Ah, the Shame, the Shame, or, Judged by the Company We Keep (I Think)

Today in Helsinki:
a cold shoulder of comfort: sheets of sleet for the heavy of heart,
abysmal weather complete with every type of unpleasantness: sleet, hailstones, torrential sub-zero rain,
half an hour delays on the buses*, due to the OSCE meeting of European foreign ministers,
and while we're attempting brokering a deal of some sort on European security,
yesterday also saw us amongst the handful of nations not signing the international treaty banning cluster weapons - alongside the United States, Russia, Israel, China (and a freakish Poland) - all the well-known peacebrokerniks, in fact. Cluster weapons are considered to be (allow me to quote the Prime Minister) "such a significant part of Finland’s defence". Against whom, one may wonder. Surely not one of our fellow clusterniks, the one to the right of us, on the map? Sorry but I fail to see the point. I'm not politically knowledgable, even less so militarily, but I'd bet quite a lot that, well, no matter how big ours are, they've got bigger clusters than we do, so we could at the very least keep a moral high ground. Or am I not seeing the point, somehow?

This concludes tonight's update from this Northern nook, this Arctic cranny. Night night.

*(and we realise half an hour doesn't sound like much, but when you're used to trusting the timetables, it's an age, trust me)