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The Vandalism Handout

Author
Affiliation

Mike P. Sinn

International Campaign to End War and Disease

Keywords

handout, flyer, prank, vandalism, instructions, explanation, objections, 1% treaty

SIDE 1: How to Play the Funniest Joke in the Universe

  1. Pick the person whose funeral you least want to attend.

  2. Find a co-conspirator. Alone, you are vandalizing clothing and it feels weird. Two of you sneaking into the closet is a heist movie.

  3. Write on every shirt.

    • Front: I am retarded
    • Back: everyone is. Read the proof at warondisease.org + QR code

  4. Tuck this handout in each collar, recipient-side up. Do not hand it to them. Let them find it.

  5. When they catch you, confess with love. Look them in the eyes and say: “Everyone is retarded. You, me, every politician. And because none of us will admit it, we spend 604 (95% CI: 453-888) times more on terrorism than on curing the diseases that are actually going to kill us. Read the back of the shirt.” Then walk them through it.

  6. Extend to everyone they love. Their siblings. Their parents. The parents of their children’s friends. Everyone whose funeral you are not willing to watch.

  7. Wear them every day. Not once. Every day. On August 6 (Earth Optimization Day), everyone wears them at once.

  8. Vote at warondisease.org. Drag the slider. Politicians count votes; give them a big number to count.

  9. Convert the person whose closet you vandalized. They are wearing the three shirts you defaced but not the other twelve. Ask: “You know the shirt is true. You are wearing three. Why not the rest?” Every answer sounds terrible out loud:

    • “I like those shirts.” = “I like my shirts more than progress toward disease eradication.”
    • “It won’t make a difference.” = “If three matter, more matters more. If three don’t matter, why am I wearing them.”
    • “People will think I’m weird.” = “I am letting people die because I’m worried what strangers think of my shirt.”

  10. Print more handouts at warondisease.org/handout. Each handout that ends up in a collar produces another vandal.

Why this works (chain letters did, and they were worse)

In the 1930s, chain letters reached hundreds of millions of people. They cost a stamp and a trip to the post office. They promised $1,000 that never came. They threatened seven years of bad luck that was not real. They were expensive, annoying, and fake. They worked anyway.

Same mechanism, fixed:

  • Cost. Chain letter: $5 and an hour at the post office. This: a marker and fifteen minutes in a closet.
  • Reward. Chain letter: $1,000 that never came. This: $10.6 million (95% CI: $5.36 million-$21.4 million) in unlocked treaty value per shirt-wearing human, and your family not dying.
  • Threat. Chain letter: seven years of bad luck. This: an eternity of bad luck, after you and everyone you have ever loved are slowly tortured and brutally murdered by horrible diseases. That threat is not superstition. It is what is actually happening, at 150 thousand deaths per day.
  • Truth. Chain letter: a lie. This: verifiable public data. Every number is sourced at warondisease.org.

SIDE 2: Please Read Before Yelling

You found this in the collar of a shirt that used to be yours. The shirt now says: I am retarded.

Being mad is the correct first reaction. The word is ugly. But the shirt is true. Everyone is retarded relative to perfect knowledge and perfect logic. And until we admit that, we keep spending 604 (95% CI: 453-888) times more on terrorism than on curing the diseases that are actually going to kill us. Someone who loves you wrote on your shirt because they want you to be alive.

What is happening

About 150 thousand humans die every day of diseases that would have treatments if anyone had funded the trials. That is about 50 September 11s every day.

Your body is quietly falling apart. Right now, as you read this sentence, something inside you is breaking. You don’t know which part yet. You won’t know until a doctor sits you down and says one word and the rest of your life is different. The treatments that would have helped exist as untested compounds on shelves, because the money was busy turning into a missile.

Your chance of dying from terrorism this year: 1 in 30 million people. Your chance of dying from disease, lifetime: approximately 100%. Your governments spend 604 (95% CI: 453-888) times more on mass murder capacity than on testing which medicines work. If cancer had oil reserves, you would have cured it by 2003.

Don’t throw the shirts away

Sometime in the next ten years, someone you love is going to get a disease. The treatment that could have cured it will have been busy turning into a missile. You will spend weeks visiting them in the hospital. You will rearrange your schedule around their chemotherapy. You will sit in a waiting room while someone explains what “palliative” means. You will go to their funeral. You will go to the wake after the funeral. You will drive home from the wake and sit in your car in the driveway for a while.

Or you could wear the shirt.

Wearing a defaced shirt is mildly embarrassing. Attending your child’s funeral because the clinical trial funding was a missile is significantly more inconvenient. When someone asks you what your shirt means, explain why this is the funniest joke in the universe and why they should do this to everyone they love. It is faster than a wake, and you do not have to wear a suit.

The human who wrote on your shirts loves you and does not want you to die of a horrible disease. Forgive them and put the shirts back on.

What your shirt is asking the world to do

Every country redirects 1% of its military budget to clinical trials. That is the entire treaty. It requires adjusting 190 cells in the budget spreadsheets of 190 countries.

The chain:

  1. 100 nuclear weapons end civilization. Your species has 12,000. Capacity for 122 apocalypses. You sacrifice ONE. You can only end civilization once.
  2. That 1% buys a 12.3x increase in clinical trial capacity. The queue compresses from 443 years to 36.
  3. Global GDP at year 15 is 1.43x (95% CI: 1.22x-1.56x) the current trajectory. About 2 billion humans are currently too sick or dead to work. Another 2 billion are taking care of them instead of producing anything.
  4. If 8 billion humans wear the shirt, the treaty passes. Nobody has invented the politician who can ignore 8 billion votes.

The calculation, on one page

Now After the 1% Treaty
Diseases with no treatment

6,650

6,650
First treatments per year

15

185
Years to clear the queue

443

36
What the treaty unlocks
Healthy life-years recovered

565 billion
Hours of suffering prevented

1.93 quadrillion
Total treaty value

$84.8 quadrillion (95% CI: $42.9 quadrillion-$172 quadrillion)
Value per shirt-wearing human

$10.6 million (95% CI: $5.36 million-$21.4 million)
Average laughs per person per day

17
Extra laughs from healthy days recovered

3.51 quadrillion
Laughs generated by the average joke 1

Answers for the person still yelling at you

“My shirts!” Each shirt is worth $10.6 million (95% CI: $5.36 million-$21.4 million) in treaty value. Don’t throw them away.

“This is naive.” After WW2, the US cut military spending by 87.6% in two years and got the greatest economic boom in history. The treaty asks for 1%.

“Lobbyists will block this.” Military contractors want money, not war. Without the treaty: they die of disease in 20 years and their net worth is zero. Unless they are buried with their money. Which their kids are unlikely to do. With the treaty: they lose 1% of revenue, the economy is 1.43x (95% CI: 1.22x-1.56x) bigger, and they make much more money. They are not evil. They are wealthy enough that they don’t need the 1%. They have just never been forced to read the math.

“Politicians will never agree.” Politicians follow voters. Once 3.5% of voters demand the treaty (the threshold every major political movement in history has crossed), refusing it becomes career suicide. Politicians are extremely good at not committing career suicide. It is their primary skill.

Sources, calculations, and uncertainty distributions at warondisease.org. Now flip this paper over.