Listen Get

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

This handout has two sides. One side tells you how to vandalize a closet. The other side is what the person whose closet you vandalize reads when they find marker on their shirts. Print one. Tuck copies in collars. Every collar produces a new vandal, who prints more handouts, who tucks them in more collars. The math compounds the same way the diseases do, except in the correct direction. Get this paper to eight billion brains and war and disease have ended.

SIDE 1: How to Vandalize a Closet

Read this side if you have a permanent marker.

The plan: pick someone you love, ruin their wardrobe with a permanent marker, tuck this paper in the collar of each shirt so they find it when they go to get dressed. Repeat until you run out of people you love, or markers.

  1. Pick the person whose funeral you least want to attend. That person’s closet is target one.

  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. You giggle in real time. You will retell this story for years. Each of you also starts a separate chain of vandalism downstream.

  3. Raid the closet. Write on every shirt.

    • Front: this t-shirt ended war and disease
    • Back: trade one apocalypse for disease eradication at warondisease.org + your referral code

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

  5. When they catch you, confess with love. Look them in the eyes and say: “I love you and I don’t want you to die of horrible diseases. This is the least terrible way I know to prevent that. Read the other side of this paper.” 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 when the treatments were sitting in a queue the whole time.

  7. Do your own shirts last. By then you will have the speech memorized.

  8. Wear them every day. Not once. Every day. Every stranger who asks is a new conversation. Every conversation is a new chain. On August 6 (Earth Optimization Day), everyone wears them at the same time. August 6 is the wave; the daily wearing is the ocean.

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

  10. Convert the person whose closet you vandalized. They are wearing the three shirts you defaced but not the other twelve. One more move. Ask: “You agree the math is right. You are wearing three. Why not the rest?” Then shut up. Every answer they give 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.”

  11. Print more handouts at warondisease.org/handout. Each handout that ends up in a collar produces another vandal. Eight billion brains, one piece of paper at a time.

SIDE 2: Why Someone Wrote on Your Shirts

Read this side if you have marker on your shirts.

PLEASE READ BEFORE YELLING.

You found this in the collar of a shirt that used to be yours. The shirt now says: this t-shirt ended war and disease.

You did not consent to this. The person who did it loves you. They love you so much that they were willing to ruin every shirt you own rather than watch you die of preventable disease.

Being mad is the correct first reaction. Now imagine you had a disease and someone had to cut off your shirt to save your life. You wouldn’t get mad at the surgeon. This is the same situation, except instead of cutting off your shirt, they had to write on it, and the disease is in the future. Keep reading.

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. Nobody invades anyone about it because diseases do not have oil.

COVID-19 alone killed more Americans than World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan combined. Your $900 billion murder budget watched it happen, fully armed and completely confused. The virus did not check your passport.

Disease already burns approximately $400 trillion (95% CI: $240 trillion-$587 trillion) per year in lost work and drags off about 11.5% of global GDP. The current arrangement is what nobody can afford.

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 a word that rearranges the rest of your life. 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: 453-894) times more on mass murder capacity than on testing which medicines work. If cancer had oil reserves, you would have cured it by 2003.

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 does not require new taxes, new agencies, or new ideologies. It requires adjusting 190 cells in the budget spreadsheets of 190 countries.

If it passes:

  1. 100 nuclear weapons end civilization. Your species has 12,000. You keep 121 of your 122 apocalypses (still adequate deterrence by any honest definition).
  2. The disease-eradication queue compresses from 443 years (95% CI: 324 years-712 years) to 36 years (95% CI: 11.6 years-77.1 years).
  3. Global GDP at year 15 is approximately 4.1x (95% CI: 2.02x-8.62x) the current trajectory, because dead people do not work.
  4. Per shirt-wearing human, the value the treaty creates is approximately $10.6 million (95% CI: $7.78 million-$12.2 million).
  5. The marker used to write on your shirts cost $0.50. The pen pays for itself many times over. ∎

The spreadsheet stops killing people.

Answers for the person currently yelling at you

“My shirts!” Replacement cost of a closet: ~$200. Treaty value per shirt-wearer if it passes: $10.6 million (95% CI: $7.78 million-$12.2 million). $200 is less than $10 million. Don’t throw the shirts away.

“My military will be vulnerable!” Every nation cuts by the same 1% at the same time. Relative balance is unchanged. Same math, different feelings. And the Pentagon cannot account for $2.5 trillion it has already misplaced; you are not redirecting the missile budget, you are redirecting the “we lost it somewhere” budget.

“This is naive.” After WW2, the US cut military spending by 87.6% in two years and stumbled into the greatest economic boom in history. GM went from B-24 bombers back to Cadillacs. Frigidaire stopped making machine guns. You are being asked for 1%.

“Defense contractors will block this.” They won’t, once they see the math. They keep 99% of their revenue, lose one unusable apocalypse, and get an economy 4.1x (95% CI: 2.02x-8.62x) larger where their families are alive to spend the money. 1% of nothing is what defense contractors get when they’re dead of the same diseases as everyone else. Nobody in the loop is your enemy. Everyone in it is just bad at arithmetic.

“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.

“What about defense industry jobs?” Engineers who build guidance systems can build medical imaging devices. Same differential equations, fewer funerals.

“This won’t work.” Then you wore some defaced shirts for a while and had some conversations with strangers at the grocery store. The downside is bounded by your wardrobe. The upside is your family not dying.

“I’m just one person.” Your vote + 15 minutes of sharing = 17 minutes. Each verified voter saves about 2.6 lives expected lives and prevents 468 thousand hours of expected suffering. You spent longer than 17 minutes last night choosing what to watch on Netflix. You chose a show about murder. You could have chosen not to be murdered by disease, but the interface was less intuitive.

“Humans will never coordinate this.” If your species can coordinate dance moves across 150 countries on TikTok, it can coordinate not dying.

What you do now (four things)

  1. Wear the shirts. Every day. Every stranger who asks “what’s that about?” is a new conversation. Every conversation is a new chain.

  2. Vote at warondisease.org. Drag the slider. Register that you support redirecting 1% of military spending to clinical trials. Politicians count votes; give them a big number to count.

  3. Write this on two more shirts. Pick the two humans whose funerals you least want to attend. Their closets are next. Flip this handout over for the full instructions. One shirt is a costume; a whole wardrobe is a person who actually means it.

  4. Forgive the human who wrote on your shirts. They did this because they love you and do not want you to suffer and die of horrible diseases.

If you want the receipts

WARONDISEASE.ORG. VOTE FIRST. YELL LATER.