Acid mine water: a century's legacy

[miningmx.com] -- AN expert report on acid mine drainage (AMD) has sketched a gloomy scenario of how the legacy of 120 years’ mining in the Witwatersrand had developed a real threat to the area’s people and environment.

The report, released on Thursday by the department of water affairs, described how the issue of AMD’s was brought to the boil in September 2002 when acidic mine water started to flow from an abandoned shaft in the Randfontein area of the Witwatersrand’s Western Basin.
A similar situation has since been developing in the Central Basin (Johannesburg area) and the Eastern Basin (Springs-Nigel) area, with rising effluent expected to reach an environmentally critical level of 150m below surface – where AMD starts to flow into surrounding groundwater or surface water systems - in the Central Basin by June 2012.

WESTERN BASIN

“Flooding of the underground mine workings, representing more than 120 years of mining in the Witwatersrand, culminated in the decant of AMD from the smallest basin in late-August 2002,” read the report. “Flooding commenced when the last mine to shut down in this basin ceased pumping.
“The volume of decant has peaked at around 60 mega litres per day (Ml/d)…during wet summer rainfall seasons. More typical is a decant rate of around 15 to 20 Ml/d. Basic treatment of this water currently permits the release of around 12 Ml/d into the Crocodile and Marico drainage system.”
The report said existing pumping and treatment capacity was inadequate to effectively manage the impact of AMD, with the excess volume flowing untreated into the receiving aquatic environment.
As an immediate priority, the report suggested that a neutralisation plant be established with a capacity of 20 Ml/d. “This is required to supplement the existing treatment capacity operated by mines in the area and the upgrade of mine water pumping facilities accordingly.”

CENTRAL BASIN

In the largest basin, the water level has been rising at an average rate of 0.59m per day since July 2009. By end-November 2010, mine water reached a level of 510m below surface at the Catlin shaft of Simmer & Jack. It is expected that the rising water level would reach the surface by March 2013.
“By this time, however, it will have sterilised still exploitable gold reserves located at a depth of less than 400m below surface,” read the report. “Of greater concern is that it will not only have flooded the shallower underground tourist facilities at Gold Reef City, but also compromised the shallow groundwater resource associated with the dolomitic strata located to the southeast of Johannesburg.”

"The problems posed by acid mine drainage will have implication far into the future, with impacts likely to continue for many years..."

The report stated that the flooding of the Central Basin has also been associated with an increase in seismic activity, with a higher frequency of earth tremors in the area following the cessation of pumping at ERPM in October 2008.

As a remedy, a pumping facility with a capacity of 60 Ml/d is required in one or more of the existing mines shafts, coupled with a neutralisation plant with the same capacity.

EASTERN BASIN

The situation in the Eastern Basin has been complicated due to uncertainty over whether pumping would continue at Aurora Empowerment System’s Grootvlei mine. The mine has historically maintained the mine water level at a depth of around 700m below surface in its Number 3 shaft.
“While continuation of this pumping regimen is at risk of failure owing to financial constraints, an early casualty of the situation was the treatment of the raw mine water prior to its release into the Blesbokspruit and a Ramsar-listed wetland,” read the report.

“Treatment of the mine water has not occurred for some time. The cessation of pumping will result in flooding of the pump station within 30 days, after which the mine water will rise to its decant level and decant in or close to the CBD of Nigel on the East Rand.”
It recommended that the pumping capability in Number 3 Shaft of Grootvlei be secured as soon as possible, while the existing treatment plant at this locality be returned to service.
“The volumes of water to be managed may be reduced by the timely implementation of ingress management measures, with a resultant reduction in operating costs. The design of the pump and treat systems will need to take this into account.

The report further warned that flooded mines were not the only sources of AMD in the Witwatersrand. Mine residues would also have to be monitored to reduced AMD impacts on the environment.
“The problems posed by AMD will have implication far into the future, with impacts likely to continue for many years,” read the report. “The process of management of these impacts will therefore need to continue, with ongoing assessments and adaption as conditions change.”

Midweek Devotion: Dealing with painful feelings

Written by Andries Combrink, pastor at  Centurion West Presbyterian Church

In order to deal with our feelings in a responsible way,  we have to learn that feelings are only feelings. What do we mean? It means that feelings are not necessarily reality.
We are not saying that feelings are not real. Everyone struggling to keep emotions at bay, know that they indeed are real! But our feelings do not reflect how things really are. To deal with them in a way that is helpful to you and others and not to act on them insensibly, we must realise that what we feel do not always reflect reality.  Therefore, we must recognize them for what they are and what they are not.

Yes, we need to acknowledge what we feel and that we do feel this way.  Denial of our feelings will simply suppress them and not allow us to deal with them in a healthy way.  Even if we try to suppress our emotions, they will eventually surface again and then they could return in destructive ways. .

To acknowledge your emotions does not mean we must tell everyone about them.  It is most of the time unwise.  When we need advice as to how to deal with what we feel, we need to only speak to someone we trust,  who is equipped to guide and help us in dealing with them.  Our minister is a good choice to share our emotions with, knowing it will be handled with complete confidentiality. He will not only listen, but he is able to guide us from the Word of God in dealing with them.

And we must always tell God about our emotions.  God knows how we feel. God understands what we feel.  God loves us even when we are angry or frustrated. We must not only acknowledge our emotions to ourselves, we can and should talk to God about what we feel.

In the Psalms we see how believers share their emotions with the Lord.  We read words of praise for when we are rejoicing and  we read sad,  even despondent prayers,  for when we are feeling abandoned, angry or in pain.
In Psalm 31:9-10 we read: "Be gracious to me, O Lord, for I am in distress; my eye is wasted away from grief, my soul and my body also. For my life is spent with sorrow, and my years with sighing; my strength has failed because of my iniquity, and my body has wasted away."

It is clear that the Psalms poet did not hesitate to tell God exactly how he really felt.
Our emotions are certainly real to us. But we cannot just blabber about them to everyone.
But we can and should deal with them, verbalising them to someone equipped to help us deal with them.
More importantly, we need to speak to God about what we feel.  We need to share all our emotions with our God.  It is an essential step in healing and dealing with them well.

The difference between a Cat and a Meerkat

Thanks to Cheesecurl.com we have unique Afrikaans humour. Kat is Afrikaans for Cat and meer in Afrikaans also means more, thus creating a interesting literal wordplay when combined (and, as we know, the Meerkat is that cute little friend of Lion King's).

Reviewing U2 in Cape Town

This pic was taken last night by Cindy

Yesterday was U2's Cape Town concert. It formed part of their 360 World Tour. Cindy and I attended.

As this event is widely publicized I wondered whether I should attempt my impressions at all. Words will do no justice to the visual spectacular that greeted us from the start with "Beautiful Day" right to the end. U2 are masters of utilizing visual effects, lightning and stage performance. They are indeed the world's best performing act.

During the Australian leg of their tour

The thing I want to think about, is U2's message. They didn't just come here to perform their greatest hits and one new song. They actually used the show to convey a message. The impression I left with was that they care deeply about human dignity, justice for all and eradicating discrimination and AIDS. Bono paid homage to Sackie Ahmat, South African AIDS activist. They showed a video clip of bishop Desmond Tutu who vision cast the dream of dignity. And the show was dedicated to pres Nelson Mandela.



I thought about the similarity of their cause to the Christian quest. It's on public record that the members of U2 are serious about their relationship with Christ, therefore it makes sense that they would allow the values of following in the footsteps of Jesus to influence their work. I admire them for that.

Zapiro's take on U2's SA leg

What I left with as well, was the vastness of the challenge presented to us as South Africans. Poverty, discrimination, corruption and disregard for democracy, and racism are rampant in our society. I would like to believe that the Christian faith would succeed in changing its adherents' hearts towards these issues. Didn't Christ Himself command love as the most important law? Then why are we still stuck with churches that fail to succeed in changing the hearts of their members? Why are we failing in our attempts to mobilize our fellow Christians into living a non-racist society?

U2 with Yvonne Chaka Chaka (last night)

I may sound harsh. Yet the one challenge presenting itself to our country is the one where we intentionally fight against the creeping virus of racism: white people becoming polarised as a minority group, and living some form of prejudice towards people of colour; black people, frustrated with the slow pace of change since the first democratic elections twenty odd years ago, choosing to blame the rich and the white and our history for failures that lay with current incompetent dignitaries.

I dream of a society where people choose not to hate and distrust and feel threatened. I also believe that the redemptive death and resurrection of Christ can play a significant role in changing the hearts and minds of all South Africa's citizens.

Last night, Bono, The Edge, Larry Mullen and Adam Clayton helped to strengthen this conviction. If Jesus won't change our country, who will?

The members of U2, circa 1980

Thunder & Lightning

Midweek Devotion: WITH WHAT EXPECTATION SHOULD WE COME TO THE LORD’S TABLE?

Written by Andries Combrink, pastor at  Centurion West Presbyterian Church

Firstly that God will in grace receive all who repent of their sins,  to partake of the Supper of our Lord Jesus Christ. And even when we realise that we are still weak and that it is hard to live according to God’s will, we accept in faith that our human nature cannot prevent us to receive the food that Jesus, our Host at the Table, wishes to share with us. 

Secondly we can expect to be reminded by the Holy Spirit of everything Jesus did for us to save us and make us his own.  The Holy Spirit speaks God’s Word  to us and communicates with us through bread and wine. Through bread and wine we receive the Word of God that reminds us that Jesus was  innocently condemned to death that we might be found not guilty at the judgment seat of God.  We are reminded that he let his  body be nailed to the cross to cancel the debt we have because of our sins.  He took our curse upon himself, in order to fill us with his blessings.  We are reminded that Jesus was forsaken by God, that we may be accepted by the Father and never be forsaken by him.

We expect to hear the Lord proclaiming his death and resurrection to us as he speaks to us through bread and wine, giving us faith through which we are saved. 

Thirdly we expect to have communion, or fellowship, with our Lord at his Table.  Jesus invites us to feast with him  to assure us of his love and salvation, that we will know that as surely as the bread is broken and the cup is given to us, he is present at his Table to assure us that we belong to him.  He meets with us at his Table to direct our faith to his perfect sacrifice on our behalf, teaching us that it is the only ground for our salvation.

By the Holy Spirit, who dwells in Christ as our Head and in us as his members, we have true communion with him and share in all his gifts,  his eternal life  and his glory.

Fourthly we expect that the same Spirit also unites us as brothers and sisters in true Christian love as members of the one Body of Christ.  For the sake of Christ, who loved us first, we love one another at the holy Table and show this love not just in words but also in deeds.

Finally, we expect to receive a foretaste of the amazing joy Jesus promised to his own, that we one day will share at the wedding feast of the Lamb of God when we will drink God’s new wine in the Kingdom of God our Father.

In order to be nourished with Christ at his Supper,  we must not only see and taste the outward symbols of bread and wine.   We should not doubt that at his Supper we shall be nourished and refreshed in our souls with Christ himself,  as certainly as we receive the bread and wine in remembrance of him.

"If you have black FB friends, I don't want to know you"

One of my Facebook acquaintances - a guy I knew from school - posted a status update on his profile earlier today. It read: "If you have black friends on Facebook, please unfriend me. I don't want to know you ..."

This is the same guy who frequently posts Christian stuff and moralistic messages on his wall, tagging a bunch of people to take note. He professes his undying love for Christ. And he happens to be a leader in a South African pro-white right-wing organisation.We only were friends on Facebook because of a connection back into our school days.

We aren't friends anymore.

I happen to have black friends. When I read his status I immediately thought how my black friends would react to such a status update. What would they feel when they read it? Apart from a feeling of utter disbelief, I also wondered if it would help if I took this guy to task on his comment. I decided against it.

While writing this, I also discovered a feeling of great shame. This gentleman and myself share a common characteristic: We are both proud Afrikaners. But I cannot state that we share a common faith as well - even if he wants us to believe that, because I read in the Bible how Jesus transcended racial and sexual categories to form a new people through his redemptive love. Jesus commanded love and service and acceptance and forgiveness. He described a world of peace and submission to the Father in heaven who equally united every human being under the headship of his Son.

I am ashamed that Afrikaners like myself should base their ethnic identity on the racist notion of being superior to other peoples. I am ashamed that these Afrikaners have a free voice to spread their venom and perpetuate the perception that all Afrikaners are like this.

The fact that I am an Afrikaner doesn't take away my African roots. We are a part of this continent. A substantial amount of Afrikaners share black ancestors due to interracial marriages or affairs by their foreparents.

If you read my post and you're an Afrikaner please hear my plea: We are not better than them. We are just like them, only worse, as we lead ourselves to believe we are better, based on the colour of our skin.

And if you're not Afrikaans speaking or white, please know that there are Afrikaners out there who are not shy to call themselves white, Afrikaans ex-racists. I am one. My Afrikaner-ness stems from the fact that I am also African. And for that reason I will fight for a country that embodies the dream of my Saviour: A society that bases its values on the unequivocal acceptance of every single person as someone who needs God's love just as much as the next one; A society that chooses not to discriminate on racial lines and fights against poverty and looks after its poor of spirit.

Ex-Facebook friend: If you hate my black friends just because they are black, I simply cannot be your friend. Feel free to reject me for that.

Christians protecting Muslims in Egypt

I found this picture via a post on the site reddit.com (by the way, reddit recently surpassed 1 BILLION page views per day). It depicts people involved in the protests in Egypt. Inside, there are Muslim protestors praying and those standing around them in protective stance, are Christians.

I get chills down my spine.

[view the original HERE.]

Midweek Devotion: Devotions about Emotions

Written by Andries Combrink, pastor at  Centurion West Presbyterian Church

Our emotions surface all the time.  Some of us suppress what we feel and do not share it with friends, family or even God.  Do we feel it is a sign of weakness to be excited or sad? Why are we uncomfortable about being passionate about Christ, our salvation and our worship?  Why do we think tears of joy and thanksgiving are embarrassing?  Why do we apologise for them?   We need to understand that God created us as emotional beings, and he has a divine purpose with what we feel.  

We have feelings because God created us that way. He created us in his image. And God also has feelings.   In Deuteronomy 32:21, God is speaking of his emotions in terms of his relationship with Israel: 

"They have moved me to jealousy with that which is not God; they have provoked me to anger with their vanities."

There are times when God is angry, because his people serve other gods, are disobedient and irreverent. 

The Bible also speaks at length about the love, mercy and compassion of God.  It is the Lord’s feelings of love that moved him to give his only Son, that whosoever believes in him will not perish, but have everlasting life.  God is love.  God is defined by his love for us,  and his grace and mercy that save us, are the fruit of his divine love.

When you read the Gospels, you see the love of the Saviour at work.  All his miracles and all his teachings testify of his glorious love for us and his desire to have a relationship with us.  God has emotions. Jesus has emotions. We can also sadden the Holy Spirit. Thus we, created in God’s image, therefore also have emotions. 

We too can experience love for God, our fellow-man, our earthly family and our church family.  We too can make a difference because we have compassion and mercy and we also know what anger is.

The only problem with our human emotions is that we sometimes allow them to take charge of our lives, leading to insensible and unwise actions that left common sense, our faith knowledge and wisdom out of the equation.  Then we may hurt not only ourselves, but also those most precious to us -  and we do not act in a God honouring way.  We are then left with regret, because emotional damage is hard to repair. 

Dealing with our emotions is harder than we think.  We need Jesus to help us.  We need the Holy Spirit to guide us.  We need the Word of truth to educate us. 

We need the love and compassion of our Lord, to console us.   

(Next time more about God’s purpose with our emotions.)

5 Complaints About Modern Life

By Mark M., M. Asher Cantrell

Read the original article HERE

In general, it's easier to be negative. It's easier for us at Cracked [the website where this article originally was published - Ed], because it's easier to write jokes about terrible things than nice things. It's easier for us as a generation, because to admit that the world isn't that bad right now would be to admit that we have it easier than our grandparents did and that the world thus has the right to expect more from us.
But as much as we like to joke about the sorry state of the world, the facts really don't back us up.

#5."Everything Is So Expensive."

The Complaint:
"The corporations and the government have us all living like slaves. I can back it up with numbers, too -- in 1950 you could buy a brand new nine-room brick home in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, for the whopping sum of $11,500. A decent family car was about $500, and the gas for it was about 25 cents a gallon. A large loaf of bread cost under 15 cents. A large coffee was a nickel, with a free refill. I could go on and on. But now between greedy corporations and the government confiscating our income with sky-high taxes, you have to work two jobs just to survive."

"One knife just isn't enough for all the mugging it takes to get by."

The Reality:
Let's start with the obvious: A low-end job in the service industry paid a dollar an hour in 1950. A fancy job in insurance or real estate? A buck-fifty an hour. You'd take home $50 a week after taxes. So please don't talk about the good old days of 50-cent steaks when people were getting paid what would now be Tooth Fairy money.
So how does this all average out, once you account for income? We don't have to guess. Punch anything into the cost of living calculator -- the one that uses the exact same formula that the government uses to decide things like tax rates -- and you'll see that the prices of most things have stayed pretty constant over the years. High-end manufactured goods have gotten cheaper. Much cheaper, as manufacturing costs drop.

Thanks, Shenzhen, China!

In 1954, the cost of a high-end Westinghouse color TV, with a massive 15-inch screen, was $1,295. No, not adjusted for inflation. That was the actual price at the time -- half of the yearly income for some families. Everybody writes this off as if it's a constant of the universe ("of course new technology gets exponentially better and cheaper with time!") instead counting it among the benefits of the modern system. Why? This economic system has resulted in handheld devices that can access all of the porn ever created, at a price affordable to the working man, and all we can do is complain about the cost of unlimited data plans?

"Yeah, it's as powerful as a PS3, but it barely fits in my pocket! THESE ARE THE NEW DARK AGES."

And the golden age of the $500 car... how many of you come from families with two cars? Statistically it's most of you, and far more than what it would have been in 1960, when there were half as many cars on a per-capita basis in the U.S. (it averaged about one car per household -- so if you had two, someone else had none).
And taxes? Again, the numbers don't lie -- in the U.S. taxes are the lowest they've been since 1950, and now that the Bush-era tax cuts have been temporarily extended, they will continue to be until 2012 at the soonest. The government even threw you an extra two percent reduction in payroll tax as a cherry on top. The U.S. has the second-lowest taxes among developed countries.

We're also the second whiniest, though.

Yes, we're going through a worldwide downturn and yes, a bunch of you are unemployed. Those of you who are reading this at a homeless shelter, we're not saying it's all in your head. But on the whole we could use a little perspective.

#4."People Are Getting Stupider."

The Complaint:
"Two words: 'Jersey Shore.' People are getting stupider by the minute, and the stupid people are breeding faster than the smart people. They watch mindless reality shows, and all anybody cares about is celebrity gossip and bullsh*t. Teenagers are obsessed with Twitter and video games and have probably never read a book. Hell, Sarah Palin will probably be our next president."

Inevitably, someone in this discussion will mention Idiocracy

The Reality:
IQ scores have risen 24 points since 1914. And on top of that, you have to account for the Flynn effect, discovered by James R. Flynn, which is a way of compensating for increased education (but more on that in a moment). The intelligence quotient is set up in such a way that an average score is 100. So, what do you do if people keep getting higher and higher scores, to the point where 100 is no longer the average? You rejigger the way scores are calculated so that it goes back down to 100.
So, while IQ scores may appear to be similar from one generation to the next, the scores have to be constantly adjusted back down to 100 because children are doing better and better on the test. If you scored 100 on a test back in the day, you might actually be considered slightly mentally challenged now.

Yup.

Meanwhile, the quality of education has been going up for the past 40 years, with children scoring higher in reading and mathematics. That's not just in the U.S. -- it's worldwide. Graduation rates, too, are on an upward trend. So by the sheer numbers, we are actively creating useful members of society at an increasing rate, and if we continue onward, we might someday see as much as 200 percent of the population with high school diplomas. (Can somebody double-check the math on that one?)
The world collectively is getting smarter. If you treat the combined mass of human knowledge as a resource for the future (and you should), then we're drowning in riches like Scrooge McDuck.

  Actually, Scrooge McDuck is an exceptional swimmer.

It seems like part of the negative perception is from trying to judge the intelligence of a people by their pop culture. But remember that most people spend their whole day at work or school thinking and making decisions and doing complex troubleshooting -- they treat entertainment as the break from all that.
And if you think that it's a sad sign of the times that Jackass 3D made a ton of money at the box office, hop in your time machine and go back 80 years. You'll find audiences howling with laughter at these guys ...

... bonking one another on the heads with shovels.

#3."All This Processed Food Is Killing US."

The Complaint:
"Just look at a label. High-fructose corn syrup? 'Phenylketonurics'? Hell, a simple chicken dinner may have 36 ingredients. Who knows what chemical preservative bullshit we eat in an average day? What happened to old-time family meals, when a roast was just a roast, and a loaf of bread just had flour and yeast and other natural ingredients?"

"That's right, kids, I gutted that shit myself."

The Reality:
Think those ingredients in your TV dinner are scary? Prior to 1966, there was no ingredient labeling of prepared foods. You bought a tin of meat-and-potato stew, and what was in it was left to the goodwill of the manufacturer, who may have had to fatten profits by feeding people elk hooves and sawdust. You simply didn't know what you were eating.

Warning: Stuffing May Contain Drain Cleaner, Excrement.

The ingredient and nutrition labeling acts changed all that. Sure, food manufacturers can still try to lie and put bug shit and viruses in your food, but if caught, they get to pull all of their product off the shelf and dump it, at their own expense. And all those scary chemicals on the ingredients list? Many of those are preservatives. Meant to preserve the food. So it isn't rotten when you eat it.
Also, let's not forget that the refrigerator and freezer are both recent inventions -- go back to the Great Depression or earlier and you find that refrigerators cost more than a car. So keeping food cold or preserved was a crapshoot, with listeria, botulism and the shits acting as the dessert to granny's wholesome down-home country meal.

Remember all those cold Thanksgiving nights at the farm, lining up outside to shit with the family?

Oh, and feel free to browse through some recipes from the 1950s -- savor the Baked Corn Chex 'N' Cheese Custard and Spam fritters.
Again, we're not saying there isn't some gross stuff in your food -- there totally is and we have examined it in some detail -- just as we weren't saying that there are no stupid people in the world in our first entry up there.
All we're saying is that we're not at the disastrous nadir of some long downward trend.

Turducken notwithstanding.

#2. "Crime Is Out of Control."

The Complaint:
"A member of Congress gets gunned down in yet another mass shooting. You can't turn on the news for five seconds without hearing of a child being abducted and mutilated, or a massive gang war along the Mexican border. Every city in America has one section that you wouldn't dare drive through at night. Now compare that to the 1950s, when nobody even locked their doors at night. What changed?"

More brigands?

The Reality:
There absolutely was a huge crime wave in the 1980s, thanks to the crack epidemic (this graph shows the spike in murders in L.A., for instance). But the numbers do not lie: Crime, property crime, theft and burglary have actually been dropping since about 1993. Dropping and dropping, below even where we were before drug violence skewed the stats upward.
If you look at the homicide rate per 100,000 people, which is one of the only crime stats reliably tracked through the 1900s and into today, you can see that not only is it the lowest since the 1950s, but that it's quite a lot lower than it was in the 1970s and even the 1930s. (And it's a scaling formula, meaning it isn't skewed by population.) Now why would the crime rate be so high in the 1930s?

Because Batman hadn't been invented yet, obviously.

When the economy is bad, people get desperate, and desperate people will do whatever they can to survive, right? And here we sit, 80 years later, with the worst economy since the Great Depression. How's the crime rate faring now? It's lower than it was before the recession. A few days ago, the FBI published its statistics for the first half of 2010, which show that crime has dropped further still.
What has not dropped is the number of TV shows and news features about crime, and newspapers' need to report on violence whenever it occurs. Therefore, the only thing about crime that seems to be going up is the perception of how bad it really is.
So, by the sheer numbers, you would be just as safe keeping your doors unlocked at night as your grandparents were back in "the good old days."

In other words, it's time to box up your mantraps.

#1."Today's Music Is All Derivative Trash."

The Complaint:
"Two words: 'Justin Bieber.' Turn on a classic rock station and you can listen for hours without hearing one bad song. Now turn on a Top 40 station and try not to gouge out your ears. Today's music is just a bland product mass-produced by corporations. Don't take my word for it -- ask any music critic. They'll tell you the stuff that sells today is generic garbage. Not the music back in the day, like Zeppelin, Elvis, The Beatles, Pink Floyd ... bands like that would never top the charts today."

The Reality:
There are two things that skew our cultural memory on things like music.

OK, three.

First of all, you have the fact that the crap from previous eras gets forgotten, leaving only the great stuff behind. Those songs on classic rock stations are obviously cherry-picked as the best and most indicative of an entire era; it's not a random sampling of all the music available at the time. Modern rock or pop stations, on the other hand, have to play whatever's come out in the past six months or so.
So there is a filter applied to the old stuff. Even most of the music in Mozart's day was bullsh*t. And because it was bullsh*t, nobody felt the need to keep copies. And what was preserved isn't played today. Because it's bullshit. So it's easy to look back at Mozart's era (or the 1960s, or whatever) and assume that because only the classics survive in our memory, everything made back then was a classic.
The other problem is we assume that what gets remembered over time is whatever was the most popular. Not true.

One day she will fade from history, and then man will finally know freedom.

For instance, what survives from the Vietnam era (thanks mostly to Vietnam movies) are songs like the badass protest song "Fortunate Son" by Creedence Clearwater Revival and "Gimme Shelter" by the Rolling Stones. Both were released in 1969, after the war started going bad.
Now look at the Billboard year-end singles charts from 1946 to today. The top song in 1969? "Sugar, Sugar" by the Archies. Let us quote the entire lyrics of that song:
Sugar, ah honey honey
You are my candy girl
And you've got me wanting you.
Honey, ah sugar sugar
You are my candy girl
And you've got me wanting you.
I just can't believe the loveliness of loving you
(I just can't believe it's true)
I just can't believe the one to love this feeling to.
(I just can't believe it's true)
Ah sugar, ah honey honey
You are my candy girl
And you've got me wanting you.
Ah honey, ah sugar sugar
You are my candy girl
And you've got me wanting you.
When I kissed you, girl, I knew how sweet a kiss could be
(I know how sweet a kiss can be)
Like the summer sunshine pour your sweetness over me
(Pour your sweetness over me)
Sugar, pour a little sugar on it honey,
Pour a little sugar on it baby
I'm gonna make your life so sweet, yeah yeah yeah
Pour a little sugar on it oh yeah
Pour a little sugar on it honey,
Pour a little sugar on it baby
I'm gonna make your life so sweet, yeah yeah yeah
Pour a little sugar on it honey,
Ah sugar, ah honey honey
You are my candy girl
And you've got me wanting you.
Oh honey, honey, sugar sugar ..
You are my candy girl .

At least Britney Spears is most of a real person.

"Fortunate Son" got no higher than No. 14 on the charts. "Gimme Shelter"? It was never released as a single at all.
Go ahead, look down the list. There is some great music on there, but it's mixed in with a lot of stuff you've probably never even heard of. And do you know what you don't see on there? Queen, Led Zeppelin and a lot of other great musicians. Groups that are well-remembered now, when classic rock radio stations wouldn't be caught dead playing some of the sh*t that outsold them. Even Elvis and The Beatles are only on there twice, tying for the most No. 1 year-end singles with none other than George Michael.

And that's not even considering that, thanks to the Internet, we have far more access to all kinds of niche music genres and independent artists that we'd have never heard in the past.
And as for the critics, you have to keep in mind that there will always, always be critics who hate whatever the latest trend is. Rock music as a whole was blasted pretty harshly when it first got popular. Melody Maker called it "one of the most terrifying things to have ever happened to popular music." The Daily Mail decided to up the ante by mixing in some good old-fashioned racism: "[Rock music] is deplorable. It is tribal. And it is from America. It follows ragtime, blues, jazz, hot cha-cha and the boogie-woogie, which surely originated in the jungle. We sometimes wonder whether this is the negro's revenge."
Hell, even The Beatles weren't safe. The Daily Telegraph said that they were "something Hitler might find useful."

Holy shit, music critics of the 50s and 60s sound oddly like the Glenn Beck of today.

Why? Because it's easier to be negative. That part will never change.