Events

The Welsh institute of town planners has awarded its top prize to a newly built off-grid home. Meanwhile Welsh planners decline applications from hundreds of off-grid projects every year.

the house at Maes Yr Onn’s has won the 2013 Wales Planning Award organised by RTPI Cymru. Chris Fray, chair of the judging panel, said: “Maes yr Onn Farm Off-Grid Living is already being hailed as an exemplar of sustainable building excellence.”

The new home of farmer Arthur Davies and his family is self sufficient, sustainable and completely off the grid.

San Diego Permaculture and the Sky Mountain Institute will host the 2013 San Diego Permaculture Convergence, Nov. 9-10, aimed at showing how to harvest rainwater using simple structures.

The event will feature talks and hands-on demonstrations about rainwater and gray-water harvesting, aquaponics, building a chicken coop, organic gardening, urban goat-keeping, rocket stoves, growing shiitake mushrooms on oak logs and creating “food forests.”

Family “living the dream” want to exchange their freedom for stonking electricity bill

There is a moment on the Discovery Channel’s new reality show, “Naked and Afraid,” when Alison Teal and the survivalist ex-Marine she was paired with see their camera crew in a whole new light.

Teal, a globe-trotting filmmaker from South Kona, and L.A. bodyguard Jonathan Klay were struggling. The show drops participants in far-flung locations — in this case the Maldives — for a 21-day survival test without food, water or clothing. When it gets that rugged, nudity ceases to be a concern, replaced by the urgent need to find food.

Wales has been saying for years that it wants more environemntally freindly buildings – trouble is they keep on rejecting the planning applictions made for such homes.

Now a Welsh Government Minister has finally give=n the green light to a farmer’s new eco-home. The state-of-the-art farmhouse got the stamp of approval by the Minister for Natural Resources and Food, Alun Davies. It had been initially opposed by Caerphilly council, but they were forced to go ahead by the Welsh national government.

Farmer Arthur Davies (no relation) and his family, are moving into Maes Yr Onn, Manmoel.He has “taken our dream of living at the farm and transformed it into reality,” he said.

The Bilderberg Group (meeting in the UK currently) operated completely in secret for two decades after it was founded in 1954, bringing together the most powerful corporate bosses with leading Western politicians and bankers to advance their common agenda. A partial list of attenders is at the end of this article. It was largely a US-European cabal and had unrivalled power until the 1980s. It was managed out of the New York offices of Kroll Associates, a particularly well-connected private Detective agency.

Former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher went there to be briefed on Monetarism from its founder Milton Friedman, and introduced the policy into the UK, along with deregulation of the banks, much favored by Bilderberg’s leaders from the world’s biggest banking, insurance and manufacturing groups.

So what will they be discussing this year?

X Men star Ellen Page is co-star opposite Arbitrage actress Brit Marling in new espionage thriller The East, which was produced and co-written by 29-year-old Brit.
Speaking at the Los Angeles premiere of the movie, which also stars True Blood hunk Alexander Skarsgard, Ellen said The East, focuses on an anarchist group known for executing covert attacks on major corporations. “These issues were something I was already interested in. The ethical murkiness is very compelling because that is what life is right now, it’s hard to know how to be alive, how to make the right choices when we see the injustice in the world and the atrocities committed by corporations in the name of profit,” she said.