Much to my surprise I recently came across an article about 9/11 in the online edition of the right-wing newspaper, The Washington Times. It is entitled “Explosive News” Inside the Beltway–Washington Times about the 1,000 architects and engineers who are publicly questioning the official explanation for how three World Trade Center Buildings literally became dust (to this day, many don’t even know there was a third building). Also, recently released aerial photographs of the World Trade Center site show everything becoming dust, including the steel beams. A majority of the members of the official Bush-appointed 9/11 Commission, including the two co-chairs and the Commission attorney, have said that their own report was bogus because they had been lied to and information had been withheld from them throughout the entire investigation. You don’t have to believe all the alternative theories of what took place that day but, if after reading this article by Paul Craig Roberts (a former Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury and a former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal) you do not crave to know the truth and insist on a real investigation, then I pity your level of willful denial. Read the full article below:
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The Road to Armageddon
by Paul Craig Roberts for OpEdNews:
The Washington Times is a newspaper that looks with favor upon the Bush/Cheney/Obama/neocon wars of aggression in the Middle East and favors making terrorists pay for 9/11. Therefore, I was surprised to learn on February 24 that the most popular story on the paper’s website for the past three days was the “Inside the Beltway” report, “Explosive News,” about the 31 press conferences in cities in the US and abroad on February 19 held by Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, an organization of professionals which now has 1,000 members.
I was even more surprised that the news report treated the press conference seriously.How did three World Trade Center skyscrapers suddenly disintegrate into fine dust? How did massive steel beams in three skyscrapers suddenly fail as a result of short-lived, isolated, and low temperature fires? “A thousand architects and engineers want to know, and are calling on Congress to order a new investigation into the destruction of the Twin Towers and Building 7,” reports the Washington Times.
flickr image by wallyg
The paper reports that the architects and engineers have concluded that the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the National Institute of Standards and Technology provided “insufficient, contradictory and fraudulent accounts of the circumstances of the towers’ destruction” and are “calling for a grand jury investigation of NIST officials.”
The newspaper reports that Richard Gage, the spokesperson for the architects and engineers said: “Government officials will be notified that “Misprision of Treason,’ U.S. Code 18 (Sec. 2382) is a serious federal offense, which requires those with evidence of treason to act. The implications are enormous and may have profound impact on the forthcoming Khalid Sheik Mohammed trial.”
There is now an organization, Firefighters for 9/11 Truth. At the main press conference in San Francisco, Eric Lawyer,the head of that organization, announced the firefighters’ support for the architects and engineers’ demands. He reported that no forensic investigation was made of the fires that are alleged to have destroyed the three buildings and that this failure constitutes a crime.
Mandated procedures were not followed, and instead of being preserved and investigated, the crime scene was destroyed. He also reported that there are more than one hundred first responders who heard and experienced explosions and that there is radio, audio and video evidence of explosions.
Also at the press conference, physicist Steven Jones presented the evidence of nano-thermite in the residue of the WTC buildings found by an international panel of scientists led by University of Copenhagen nano-chemist Professor Niels Harrit. Nano-thermite is a high-tech explosive/pyrotechnic capable of instantly melting steel girders.
Before we yell “conspiracy theory,” we should be aware that the architects, engineers, firefighters, and scientists offer no theory. They provide evidence that challenges the official theory. This evidence is not going to go away.
If expressing doubts or reservations about the official story in the 9/11 Commission Report makes a person a conspiracy theory kook, then we have to include both co-chairmen of the 9/11 Commission and the Commission’s legal counsel, all of whom have written books in which they clearly state that they were lied to by government officials when they conducted their investigation, or, rather, when they presided over the investigation conducted by executive director Philip Zelikow, a member of President George W. Bush’s transition team and Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and a co-author of Bush Secretary of State Condi “Mushroom Cloud” Rice.
There will always be Americans who will believe whatever the government tells them no matter how many times they know the government has lied to them. Despite expensive wars that threaten Social Security and Medicare, wars based on non-existent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, non-existent Saddam Hussein connections to al Qaida, non-existent Afghan participation in the 9/11 attacks, and the non-existent Iranian nukes that are being hyped as the reason for the next American war of aggression in the Middle East, more than half of the U.S. population still believes the fantastic story that the government has told them about 9/11, a Muslim conspiracy that outwitted the entire Western world.
Moreover, it doesn’t matter to these Americans how often the government changes its story. For example, Americans first heard of Osama bin Laden because the Bush regime pinned the 9/11 attacks on him. Over the years video after video was served up to the gullible American public of bin Laden’s pronouncements. Experts dismissed the videos as fakes, but Americans remained their gullible selves. Then suddenly last year a new 9/11 “mastermind” emerged to take bin Laden’s place, the captive Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the detainee waterboarded 183 times until he confessed to masterminding the 9/11 attack.
In the Middle Ages confessions extracted by torture constituted evidence, but self-incrimination has been a no-no in the U.S. legal system since our founding. But with the Bush regime and the Republican federal judges, whom we were assured would defend the U.S. Constitution, the self-incrimination of Sheik Mohammed stands today as the only evidence the U.S. government has that Muslim terrorists pulled off 9/11.
If a person considers the feats attributed to Khalid Sheik Mohammed, they are simply unbelievable. Sheik Mohammed is a more brilliant, capable superhero than V in the fantasy movie, “V for Vendetta.” Sheik Mohammed outwitted all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies along with those of all U.S. allies or puppets, including Israel’s Mossad. No intelligence service on earth, or all of them combined, was a match for Sheik Mohammed.
Sheik Mohammed outwitted the U.S. National Security Council, Dick Cheney, the Pentagon, the State Department, NORAD, the U.S. Air Force, and Air Traffic Control. He caused Airport Security to fail four times in one morning. He caused the state-of-the-art air defenses of the Pentagon to fail, allowing a hijacked airliner, which was off course all morning while the U.S. Air Force, for the first time in history, was unable to get aloft intercepter aircraft, to crash into the Pentagon.
Sheik Mohammed was able to perform these feats with unqualified pilots.
Sheik Mohammed, even as a waterboarded detainee, has managed to prevent the FBI from releasing the many confiscated videos that would show, according to the official story, the hijacked airliner hitting the Penagon.
How naive do you have to be to believe that any human, or for that matter Hollywood fantasy character, is this powerful and capable?
If Sheik Mohammed has these superhuman capabilities, how did the incompetent Americans catch him? This guy is a patsy tortured into confession in order to keep the American naifs believing the government’s conspiracy theory.
What is going on here is that the U.S. government has to bring the 9/11 mystery to an end. The government must put on trial and convict a culprit so that it can close the case before it explodes. Anyone waterboarded 183 times would confess to anything.
The U.S. government has responded to the evidence being arrayed against its outlandish 9/11 conspiracy theory by redefining the war on terror from external to internal enemies. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said on February 21 that American extremists are now as big a concern as international terrorists. Extremists, of course, are people who get in the way of the government’s agenda, such as the 1,000 Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth. The group used to be 100, now it is 1,000. What if it becomes 10,000?
Cass Sunstein, an Obama regime official, has a solution for the 9/11 skeptics: Infiltrate them and provoke them into statements and actions that can be used to discredit or to arrest them. But get rid of them at all cost.
Why employ such extreme measures against alleged kooks if they only provide entertainment and laughs? Is the government worried that they are on to something?
Instead, why doesn’t the U.S. government simply confront the evidence that is presented and answer it?
If the architects, engineers, firefighters, and scientists are merely kooks, it would be a simple matter to acknowledge their evidence and refute it. Why is it necessary to infiltrate them with police agents and to set them up?
Many Americans would reply that “their” government would never even dream of killing Americans by hijacking airliners and destroying buildings in order to advance a government agenda. But on February 3, National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair told the House Intelligence Committee that the U.S. government can assassinate its own citizens when they are overseas. No arrest, trial, or conviction of a capital crime is necessary. Just straight out murder.
Obviously, if the U.S. government can murder its citizens abroad it can murder them at home, and has done so. For example, 100 Branch Davidians were murdered in Waco, Texas, by the Clinton administration for no legitimate reason. The government just decided to use its power knowing that it could get away with it, which it did.
Americans who think “their” government is some kind of morally pure operation would do well to familiarize themselves with Operation Northwoods. Operation Northwoods was a plot drawn up by the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff for the CIA to commit acts of terrorism in American cities and fabricate evidence blaming Castro so that the U.S. could gain domestic and international support for regime change in Cuba. The secret plan was nixed by President John F. Kennedy and was declassified by the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Review Board. It is available online in the National Security Archive. There are numerous online accounts available, including Wikipedia. James Bamford’s book, Body of Secrets, also summarizes the plot:
“Operation Northwoods, which had the written approval of the Chairman [Gen. Lemnitzer] and every member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called for innocent people to be shot on American streets; for boats carrying refugees fleeing Cuba to be sunk on the high seas; for a wave of violent terrorism to be launched in Washington, D.C., Miami, and elsewhere. People would be framed for bombings they did not commit; planes would be hijacked. Using phony evidence, all of it would be blamed on Castro, thus giving Lemnitzer and his cabal the excuse, as well as the public and international backing, they needed to launch their war.”
Prior to 9/11 the American neoconservatives were explicit that the wars of aggression that they intended to launch in the Middle East required “a new Pearl Harbor.”
For their own good and that of the wider world, Americans need to pay attention to the growing body of experts who are telling them that the government’s account of 9/11 fails their investigation. 9/11 launched the neoconservative plan for U.S. world hegemony.
As I write, the U.S. government is purchasing the agreement of foreign governments that border Russia to accept U.S. missile interceptor bases. The U.S. intends to ring Russia with U.S. missile bases from Poland through central Europe and Kosovo to Georgia, Azerbaijan and central Asia. U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke declared on February 20 that al Qaida is moving into former central Asian constituent parts of the Soviet Union, such as Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan. Holbrooke is soliciting U.S. bases in these former Soviet republics under the guise of the ever-expanding “war on terror.”
The U.S. has already encircled Iran with military bases. The U.S. government intends to neutralize China by seizing control over the Middle East and cutting China off from oil.
This plan assumes that Russia and China, nuclear armed states, will be intimidated by U.S. anti-missile defenses and acquiesce to U.S. hegemony and that China will lack oil for its industries and military.
The U.S. government is delusional. Russian military and political leaders have responded to the obvious threat by declaring NATO a direct threat to the security of Russia and by announcing a change in Russian war doctrine to the pre-emptive launch of nuclear weapons. The Chinese are too confident to be bullied by a washed-up American “superpower.”
The morons in Washington are pushing the envelope of nuclear war. The insane drive for American hegemony threatens life on earth. The American people, by accepting the lies and deceptions of “their” government, are facilitating this outcome.
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Paul Craig Roberts, a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, has held numerous academic appointments. He has been reporting shocking cases of prosecutorial abuse for two decades. A new edition of his book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, a documented account of how Americans lost the protection of law, was published by Random House in March, 2008. His latest book, How The Economy Was Lost, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press
callmeslick comments:
as I’ve pointed out repeatedly, if progressives choose to go off on tangents involving clearly idiotic theories, espousing clearly disproven “facts” and exercising hyperbole in place of rational judgement, it hardly does any good for anyone with sound progressive goals. Single payer healthcare is possibly the best example of a blatantly solid idea that most Americans should embrace, which has been obscured and lost credibility when some of it’s (potentially) best supporting voices come out and embrace loony ideas of absolutely no merit or long-term value(example, like some of the easily disproven drivel Stefan espouses above). And, that is what makes me upset with some in the Progressive movement. The failure to focus on a few truly monumental goals, getting lost in a mixed bag of solid ideas and pure paranoid idiocy kills the credibility for ALL Progressives.
Stefan Kosikowski comments:
I am not a Progressive, I am a liberal.
Thank you and good day!
callmeslick comments:
whatever, the thinking you embrace in some of the conspiracy theories above is the same unstable thinking exhibited by the poor guy who started shooting strangers on the Pentagon Metro platform today. It’s not healthy, in other words.
Stefan Kosikowski comments:
So now you psychoanalyzed this other person you never met? You sure do get around!
You also use terms you clearly don’t understand the meaning, such as conspiracy theory, for I presented no theory at all about 9-11 or how the three building fell down. I did however, state that the government has presented an impossible conspiracy theory of it’s own, as has the 1000 engineers group that Dorothy wrote the article about.
You have also demonstrated that you are not an honorable person, to compare me to a person who goes around shooting people. Shame on you. Don’t you know that I am a combat veteran, a fully trained Army Ranger, a graduate of the Guerilla Warfare school at Ft. Banning Georgia, someone who if I was the least bit inclined to do harm, could be exceptionally dangerous? Do you honestly believe that the United States Army trains individuals in these skills if they are the least bit emotionally disturbed like that person or constantly angry as you claim I am? Once again, all you have done is express your extreme ignorance about subjects beyond your understanding. At least your consistent, huh?
Stefan Kosikowski comments:
Excuse my typo… Ft. Benning Georgia.
callmeslick comments:
whoa, Stefan!!! I’m hardly comparing you to that person, mentally. I merely stated that obsession with theories to the point of calling ‘facts’ things which are clearly not true is not healthy, and that such obsessions lead to dangerous stuff. In your case, all that I see happening is that you rant on local political fora. My greater point in this whole exercise is the role of credibility for those who would get out front for Progressive causes. I feel there is a need to focus on what is both attainable and truly important, and stop with the goofy tangents. I feel this for two reasons: 1)the tangents dilute and distract from the more serious issues and 2)some of what I read on Progressive blogs/sites is SO far off base(and here is where I used your claims as examples)as to destroy the credibility of the writer on ANY issue.
Oh, and yes, although I don’t feel you to be much more than an angry young man wannabe, the US Military trains a fair number(from my experience) of individuals with serious mental issues and notably anger issues. And, these are folks who had those issues going in. At any rate, you and your training might equate to someone potentially dangerous, but given your gullibility demonstrated above, mostly to yourself…….Interesting, this is the second time you’ve noted your ‘potentially dangerous’ nature and military training to me in these pages. Trying to say something?
Stefan Kosikowski comments:
Stefan Kosikowski comments:
Interesting… my last comment evaporated!
LOL
Anyway, your “facts” are once again ignorant opinions, but keep up the hypocrisy. There haven’t been any cases of an Army Ranger, Navy SEAL, or DELTA force combatant wigging out and killing people. That is because these unconventional soldiers are run through extensive psychological evaluations as candidates before they are provided this specialized training. The Armed Forces simply doesn’t have the resources to do likewise to all it’s soldiers, so your ignorant comparisons belie your so-called fact.
You are consistent though, got to give credit where it is due. You keep repeating that I am an angry young man, yet I am just days away from my 47th birthday and have no anger issues whatsoever. Then again, for you, 47 may be young. Who knows since you feel a need to hide your identity? You may be older than dirt and look like an elaborately coiffured scrotum! At least, I am entitled to that opinion so long as you keep expressing yours about me.
callmeslick comments:
geezus, I think I’ve discovered the issue. You have serious reading comprehension problems. I said “angry young man wannabe”, which implies that you aren’t all that young, if you paid attention. Maybe that is how you can find ‘facts’ in pure fiction.
Hell, I pretty much figured you to be in your 40′s or more, as you apparently had enough time to train to be a super-duper terrorist killing Ranger, with mad skills,
a professional engineer, and now your current position in Exeter. Look, you’re the one who once pointed out here the shortcomings of the medium. Perhaps, discussing these things over drinks, coffee, a plate of nachos(food fight! Whee!), whatever, miscontruing words wouldn’t come to you quite so easily. Still, I’ll admit freely to being one blunt presenter of my opinions, and I would be just so blunt in person(heck,
just come to Canal St. for a DL session and flag me down, you’ll see what I mean, no doubt). And, Stefan, that is why I pull no punches about the absolutely outrageous claims you made above, regarding 9/11 and specifically WTC-7. They are laughable,
easily proven to be false by folks who know far more about the details than either you or I. If you want to go on spouting such paranoid crap as ‘truth, hidden from the unsuspecting public’, go ahead. Just don’t do it here, without expecting questions,
contravening facts and more than a few bemused observations from myself. Seem fair?
If you noticed elsewhere, I was more than happy to straighten out Onenastybeast about tax cuts that weren’t really tax cuts, or pointing out when someone misses the whole point of a movie to make a bogus point about the state of feminism in America. I’d like to see a little more critical thinking out of Progressives AND Conservatives in this country, because if we don’t start getting some, the whole ship sinks in a sea of stupid. And, that’s what I’m focused on.
Oh, and by the way, I’m 55, and not all that elaborately coiffed. Comparisons to body parts, to my mind, vary with the beholder and can be wildly disparate.
Stefan Kosikowski comments:
Before you question my comprehension skills, you should remove the vagueness from your statements. As you just described it makes no sense in the context of the discussion. BTW… obtuse would be more apt than blunt.
Just remember one thing though. You can take all the personal snipes you want at me, even while hiding your identity in a dastardly way, but it doesn’t dismiss the 1000 engineers and architects and their expressed EXPERT opinions that this article is written about. Keep your focus!
callmeslick comments:
hiding my identity?? A check of the archives will readily reveal my real name. Further, I have no beef with the original article. Those engineers merely want a more thorough, public review of the incident. It was YOU who went off on the goofy tangent about lost SEC documents, and how it HAD to have been something other than a result of the planes hitting the complex.
Stefan Kosikowski comments:
LOL… people can search the extensive archives and possibly find your identity… that’s really noble of you!
Also, those 1000 engineers and architects are stating that the government is lying. Let’s not try and gloss that fact over.
callmeslick comments:
no, they are not, they are claiming that the government is not being transparent or forthcoming. Semantics, perhaps, but, it is a jump from that claim to ‘lying’.
Thomas J. Littleton ; BS(Biochemistry)MS(Biology)
keep for your files…..lol
Stefan Kosikowski comments:
Clearly you are obtuse, for the point is lost upon you. I already know who you are. What is relevant is that you post your comments under a pseudonym, to make it immpossible to run a web search on your name (identity) and connect them to your comments, freeing you to make ugly remarks about people without consequence. If you have any honor whatsoever, you would be “blunt” while posting under your full name. Then again, that does require character and integrity.
callmeslick comments:
it’s all a sinister plot……….aimed at people completely lacking a sense of humor.
gk thomas comments:
Reply to callmeslick , Comment #4
Well, callmeslick, you must be unaware of Washington’s policy to exterminate Indian
tribes and confiscate their lands for himself and his cronies. Washington believed Indians
were not human: They have “nothing human except the shape,” he said. Troops following
Washington’s order would skin the bodies of slain Indians to make leggings. Indians who
survived the attacks later re-named the nation’s first president as “Town Destroyer”.
You ask “…what school teaches the ‘nobility’ of Columbus?” Most that I’ve been in, and
I was a teacher.
D.A. Mihesuah says in his book American Indians: Stereotypes and Realities. Alanta,
GA: Clarity Press. 1996 that we must “Refrain from teaching that Columbus was a hero
without examining his relations with indigenous peoples. The same can be said about
George Armstrong Custer, Andrew Jackson, George Washington, William Henry Harrison,
Teddy Roosevelt, and others who believed Indians to be inferior to Europeans. ”
callmeslick, you seem to think morality is relative to the times in which one lives. But
one cannot excuse our forefather’s cruelty on that basis. They knew genocide was evil; they
knew slavery was an abomination, yet for greed of profit they endorsed these practices.
Don’t try to nobilize what they did. Both Washington and Jefferson admitted that slavery
was wrong–but neither wanted to give up the wealth that slaves represented.
You say “War just ain’t the profitable business it once was….” Really? Perhaps you
think the US invaded Iraq to free its people and not to steal its oil? Or that Israel’s recently
booming economy in marketing high tech surveillance software and weaponry is not based
on sustaining perpetual global conflicts?
And what can I say about the media? If you don’t think the mega merges of corporate media
poses a threat to honest, unbiased news reporting, then I want some of what you’re smoking.
You can leada jackass to water, but you can’t make him drink.
And now, here’s sports
callmeslick comments:
All I can say to the above, in the guise of a three-week delayed response, is that if we went to war to get Iraq’s oil, the planning was even poorer than I have previously thought. Personally, I think those that got us into that one were so blinded by ideology that they didn’t even apply THAT much thought to it, going in.
And, that speaks to my point…..when you make over the top, ideologically driven assertions(as you did, I won’t even dignify some of them, and will leave it at ‘agree to disagree’ on the evolution of morality and fairness, you feel are unchanged in your screed above), you lose your credibility, and hence your audience.
That problem is not limited to either faction of the political battlefront.
callmeslick comments:
actually, I’ll take some of the above back. A few details are worth response:
1.”you must be unaware of Washington’s policy to exterminate Indian
tribes and confiscate their lands for himself and his cronies. Washington believed Indians
were not human: They have “nothing human except the shape,” he said. Troops following
Washington’s order would skin the bodies of slain Indians to make leggings. Indians who
survived the attacks later re-named the nation’s first president as “Town Destroyer”. ”
I’m not unaware, but am conscious of different mores and viewpoints 250 years past.
Obviously, the Europeans, notably the British, held a view of superiority, that led to horrible excesses. Our history is replete with them. Still, if you wish to discount the positive contributions of Washington, Jefferson, et al, who created what is clearly the most tolerant and progressive system of governance ever conceived, I would say to you what I say to rightwing types who cannot abide a black President, or tolerate liberals in the public discourse:Please leave, you don’t get the concept of America. I’ll gladly buy you luggage. Just go.
2. No matter what the great scholar Dr.Mihesuah(sarcasm noted)states, most decent secondary schools teach a nuanced view of Columbus, and the entire exploration and conquest of America by Europeans. If you did not teach in such a place, I am truly sorry for you, and the students thereof. All I know is that I was taught in such a manner, over 40 years back in a pretty conservative prep school. If you were a history teacher, and taught the ‘nobility’ of Columbus, with no nuance, shame on you.
3 Finally, this bit:
“callmeslick, you seem to think morality is relative to the times in which one lives. But one cannot excuse our forefather’s cruelty on that basis.”
Yes, I can, and yes I do. Man evolves, and continues to. Freedoms, and the concept thereof evolve, and continue to. That is the crux of arguments I’ve made elsewhere to Lynn on the matter of women’s progress. At least, Washington and Jefferson(who did, upon his death free all his slaves),my forebearers, the Germans who lived in these parts, and a host of others, set in motion a system that has grown to embrace the rights and humanity of women, people of color, native Americans, foreigners of all types, and various sexual orientations, to an extent that would have been both unimaginable to anyone in 1786. In fact, a glance around the planet will show few nations have close to the tolerance we do right now. As I said earlier, you clearly are angry to be living here. Feel free to fix that wrong, but save me to hyperbolic
nonsense.
gk thomas comments:
callmeslick, wasn’t that clever of me to wait 3 weeks before replying to your post? “guise?” Are we a bit paranoid?
You said,”…if you wish to discount the positive contributions…” of Washington and Jefferson.
I never discounted the unintended good that came out of evil intentions: Washington and Jefferson would not have endorsed freedom for blacks, Indians, poor whites and women. Nor did they discount the use of mass murder and force to steal land that belonged to others [which was the driving force behind the Declaration of Independence]. I don’t think America would have been the America you praise so highly had they had their way.
You said, “…taught the ‘nobility’ of Columbus, with no nuance.”
What ‘nuances’ were you taught? Were you taught graphically how he personally raped, tortured and killed peaceful Indian men,women and children and ordered the enslavement and deaths of thousands more? I really doubt that.
You said, “…the concept thereof evolve, and continue to.”
But I said, “you seem to think morality is relative to the times in which one lives.” I used the word ‘morality’. Concepts do evolve,esp. scientific ones, but morality doesn’t. When has murder ever been sanctioned by just men and women in history? It could not be; for he who murders does not want to be murdered, therefore he knows he does wrong to murder. To steal, to rape, to lie, etc. When has slavery and genocide been considered moral? Only a hypocrite would try to justify such things.
I won’t say you are an obnoxious person, but I would like to offer that epithet to you for your private consumption.
callmeslick comments:
yes, morality does evolve. Moreover, morality varies from culture to culture, even at the present time. Avoiding that fact for some set of general human principles such as you state is a nice idea, but not one rooted in actual historical fact or reality.