WHAT'S NEW AT LIFTING THE VEIL
July 18, 2008
Just when I was about to finish up some fresh articles for this site, along comes the public school system in the company of child protective services to turn my life upside down.
That's fine, I'll take that golden opportunity and run with the ball.
Look for fresh material at my subdomain, and when I'm done with that little project I'll get back to this one
April 7, 2005
Lifting the Veil has greatly benefited from a new office dedicated almost exclusively to work on the project. A unique circular writer’s desk, a large flat-screen monitor, the fine coffee in the restaurant across the street, and most importantly, some measure of solitude, have recently combined to provide me with some tremendous bursts of productivity.
A complete rewrite of the article “How Great the Need?” is nearly finished. It will be, for all intents and purposes, a brand new article. I hope to have it posted near the end of the month. Two new articles are also nearing completion. Work is also being done to bring the databases up to date, and a fresh and clean look is gradually being phased in for the web site.
February 5, 2005
It has been quite a while since any meaningful updates had been made to the site, and I am pleased to announce the first in a continuing series of reports in the "Efforts at Reform" series. I hope that you will enjoy reading the first entry in the Efforts at Reform series as much as I enjoyed writing it.
Some minor other updates to the web site are soon to follow.
December 8, 2002
Added a new page, Close Up: The Petro Audits, which outlines the findings of Ohio State Auditor Jim Petro, who, based on allegations of misspending, conducted a series of sweeping audits of private foster care agencies in his state. His findings are remarkable.
Over the last week, a considerable amount of new information had been added to the Studies, Surveys and Audits section of the site, including links to the Federal Child Welfare audits issued to date. The Child Welfare and Foster Care Related Testimony section now contains complete transcripts of recent Congressional hearings on Child Welfare and Foster Care. Additional testimony is to be added as time permits.
August 29, 2002
"The reports of my demise have been greatly exaggerated," wrote the author Mark Twain in reply to a premature obituary. After a lengthy hiatus, I am pleased to announce that as of August 28, 2002, Lifting the Veil begins its eighth year online with a new home and its own domain name. Our chosen hosting service offers fast and stable servers that are free of pop-up ads, animated images, and other such commercial annoyances.
During the months of August and September, several updates will be made to this site. The first updates will be largely cosmetic in nature, as I plan to rewrite the code such that these pages will display properly on the widest range of browsers and across the widest range of screen resolutions. To this end, backgrounds will be modified or replaced on all pages, and all pages will be reformatted for easier viewing overall.
Other changes include combing through all of my links. While many of my references initially held up to 80 percent of "clickable" content, over time many of the newspaper and magazine articles to which I had linked in my footnotes had either expired or been replaced by "pay per view" services. Over the short term, I shall remove all of the dead links, while over the longer term I plan to replace a majority of them with currently active ones.
More importantly, there are quite a number of articles that have been roughed out. These include an analysis of "risk assessment" techniques, which I believe are at the very heart of many wrongful removals of children from their homes. Also forthcoming is a detailed analysis of the ever-expanding role of private contractors such as MAXIMUS, Inc., Accenture (formerly Andersen Consulting), Electronic Data Systems, IHHS, and Lockheed Martin. The role of the private contractors in the field of human services generally, and in the fine art of "federal revenue maximization" specifically, cannot be overemphasized.
Lifting the Veil has been, and shall continue to be, a work in progress. Until such time as true reform of the child welfare, foster care, and juvenile justice systems is implemented on a meaningful scale, this work shall continue.
HomeCopyright © 1996 - 2005 Rick Thoma
Last updated December 1, 2005