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Energy "Catalizer"

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The petition is written in the third person, but there hasn't been an unlikelier third person since Adam and Eve's wacky alien gardener, Zorblu. This isn't Rossi's first try at sock-puppeting:

And while we can't say for sure that Andrea Rossi hasn't mastered the physics of an energy catalyzer, he can't even spell "catalyzer." His invention allegedly fuses hydrogen and nickel to produce copper and energy. We won't get into the impossibilities here, but it has more logical flaws than Willy Wonka's chocolate factory and is believed to actually exist by fewer people.

Even though every respectable scientist in the world says his machine is full of shit, he's skipping straight to the White House. Because it's not like the U.S. government has any history of knowing about nuclear devices.

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These rubes don't know a thing about fusion.

Rossi insists that his invention, which looks like it was welded by a depressed plumber to express the bleakness of a lifetime spent with other people's U-bends, works by using a "secret mixture" of catalysts to fuse hydrogen and nickel into copper. You know you can trust a nuclear reactor that uses the same explanation as KFC.

http://www.energydigital.com

"As long as it's not clogged with hair, it generates free energy."

Especially when they're talking about a reaction that is energetically impossible even in the heart of a large star. His work has been published in the "Journal of Nuclear Physics," but only because that's the name he gave his blog. It's like changing your first name to Doctor and trying to operate on people. The device is actually a reverse Schrodinger's cat, because if the reaction ever works it'll kill everyone attempting to observe it. The 2 inches of lead shielding around the core are to gamma rays what cling wrap is to an angry tiger.

Rossi reportedly has a history with

3

Evil Corporate Cure Conspiracy

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The idea that corporations are hiding a cure for cancer is popular with paranoid lunatics who don't understand science, medicine, patents or profit.

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"What are you idiots saying now?"

It's a little-known effect that conspiracy theories always attract the exact opposite kind of lunatic: people who never leave their basement believe aliens have traveled all the way to Earth, people who can't spell think superscientists have cured all disease and assholes who are virgins think only assholes get women.

This petition is such a contradictory mixture of cynical and optimistic it shouldn't exist. Care Bears with ecstasy make more sense, because at least then you'd understand why they're so huggy all the time. The 591 petitioners believe that huge corporations would rather let people die than become the most successful brand of all time by curing a disease forever, but that the same EvilCorp will hand over the cure if there's a law saying so. The law is less enforceable than the three-second rule on the International Space Station.

Especially since their strategy is "There's a giant conspiracy that has suppressed evidence for decades, so we'll ask them online instead." If there were a secret government conspiracy to paralyze the masses and distract them with pointless bullshit, they would have

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Spamming the White House

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The entire Internet is choking on spam, and this petition proves that government projects are no exception. When Skynet comes online and decides to kill us, we'll be fine -- by the time it digs through all the Viagra ads to get at the nuclear launch codes, spam bots will have evolved and be targeting it with ads screaming "GET A BIGGER HARD DRIVE NOW!" Also, we like the idea of the White House getting mail from a Nigerian prince, and Barack Obama resisting the urge to write back explaining he's the American president.

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Dear Nigerian royalty, thank you for your mail, and for being more reasonable and believable than people I have to work with on a daily basis.

Confusing the White House for an advertising agency, supporters of electronic cigarettes have been calling on the government to endorse e-cigs and "support job creation" in the vast e-cig manufacturing complexes that would surely result. The government refused, on the minor grounds that

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Internet Users Are Better Than Other People!

Internet users are often more ridiculously entitled than Capo del Governo Duce del Fascismo e Fondatore dell'Impero Sua Eccellenza Mussolini. But not as likable. And they've been submitting petitions that make monitors refresh at the exact frequency of whine. We know this is a long one, but imagine you actually had something to do (like running the country) and still had to wade through such bullshit:

Syllabus of Internet Whining 101, aka the Full Text, here

Poisoning the rest of the Internet with passive aggression was just a testing ground for this assault on the heart of democracy. It's a black belt lesson in Internet whine-fu techniques: dictionary definitions, sarcasm and threatening. Multiple period. Sentences. You can almost see neckbeards quivering with pride as that final line was typed. Listen, asshole, if you want to make the White House obey your demands, that keyboard needs to be connected to an orbital laser cannon, not an Internet comment box.

20th Century Fox

"In the wake of the recent laser strike, the relocated U.S. government acknowledges that modern warfare does indeed 'rule.'"