Editorial: 'Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in UK NHS' - Hawking: 'UK NHS saved my life'

I agree with you in a way though, cztheday. You're rejecting God as he has been presented => very poorly by the churches. It took me til 17 years of age to come to realize and understand how messed up they were and how wrongly they had presented God to the world. The God of the Bible is real and He reveals His plans for this planet in very great detail. His is not a wispy voodoo imagination.

That's why when you insist on saying you don't believe it doesn't bother me in the least because you in your disbelief are actually following a Biblical injunction stated by John at Revelation 18 verse 4 where he tells us all to recognize the falsehood of this worldwide conglomeration religion and Get Out of her, otherwise we will share in her sins.

Totally without knowing that your great intellect immediately saw the need to get out. But, you had no knowledge about anything better to get out to. When you have time how about taking a gander at the information contained on this web page => http://www.watchtower.org/e/20060715/article_02.htm not that it will cause some instant flash of light conversion but just so you can know there is a bit more depth to the subject than anyone has likely ever told you about.

You obviously have a craving for knowing stuff. A
man isn't fully educated til he understands the Bible.

Sorry, G-man, I had to work the rest of the day so did not see that you were continuing to post. I am not sure where you came up with the idea that I don't believe in God. I count myself among the faithful. I simply said that I don't believe that He is a Hallmark Card God who speaks to me in precisely the same way my best pal might do so. To me, God manifests himself in those aspects of reality that strike me as most truthful. At least that is where I feel his presence most strongly.

I have read both the old and new testaments, cover-to-cover (OK, I tend to read rather briskly through the "begats" and the animal sacrifice stories...) twice since turning 45 three years ago. I take my faith very,very seriously. I have great respect for the faith of others but would never consider commenting about THEIR beliefs and have no interest at all in other people's notions of what I should believe. They have their experience of life and the world...and I have mine...I just have a hard time understanding how someone could be so presumptuous as to pretend to know what is best for someone ELSE'S soul...It is really rather funny when you think about it.

You always manage to shove something in deep the best you can eh? Well, if that's your "religion" I don't want any of it or your beliefs, whatever they are. Adios dude.

Oh for God's sake, Gravity_Man, I didn't SAY that you slandered Hawkings. The series of comments to which you are adding is called (as I am sure you already know) a "thread." This thread emanates from an article. While comments can and often do stray from the theme(s) of the original article, for the most part, that article is considered the touchstone of the thread. You sound like a reasonably intelligent person (though seemingly incredibly eager to demonstrate that you are a more accomplished scientist than Steven Hawkings...why that would be important for you to impart at all, let alone to me, is rather a mystery), so I suspect that nothing I just said in this response has caught you by surprise.

Why, then, do you not see that my responses to you all tie back to the original article. That article is the only reason I am contributing to this thread. Did you read the article? I am not say that you must do so...just that you are drawing conclusions about my intent that are erroneous because you appear to think my response is directed primarily at YOUR posts.

In other words, the only reason YOUR posts are referenced by MY responses is that I have been assuming that yours have been defending that original article. At the risk of sounding self-righteous I think that assumption on my part is reasonable insofar as the process I have described (Article followed by thread of responses based on the theme(s) of the article) is the process followed by 99.9% of the tens of thousands of threads stored on this site.

The article describes the continuing efforts by right-wing sleaze balls to attack the proposed health insurance reform bills currently making their way through the two houses of Congress. Specifically, the article mocks a provision in one of the bills that would require seniors facing "change of life" issues to be offered voluntary counseling with respect to matters such as Living Wills and the like.

Naturally, these nut balls are determined to instill a conspiracy at evry turn, so they decided that this was NOT the perfectly sensible provision that is already standard policy in hospitals, clinics across the country...but rather (get this, it's PRICELESS) an attempt to kill off the old and the infirm. These contemptibly cowardly conservatives then go on to say that if the Democratic proposal had been law up to now, Steven Hawkings would have been counseled to "pull the plug" on himself and would therefore have died long ago. Professor Hawking objected to this characterization of public health insurance plans, expressing his gratitude for the one in the U.K. for SAVING his life...

Again, you already know all of this from reading the article. YOUR response has been that Professor Hawking has not earned better treatment by the right wing nutcases. You claim that his accomplishments are at best pedestrian -- especially when compared to your OWN lofty accomplishments.

My response? Earning an endowed chair in mathematics at one of the most prestigious univerities in the world is, by definition, NOT a pedestrian accomplishment...even if Professor Hawkings had the full and unrestricted use of his physical body. As to YOUR accomplishments, I would be happy to hear them...but of course they are entirely irrelevant to the central issue of this thread: is Professor Hawkings justified in his refusal to simply sit still for this nonsense? Answer: yes! -- and he shoudn't have to PROVE himself any further to be accorded proper decency...

You do one great dance. I appreciate your holding back from the insults you would like to hit me with. You have judged me incorrectly by thinking my eagerness to write could be my attempt at building a taller pedestal only I can sit upon. My health insights and inventions are for raising everybody up, not myself... which if I'm not mistaken I had written you that long ago.

Yes, I understood your post was a lot towards the other posted comments. I admire Dr. Hawking a lot but I don't let his walking on hot coals turn me into a Hawking groupie either. I acknowledge him as a very insightful thinker and I can't help but wonder if he and I working together wouldn't be more than the sum of our parts.

I don't defend the overboard but I won't ignore the truth either. My son was in a class held back in school with children of various types of mental retardation and physical disabilities and he had no wheelchair under him to warrant what Hawking has received. In the 7th Grade his IQ had passed 170. Many fellow students thought he was retarded like the others so he had to carry a burden being set aside as trash by "normal" students when all the problem he had was dyslexia.

He saw how children were treated if they had a wheelchair under them. I think you're wearing blinders where Hawking's experience is concerned. As for me, I feel no need at all to engage you in a pissing contest because me and Hawking are apples and oranges. I have gifts he lacks and he has gifts I lack.

I applaud your 14 years successful struggle. I've been in a number of inherited struggles for 57 years. What I would advise you to do is let up on the pushups because you're making excess waste products that could be adding to your rheumatoid condition. I wish you the very best.

As for all this uproar about healthcare letting people swing at the end of a rope, I've already swung from that rope. Doctors began writing me off in 1993. I couldn't walk, run, do jumpin jacks because my foot had been smashed up & the toes against the shinbone and yet, somehow they decided my complaint of foot pain was all my fault (from being bipolar).

Without being able to do aerobics (walking, running) I knew a big man like me was headed for circulatory disease. I went through every one there is. I even had what's called a "fat stroke". I've spent a lot more time than you and Hawking put together dealing with people quite content to let me tumble into the grave and they came real close too. Eventually my heart would stop twice, so they did in fact cause my death.

My resting heartbeat last night was 57. I finally found the correct combination of health products mostly food & berry powders and natural oils that is apparently reversing apoptosis and lengthening my telomeres. I have no need for doctors any more.

I've been blessed to rise above doctors. I would remind everyone that the obesity epidemic happened on their watch. The heart disease epidemic happened on their watch. The medicine-approved killings of many hundreds of thousands of Americans from one-size-fits-all (not) vaccines was endorsed by doctors on their watch. When my time comes I plan to embrace it, not a d*mb*ss doctor pants leg and beg for help.

Never again buddy, never again.

My life experience is not TOTALLY foreign to that of Professor Hawking. My parents were married at age 17. Dad was a successful architect. But he had not completed his youthful "sowing" and thus at age 24 abandonned us by chasing a young lady across the country and leaving us penniless. I turned inward and read voraciously.

By the time I was 12, there was something clearly different about my intellectual development. I don't think it was a matter of greater intelligence...just that I had read SO much over the course of the previous 5 years, that my vocabulary and verbal sentence structure were a little startling...and admittedly every other class was a breeze, too.

So the school administrators gave me an extensive battery of tests. The short story version is that a few weeks later a delegation from the school came out to the dingy, broken-down trailer house (located in the middle of a horse pature) to visit my Mom. I was in the seventh grade, and they told her that neither the junior high/middle school nor the high school had anything left on their curricula that would teach me anything I didn't already know. They suggested that she enroll me as a freshman at the local unversity.

She declined, thank heavens. So they created a separate curriculum for me, and I spent almost all of my classes alone from that point forward. But I earned an Ivy-covered scholarship, then attended a good law school. I have had a very satisfactory career, I think, by taking ADVANTAGE of my gifts but not reading too much into them or deciding that I was God's special gift or the like. Just moderately lucky and bright enough (barely) to realize that leveraging that gift could pay real dividends down the road..

Interesting. Uhm, people in a wheelchair enjoy some kind of special status that magically removes them from all the stereotypes that beat the rest of us down with a stick. It seems to be a mix of pity, guilt that they're in the wheelchair not you and so on. So if you or I did what he did we wouldn't be "Stephen Hawkings". Colleagues would blast us in editorials and blogs and drag us behind a pickup truck every chance they could make time for it.

"Grasshopper", you are now beginning to grasp the small toe of wisdom. The next lesson will include the nature of humanity and the failure of humanity to see the truth! The second lesson will involve seeking truth through the cloud of human prejudices!

You mean that cloud that engulfs your head?

Yes, that would be the same cloud. I suspect the same cloud is near you, "Grasshopper".

I'm not the one that judges historical figures in an inaccurate manner....you know based on conjecture and self prattling.

wow, that's rich. so you think the Investor's Business Daily subscribers know nothing about life, the universe...

that makes sense. investors are probably just brainless demons.

You mistake them for the NYT, and LAT; when they actually DO ADMIT to a retraction.

Put the hate away, and think for a change.

Watch this:

He is a man that likes to base things on experiments and determining which is better. If he only lived one way he cannot state he got good care. He has nothing to compare it to.

----I don't know what they'll say or even if they'll show up in this thread...but that's the first thing I thought of.

Stating that you believe you were saved by a single event when you have nothing to compare that even to is nothing but conjecture, belief and faith in a situation that you only lived through ONE way.

Does he know of every story in all of the UK that need special care that are being treated well? It would be in the NHS to treat him decently for he is famous and well known. He's great PR if handled correctly.

ALL health care is a business be it national or not. PR is very important.

On a side note Huffington Post is one of the worst websites.....just because they are so one sided it is funny.

he must be right, because it's well known that we just euthanize ALS patients in this country...right?

to the point, whoever wrote that he wouldn't have been cared for in England obviously had not done his research. I have to wonder if any ordinary citizen, who is not a prize-winning physicist, would receive all the bells and whistles that Hawking has.

"Although very physically challenged, he is both mentally and emotionally extraordinary. He even jokes about the only problem with his voice synthesizer is that it gives him an American accent!"

I wonder if that means that the device was created in the USA?

could that be one of those companies that earns obscene PROFITS we must do away with?

And the American government respected Lincoln soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo much they put him on the Penny.

DUMB.

@JJ

Monetary value has nothing to do with the respect one should receive. Lincoln is on the penny - the base unit of our currency. You can't devide a penny into smaller units. I think it's very fitting that he was chosen for that coin.

When you put it like that. Clever thinking.

But he should be remembered more so than Benjamin Fraknlin....

songs sing about getting their Benjmains....could have been Lincolns.

And if anyone should be remembered more than Franklin it is the mad that created him and that was John Adams. For without Adams Ben wouldn't have spoken up as he did in congress.

I do like your suggestion, though. It works.

Lincoln was correct. The administration following his was one of the most corrupt in U.S. history. (U.S. Grant). For a fool, Lincoln was quite a prognosticator. But, of course he had an insider's knowledge of Washington. The penny is worthy of his accomplishments of nearly destroying our Nation. I look forward to the day when the penny is removed from currency due to its lack of value. He led a corrupt pack of military industrialists to nearly destroy a nation for their own benefit!

Based on what?

I've seen many historical list by historians of how was the best and the worst and Grant was never on the worst....ever. Neither was Lincoln. In fact...Lincoln is always close to number one.

JJ, number one in what? Presiding over the most American deaths in all wars.The total accumulation in U.S. deaths, in other wars, still does not exceed the deaths from the Civil conflict caused by Lincoln's failure to understand his own country's nature. General Grant ( drunkard), future President, allowed criminals including his family members to steal from the U.S. And let us not forget, he was the mastermind of the treaty's for the Western Tribes, stealing their lands and starving their people. The statue of Lincoln in D.C. should be doused in the blood of the people he was responsible for killing! That focker is number one, next to Hitler, Stalin, and the other arrogant leaders of this World!

I'm sorry that in a CIVIL WAR no one from other countries dies....I guess that has something to do with the TITLE OF THE WAR.

You don't know history or you would know that James Buchanan (a Democrat by the way) failed to heal the nation that was splintering right before his eyes. He did not stop the Civil War that was coming....he ignored it.

And so Abraham Lincoln had to deal with it.

War is something that happens. If you are really angry about deaths then you shouldn't be too pleased about the Atomic bombs, but based on your post you probably think that that was ok because they were Japanese not American.

Jammer, we really do not want to get into a discussion of Japanese deaths due the ignorance of their leaders. Very similar to the ignorance of Lincoln, which led to 600 thousand dead Americans. He was a rail splitting, populist fool that very nearly destroyed a Nation. John Wilkes Boothe was the next fool that played into the hands of Lincoln's enemies, to make Lincoln a martyr. Guess who came out on top? The industrialists benefiting from war! Things have not changed much in 150 years! We die and they profit! Ask yourself, have there been any other political martyrs, used to polarize U.S. voters?

What is your problem? War or just that the CIVIL war killed Americans?

Because that's kind of a double standard you have dancing around in that conspiracy there.

"Jammer", I have a problem with War in general, and War, specifically. Particularly, when it enriches the politically powerful, while draining the blood of our children. Lincoln is merely an icon of a political system manipulated by industrialised interests. He is not a hero, instead, an icon created to justify the brutality incorporated into Reconstruction, which has become the roots of anger, spawning the KKK, and other hate groups. His death, used by Yankees, to justify onerous laws on Southerner's, has led to the state of our country today! P.T. Barnum states that there,"is a sucker born every minute", I reserve the right not to be that sucker.

Based on what? So many historians say otherwise and you say this but it's like it's all based on bitterness.

Is that your response?

You can also add this to that response....

....if all war is as bad as you state then you can't possibly, or even logically, think Lincoln is the worst. The President that allowed Hitler to gallanting around Europe should be hated to. I mean he had the power to stop Hitler with his thumb as well as his pinky.

Clearly he saw the rise of the SEIU and ACORN. Yes they are both corporations; only corrupt, liberal and Obama backers, so they get a pass.

SEIU is a labor union.

He DID NOT get great Healthcare. He also DID NOT say he rec'd quality care, or care that could have improved his state.

Funny how you liberals never understand much beyond the surface. Well it's too easy to pretend you are right, than to actually question things and make tough decisions. That thinking is so overrated.

"I have received a large amount of high-quality treatment without which I would not have survived."

How about this thinking, actually read the quotes before you make yourself sound like a retard. It seems that in this case the liberals are following the facts and you are just making stuff up. Who's pretending? You.

Only a fool believes the NHS would have done as much for anyone else who was not Hawking.

Investor's Business Daily seems to think that Hawking wouldn't get preferential treatment, so I guess they are fools. Not to mention your own foolishness defending the indefensible blatantly obvious lie.