OmegaRacer

52 minutes ago, Neeranam said:

Interesting. Are the soldiers held at gunpoint to join the army?

This is a war and drastic measures ensue. I urge all hotel owners and other business owners to ban Russians. 

The world is a little more complicated than that. 
Don't let your emotions cloud your judgement.

41 minutes ago, ConnectionNotGuaranteed said:

That's really why I'm asking if there is a way to do it, before I actually purchase one. If or instance it's possible and only cost about 10,000 baht I'd be prepared to go through the hassle as I'd have a nice little project that I would do to my taste. Thanks for the link though, definitely consider that option.

I'm not saying it's impossible (everything here is possible with the right connections and money), but I highly doubt you can do it for 10k. I don't know how it is with Vespas, but for other vintage bikes (old Honda CB's and Yamaha SR's), books start at 30-35k.
It also depends where you intend on riding. No book in Bkk or Pattaya is a big NO, but if you live somewhere in the countryside, that's different.
Good luck with your project.

I wouldn't. Why putting in the money and work, only to have a big headache and hassle trying to register it?

There are many Vespas in all kinds of conditions for sale that have a legal green book. 

Check out Pong Motor on FB (https://www.facebook.com/PongMotorKhlassikh). They have Italian and Indian Vespas for sale, with and without books.

Aren't these India made Vespas?
And if so, do they come with a green book?

41 minutes ago, Andy from Kent said:

I sent an  article from a New Zealand newspaper to a friend with whom I'd worked  for  a dozen years.     I know he's religious and the article was I thought void of politics and  or anything  controversial.

 

He sent back this reply to me:

 

"Hi XXXX, in this world, even though I turned my back to it and my Lord and Savior for nearly ten years, this is the only real truth, the only news and truth that matters in the end. My prayer is for you to receive the free gift of a merciful ,gracious and loving Savior! When one receives true forgiveness from sin, by realizing that “all” have sinned and asking forgiveness,expressing true  repentance and believing In Christ, can one have true Peace, and a Biblical understanding of what is happening today! 

I am seriously hoping and praying  that your heart and mind are ready to accept this free gift of “eternal life” of joy and happiness—the alternative is “eternal life “ of  never ending suffering !

Well  XXXX,  that’s my true feeling of this world’s news reporting! “

I find his attitude unfortunate and uncaring for others.

 

I wonder how some religions convince followers that their's is the one and only true religion?    That remains a mystery to me.

 

I'm convinced he meant well, but I can't share his belief at all.

Eternal life is a given, your true condition, whether you believe in it or in Jesus or the bible or whatever else, or don't have any spiritual beliefs at all. Suffering is not realizing this simple fact. To identify with the body, with the ego, to believe you're limited, to walk through life not knowing that you really are an eternal spark of the Divine pretending to be human....that the true suffering. Thankfully, this suffering can be overcome.

Found this on Quora and found it relevant to the discussion:

 

What are the logical / scientific reasons to believe in the existence of God?

There are a few logical reasons, some with scientific bases, to believe in the existence of God. Here are some of them:

1.    The fine tuning of the universe to our existence. This is what convinced Anthony Flew, perhaps the leading atheist thinker of the second half of the 20th century, to decide that he was wrong and God exists. The argument is that somewhere between six and a dozen constants of nature are so finely tuned for our existence that random processes cannot account for it. (We are talking about probabilities of one divided by ten to a power of hundreds or even thousands of digits.) The counter argument is the infinite multiverse with an infinite number of local bubbles. If you get an infinite number of shots at even the lowest probability event, the event will happen an infinite number of times. The evidence for a multiverse is very thin, but not zero.

2.    Human consciousness. Truth is we don’t have a clue as to what human consciousness is. The mechanical electro-chemical explanations are not very convincing. How does a chemical moving across a synapse in some kind of energy exchange create a thought? If I hold two wires connected to a battery near one another and get a spark between them, did I just create a “thought?” Doesn’t feel like I did. Maybe human consciousness is on a higher level than science. The counterargument is that thought is just the whirring of the brain’s machinery and has no reality independent of the whirring. One of the most prominent atheists or our times, Daniel Dennett - a member of the so called Four Horseman of New Atheism, was so troubled by the problem of human consciousness that he insisted that it does not actually exist and that thinking is just an illusion. What do you think about Dennett’s counterargument? Oh wait, if he is right you don’t think at all.

3.    The mathematical structure of the universe and our ability to understand it. The equations that govern everything in the universe can be written in longhand on two 8 1/2 x 11 inch pieces of paper. Why is the universe so ordered and mathematical? There is no fundamental reason for this. It could just as easily be chaotic at a profound level if there is no purpose to the order. Princeton professor Eugene Wigner ranks among the important physicists of the twentieth century, winning the Nobel prize in 1963. He wrote a frequently noted 1960 article on “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.” Speaking bluntly and candidly, Wigner acknowledged that the mathematical foundations of the natural world are a true “miracle” that lies outside any scientific understanding itself. Indeed, as he further explained, it seemed to him that there are actually “two miracles,” first the very “existence of [mathematical] laws of nature” and a second miracle “of the human mind’s capacity to divine them.” Wigner thus considered as implausible any suggestion that the electrical and chemical workings of the physical brains of human beings could have created the complex abstractions—themselves lacking any physical reality—of higher mathematics of the kind routinely used by physicists. Why is the human mind that evolved to be good at calculating the trajectory of spears being thrown at mammoths able to grasp everything from the Planck length (the incredibly smallest possible sub-atomic distance in physics) to our Big Bang-produced universe that is probably 156 billion light years across (including the bigger region beyond the light horizon)? Jesus said to love God not only with our hearts but with our minds. Maybe God is a mathematician and our ability to understand his math is what “in his image means.” The counterargument is we were just lucky that the universe randomly turned out to be mathematically ordered because if it hadn’t we wouldn’t be here to contemplate it and our ability to understand it is the result of a long series of random beneficial DNA mutations that while not helping us to down mammoths, didn’t hurt our ability to do so.

4.    Human conscience. The argument is that human beings in every culture throughout history have felt the desire to behave well and do the right thing toward other human beings. Cruelty and wanton self-interest are viewed as aberrations, even being deemed a mental illness (sociopathic behavior). Most cultures, no matter how separated in time and space from ancient Judaism, have moral codes that overlap significantly with the Ten Commandments. Why are all human beings drawn to similar standards of good behavior? The famous mathematician, Blaise Pascal, first referred to this concept as an abyss in the heart that can only be filled with God. (Modern writers have rephrased this to be the “God shaped hole in our hearts.”) The counterargument is that human conscience evolved because benevolent societies had a reproduction and survival advantage over more self-centered societies.

Atheists holding to the current views of the state of physics believe that all of observable reality is the result of an initial random fluctuation in the pre-Big Bang vacuum energy that led to a multiverse that spawned our local Big Bang in a process that randomly determined the constants of nature in the resulting local bubble which along with early random quantum particle fluctuations necessary to seed star formation in the early plasma after the Big Bang led to a chaotic process of particle collisions cascading through billions of years that created everything we are and see. As Rupert Sheldrake famously said in his book the Science Delusion, “Give us one free miracle and we will explain the rest.”

Believers hold the view that God had a purpose in creating the universe and us, however it was he went about it including possibly every law, constant, and event in the current views of physics and biology, and we should learn that purpose to the best of our abilities.

Both positions are positions of faith. You can’t prove either one is right. Two different people, both rational and well-meaning, can look at the arguments and counterarguments above and come to different conclusions.

Longing seems to permeate the debate. Longing colors everyone’s perceptions of the evidence. Atheists long for the intellectual and moral freedom that they interpret a universe with no creator gives them. Then they try to bravely accept the attendant purposelessness that would characterize human life. Believers long for a universe in which our lives count for something.

So it boils down to this: what do you long for?
(Answer by David Seuss)

SR400FI (after 2010) can be bought 2nd hand for around 170-180k, legally. 
If you prefer the carbureted model (pre-2010), there are thousands of them for sale. 99% of them without book and a few of them with book, but with various degrees of legitimacy. Bikes without books go from 40k to 70k. If you're lucky to find one with a decent book, 90k - 100k. 
You can ride an SR without book (many still do, with invoice), but it's just not worth the hassle anymore, so I would not recommend it.

Here is mine...1998 SR400 WITH green book. ???? 

http://www.pipeburn.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/11_07_2016_Yamaha_SR400_Omega_Racer_Sunmaster_01_large.jpg

Personally I don't spend that much I think (my wife would disagree though ????), but my business supports several Thai businesses. If contributing to the Thai economy were a criteria for getting a visa, I would probably deserve it easily. 

10 minutes ago, VincentRJ said:

The meditators feel that they have touched infinity.

What's wrong with touching infinity?? ????

8 minutes ago, VincentRJ said:

"A recent study that Medical News Today reported on, found that religion activates the same reward-processing brain circuits as sex, drugs, and other addictive activities."
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/322539

Religion is the outer manifestation of spirituality. Not the topic discussed here.

8 minutes ago, VincentRJ said:

"What Andrew B. Newberg and others discovered is that intensely focused spiritual contemplation triggers an alteration in the activity of the brain that leads one to perceive transcendent religious experiences as solid, tangible reality."

 

"If you block sensory inputs to this region, as you do during the intense concentration of meditation, you prevent the brain from forming the distinction between self and not-self," says Newberg. With no information from the senses arriving, the left orientation area cannot find any boundary between the self and the world. As a result, the brain seems to have no choice but "to perceive the self as endless and intimately interwoven with everyone and everything." "The right orientation area, equally bereft of sensory data, defaults to a feeling of infinite space. The meditators feel that they have touched infinity."
 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_religion#:~:text=The neuroscience of religion%2C also,hypotheses to explain these phenomena

This is indeed interesting and already closer to the point. 
Not sure why you think this should not be flattering. Do you think this "discovery" negates what spiritual practitioners experience?

Hi

I set up my company 2 years ago. I used DLW accounting firm based in Bkk who were very helpful and assisted me throughout the whole process and are still doing my accounting. They speak English.

https://dlwthailand.com/

I follow every race (subscribed to motoGP.com). Not a fan of anyone in particular, but I dislike that one guy who ruined the 2015 season. I'm happy when Ducatis win, even better when there's an Italian riding it.

54 minutes ago, Surelynot said:

Word salad....

That flew right over your head, didn't it? ????

Unless they will change it this year (which I highly doubt), all other years the entrance has been free.

This is where you go off the main road and enter the park.

Here they will just let all the bikes go through. NO NEED TO PAY and no dual pricing.

5 hours ago, mauGR1 said:

Well, Ramana Maharshi was considered one of the greatest masters even by Swami Yogananda, I can only accept his truth with reverence.

Yet, personally I have to admit that I'm still at the stage of re- shaping my various egos, and it will take a lot of work before i can finally transcend what is perhaps the last illusion which exists after all other illusions have been transcended.

Thanks by the way for the good effort you put in stimulating the discussion, i could say more, and the same is for you, i guess, but meditating and visualising the shape and the various aspects of our own ego is already some achievement !

Bloody hell, how many egos do you have??

5 hours ago, Kerryd said:

Actually I was thinking that if it were held somewhere in/around Kanchanaburi itself, they might get a better turn out.

By chance does that "beautiful national park" practise double pricing like many others do ?

No, free entrance to the park, but I think about 100Baht to park inside the meeting place.