is that there are limits to everything, including the resources of the USA. That's not an easy thing for a lot of folks to accept.

The cheap, high quality, easy-to-get oil in the USA is gone. Done, used up, pumped out in the years since Drake first drilled.

That's just geological fact.

The problem, as mentioned early in the article, is that the USA has a self-image of being a land of plenty where growth and resources go on forever. And for a couple of hundred years, that self-image worked, helped by things like pushing the Native Americans aside whenever they were in the way, not worrying about pollution of all kinds, and the lack of competition from the rest of the world.

Reagan got elected in 1980 in large part because he told a different story than Carter. Rather than a "crisis of confidence", ol' Ron talked about "Morning in America", and simply ignored the problem. Now it's 30 years later and we're worse off than before.

But the last thing anybody on the right is going to admit is that Jimmy Carter (or anybody else with a different view) was right and they were wrong. The right's game for the past three decades has been to tell a nice comfortable energy fairytale in order to get elected.

The real question isn't how much oil is in the ANWAR or under the continental shelf or someplace else. The real question is how to get more Americans to understand the basic truth that the days of cheap plentiful petroleum are over, done, finished, and they're never coming back, so if we want to survive here in the USA things are going to have to change.

When you've got T. Boone Pickens, a lifelong oil guy who will never be mistaken for a "tree-hugger", pushing for wind and solar energy as essential to national survival, it's serious.

Energy dependence is a far more losing propostion than energy independence. This is particularly true if the energy producing countries are not exactly friendly with the energy-buying countries and vice-versa.

Back in the 1930s, Japan was a military giant, but was dependent on imported oil and other raw materials to keep its military machine operating and growing. When sanctions that effectively stopped oil sales from the USA to Japan were imposed in 1941, the response was for Japan to attack on Pearl Harbor and a vast expansion of WW2 so that Japan could access oil in places like Indonesia. The war planners in Tokyo saw access to plentiful inexpensive oil as absolutely vital to Japan's national security. However their plan didn't quite work out the way they wanted.

As far as autarky being a losing proposition, the US economy was built on it.

For most of US history we were very careful not to become dependent on imports, raw or finished, if there was any domestic-production option. While complete self-sufficiency was never achieved, the USA came close, particularly in essential things. There's a big difference between importing specialty items like tropical fruit (we can live without bananas if we have to) and importing things the whole economy and way-of-life are dependent on.

But since about the 1960s the USA has allowed itself to become more and more dependent on various kinds of imports. We used to have the world's largest and best consumer electronics industry, for example.

IOW, if the USA becomes energy-independent, the US military machine might not need to be so big nor so busy.

"Women don't "give" birth!"

Yes, they do. I've seen it done; it's not easy!

"A woman and man had sex. Absent such equal couplings his sperm is a match with no fuel, her egg an oven with no fire."

Ever hear of artificial insemination?

Or what about women being forced, coerced or tricked? Men being tricked? Those are hardly equal!

"Once pregnant, babies emerge after 9 months. The woman no more "gives" life than she "creates" still-borns or deformed children. Nature does all that."

Giving birth and giving life are two different things. Giving life takes at least two people, one male and one female, giving birth takes at least one person, always a female.

Like it or not, the mother is "directly involved" from conception to birth. The father isn't.

This is all basic biology - where ya been?

"Woman can, of course, terminate pregnancies and/or kill new borns. Millions have."

Of course. So those who GIVE birth are truly GIVING, because they don't have to.

"In short, women don't "give" birth but CAN take life."

That's just plain wrong.

"Just trying to keep feminists off the pedestal they keep saying they hate...while jumping atop it every chance they get."

I don't see any pedestal-jumping here.

Yes, being afraid it could happen to them is certainly one reason for the nasty responses. But there's another reason: Ms. Ryan's story shows how the system isn't working even for hardworking folks with educations and resources.

It's much easier and more comfortable to blame the messenger than it is to say that some things have to change.

Admitting that the American system has big problems has been cast as "unpatriotic" and such in recent times rather than as the first step to fixing it. That's just plain wrong.