`  == ``Bureaucratic slime`` ==  That's exactly the right phrase. I'm rather tempted to right an essay of my own along the same lines, detailing just how evil bureaucracy is. Put a man inside a bureaucracy and you strip away his conscience and his soul. Someone I know wrote a top-class book about the The Holocaust. One of the points he made was that the efficient German bureaucracy allowed men to feel they were doing excellently at their jobs, just not think about the jobs in question. He goes into it in better detail that that, but that's his general point. Anyway, I think you've written one of the best explanations of IAR I've seen thus far. Cheers,    `