Does that make you an "equal opportunity discriminator"? I like it!

I do find Xenophobia to be its own reward. ;-)

Don't tell me that was Scorpie he was talking to!

Hmm, perhaps Aeryn ended up in Crichton's head too at one time or another. It has been too long!

It gets even funnier. That "~ski" ending of the family names is actually Polish, not Russian. Pole-ish, get it?

No, it cannot be said.
Certainly not about English, because it would mean that a majority of English speaking population would usually talk mostly using words from a closely related language - that would be what, Frisian? - with English accent and grammar.

That might maybe happen in Scotland, where English and Scots might intermix in this way, but this kind of speaking is far from majority.

It certainly is not the way here in Germany, people won't, for example, speak Dutch using German grammar and accent. They either speak Niederdeutsch or standard German. They might speak more or less in a dialect, but a dialect is not a language, Ukrainian is certainly not just a Russian dialect, they are several grammatical differences like the vocative case which Russian lost half a century ago.

It doesn't work for Russian at all, Russians don't usually mix their language with other closely related languages. Only when they try to learn that closely related language as a foreign language this might happen.

It can come out this way in former Yugoslavia, because the language there is mostly a dialect continuum and the languages are really only separated for political reasons - with the exception of Slovenian (which lies between South and West Slavic languages, that is between, say, Slovak, and Croatian) and Macedonian (which is closer to Bulgarian).

Slavic languages are a hobby of mine so I do know a lot about them and can speak several.

Am I?

Economic theories are not falsifiable, economic theories assume a human model (homo oeconomicus) that has nothing in common with real humans. Economists don't use scientific methods for experiments. Either you can't see it because you are an economist and was brainwashed to believe that economics is a science or you are misguided by applied mathematics used by them.

Windows 7, Cyberlink PowerDVD 13.

The English say yes, the French oui, the Germans ja, the Spanish si, the Russians da, the Japanese hai, the Portugese sim, the Polish tak... is there a value to this?

In fact there is. Because the apparently simple concepts you have listed are not quite the same. Polish "tak" comes, in fact, from the same protoslavic word that means "so (it is)" which exists in every Slavic language in the same or nearly the same form (tak, tako, taka), so a Croat or a Russian or a Czech would understand it as a kind of a confirmation, but other Slavic languages use a different word for a simple affirmation. Czech and Slovak use "ano", which comes, I think, from the protoslavic "that one" and all the rest uses a form of "da", which comes from a protoslavic word meaning something like "in order to". Matter of fact, ancient Czech and Polish had "da" as well, it just fell out of use.

You can already see, I love Slavic languages.

Japanese "hai" doesn't necessarily mean "yes". It often means "I hear you" or "I understand what you are saying".

Well, a lot of experts took classes about economics. And still these experts fail to predict economic downturns and after that fail to do anything substantial about them.
Economics is a science about the same way astrology is a science. It uses math, sure, but at its core there is just a set of beliefs.

Just yesterday I've tried to watch a Pink Floyd "The Endless River" bluray I've bought the other day on my PC - I don't have a TV or a stand alone bluray player. I was not able to get it to work thanks to the bloody DRM.
This crap encourages pirating instead of buying.

Very much so. I work for a company that employs people that came from 20 different countries. Not a single one of them speaks Spanish.

Many people say that they speak Ukrainian. Most of them speak either an ugly mongrel of Russian vocabulary with Ukrainian grammar and pronunciation or an ugly mongrel of Polish vocabulary with Ukrainian grammar and pronunciation.

I wish that if they use that kind of a mixed language, they'd use Czech words instead of Polish ones - they are far less ugly and closer in phonetics.

Lack of agricultural knowledge. There's a reason it's a waste-land.

Yes, and agricultural mismanagement is one of the reasons. Desert reforestation is important.

What utter stupidity. There are damned practical reasons that cities grow up where they do, and positing crap like "more equable distribution of the population" denies those realities.

You forget one important thing - perhaps you live in a country that was settled not too long ago - there were practical reasons that cities grew up where they did many centuries ago. These reasons might not be valid nowadays. In fact, that more equable distribution of the population over the country is what has happened in Germany during the late 20th century.

How many Soviets fought in the Pacific campaigns, such as Okinawa, Tarawa, the Philippines, and Iwo Jima?

Well, how many Americans fought the Japanese in Manchuria?
How many Americans fought in Yugoslavia?

Did any Soviet armies fight in Africa, the Middle East, or Italy?

You mean the battles that were barely a blip on the radar compared to what happened on the Eastern front? But yes, matter of fact, USSR and UK invaded Iran together.

How big was their strategic bombing campaign against Germany?

Large enough. USSR has started bombing Berlin two weeks after it entered WW2. Two years earlier than the Americans that were - as 20 years earlier - quite late to the party. You didn't know that?

Did you know that 30-40% of the heavy tanks helping to defend Moscow at the Battle of Moscow in 1941 were Lend Lease material?

Which was paid for in gold and for decades after the war. That was just business, nothing more.

Crusades are easy, that would be a response to 100 years of Muslim rape, slaughter, and forced conversion in Spain.

Eh, never knew that Novgorod was muslim and in Spain. Or Prague, for that matter. Maybe Latvia? No?

Bullshit. The pope has started crusades on the (christian) Czechs for five bloody times.