The reputation bar is just taking the amount of renegade and paragon points and adding them together. If you have enough renegade, you will be able to get both the renegade dialog option and the paragon option. General reputation only increases the size of the bar, it doesn't change the ratio at all.
In the American military she'd only be an E-4, Specialist/Corporal, and she went to Oxford where I'm sure she got a degree, that would put here at an officer rank upon graduation, she got screwed.
The dream sequence reminds me of Dante's Inferno, anybody else? "Midway upon the journey of my life, I found myself in a dark wood, for I had lost the right path." or something close to that, i don't remember it verbatim, been a while since I read it, but yeah then the kid starts burning, weird.