time. In a sport as physical as rugby that really matters.

Therefore there was suspicion that Australia - a rugby mad nation - would be punished for it's insolence during the game. Initially we thought it would just be points shaving to deny a Australia a landslide victory but after Wales beat England last Saturday (26/9/15) there was speculation that Australia would be forced to throw the match in order to allow England to continue in the competition.

On Friday (2/10/15) Australia's Commonwealth Realm neighbour and vicious rugby rival New Zealand piped up and announced that they would be more then happy to invite Chris Brown into their country. This was seen as New Zealand throwing it's full support behind the UK's support for Chris Brown in the hope Australia would be absolutely smashed as punishment.

In Rugby Union the question isn't so much who is the favourite as; "Is there anyone out there who think of any reason they might be able to beat New Zealand's dominate team The All Blacks?!"

On Friday evening (technically Saturday morning in New Zealand) the All Blacks were playing Georgia who if England are a second tier team then Georgia are a third tier team.

In 2008 Georgia's pro-American President Mikheil Saakashvili launched a military assault on Georgia's ethnically Russian minority prompting Russia to intervene to protect them. Saakashvili's hope was that NATO would use this as an excuse to go to war with Russia and bite out a chunk of Russia territory to be handed to Georgia as happened to Serbia in 1999.

In short Saakashvili did what the US has been trying to do in Ukraine since late 2013. In fact Saakashvili is currently the Mayor of the Ukrainian province of Odessa despite being wanted in several countries for war crimes.

In Georgia Saakashvili got his calculation very badly wrong and the nation has been in international isolation ever since. However amid the anti-Russian fervour there have been moves recently to bring Georgia in from the diplomatic cold. Part of this has been there inclusion in the very soft Pool C at the Rugby World Cup.

As such New Zealand seemed to be requesting an utter punishment of Australia in return for making Georgia look good. Although they went on to win 43-10 in the first half that I watched the All Blacks were being extremely charitable.

At the UNGA the US hosted a Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) Summit. As part of this the UK and Australia set up a bit of a case study involving 15 year old boy who was convicted on Friday (2/10/15) of plotting an Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) terror attack on the ANZAC day celebrations back in April 2015. The questions of what motivated the Umpqua community college shooter also touch on this topic

However amid the Russia air-strikes against ISIL in Syria and all this rugby talk the Americans completely lost their sh*t. So during New Zealand v Georgia match the US got the US registered corporations such as McDonalds, Coca-Cola and Visa who sponsor the football World Cup to demand that FIFA President Sepp Blatter resigns.

The reason for the US campaign against FIFA is not because they want to clean up the sport - in fact most of the evidence suggests that it's US officials who've been trying to corrupt the sport.

Instead it's because the US doesn't understand the sport and therefore is unable to control its agenda which tends to be a sporting rather then politic one.

If Americans are baffled by football then Rugby Union completely overwhelms them. A large part of the reason for this is the all powerful National Football League (NFL) cartel which forces Americans to consume American Football as their national sport. So powerful is the NFL that if a game is not sold out the NFL can prevent US broadcasters from covering that game in any way, shape or form - the so-called "Blackout Rule."

As a result even sports journalists on US news networks whose job it is to understand rugby - including ones that may have been born in rugby mad nations such as South Africa and Australia - have to pretend they know absolutely nothing about this strange game that is definitely not completely superior to American Football in every way.

Somewhere underneath all of this there was actually a Rugby match between England and Australia tonight. Personally I thought Australia could have tried harder but then this match was far less important to them then it was to England. However generally I thought it was a fair game.

For example I am now obligated to use the phrase; "Mike Brown was shocked to discover that the laws (of the game) also applied to him."

In fact around 35 minutes in Australia's #7 Hooper got away with a right smash on him that certainly bordered yellow card territory. Mind you Brown's reaction didn't exactly inspire sympathy. But then on 70 minutes England's #23 got away with a wicked high-tackle/body-check on Hooper. However there was no other option then to show England's Farrell the yellow card for an off the ball body check that happened at the same time.

The big thing that annoyed me about the refereeing in the England v Wales game is that England have this tactic of collapsing the scrum by not driving forward (Google it). As with spear-tackles collapsing the scrum is a great way of turning profession rugby players into quadriplegics so I was always told that it was one of the worst sins you could commit on the rugby field.

However the referee in the Wales game disagreed and let England get away with it time and time again. The referee in this game didn't and it cost England a lot of penalty points. 

In the end Australia beat England by 33-13. As a result England become the first host nation in the history of the rugby world cup to be knocked out at the group stage and won't progress to the knock-out stage.

I'm sure you'll agree that there is absolutely nothing funny about this.

Nor is it completely hilarious that they've still got to play one more game in front of a prime time audience.

23:00 on 3/10/15 (UK date).