The joke is funnier if you are not asking other people to do the thing you avoided doing. Take your 30 seconds first.
Step 2
Write the shirt.
A bought shirt works. A shirt you already own plus a permanent marker also works. The shirt is text. Text costs marker ink.
Step 3
Include the handout.
The handout puts the facts in their hand before the yelling starts.
Step 4
Propagate.
Write it on the rest of your shirts. Write it on your friends' shirts if your friendship has survived worse things. The joke stops being a joke when humanity gets the point.
Write this
Front
THIS T-SHIRT ENDED WAR AND DISEASE.
Back
Trade one apocalypse for disease eradication at warondisease.org.
warondisease.org
Handout to include with the shirt
Print both sides and put it with the shirt.
The QR code can use your share link. Sign in and vote to personalize it.
Please read before yelling
Why I wrote on your shirts
You were given this shirt because someone correctly loves you and would prefer that you not be processed by preventable disease while humanity funds spare apocalypses.
Disease kills 150,000 humans/day, about 50 September 11s every day. Nobody invades anyone because disease has no flag.
warondisease.org
Your chance of dying of disease: nearly 100%. Your chance of dying of terrorism: 1 in 30,000,000.
Governments spend 604x more on weapons than on government clinical trials.
Before WWII, US military spending was 96.7% lower. After winning, the US cut it 87.6% in two years.
About 6,650 diseases have no FDA-approved treatment. At 15 first treatments per year, that is 443 years. The 1% Treaty buys 12.3 times as much clinical-trial capacity: about 185 first treatments per year, or 36 years to find treatments for all diseases.
The average human becomes about 4x richer and much less diseased and dead. The spreadsheet stops killing people.
Vote. Then write this on two more shirts. Social proof handles the part your facts cannot.
The yelling part
Answers for the person currently yelling at you
But national security.
National security improves. Every country makes the same one-budget-line trade, so everyone has fewer weapons pointed at them and keeps 99%. Humanity still has about spare apocalypses. That is enough murder capacity.
We cannot afford it.
Disease already burns $5.00 trillion/year in lost work and drags off 13.0% of global GDP. The current arrangement is what nobody can afford.
Who would block this?
Nobody rational. Military contractors keep 99%, lose one unusable apocalypse, and get an economy about 4x larger where their children are alive to spend the money.
Then why has nobody done it?
Because the facts are scattered. Put them in eight billion brains at once and the insanity becomes visible: change the spreadsheet, keep the deterrent, fund the trials, stop dying.
That knocks about 407 years off the treatment line. The avoided centuries of untreated disease prevent 10.7 billion deaths and 1.93 quadrillion hours of suffering. At one laugh per healthy day recovered, that is 206 trillion extra laughs. The full laugh-rate model counts 3.5 quadrillion.
Warondisease.org. Vote first. Yell later.
When they ask why
But national security.
Your annual chance of dying in a terrorist attack is about 1 in . Your chance of dying from disease is still 100%. The treaty changes one budget line. Every country makes the same trade at the same time, so every country has fewer weapons pointed at it and keeps of its military budget. Relative military balance stays the same. Everyone is safer because everyone is less targeted and more alive. Humanity still keeps roughly spare apocalypses, which is too much deterrence for a serious species.
Disease already burns in lost work and drags off of global GDP before you even count the funerals. War smashes infrastructure. Disease smashes the workers. The current arrangement is what nobody can afford.
1% is unrealistic.
Immediately before the United States won World War II, US military spending was lower than current levels. After winning, the US cut military spending over two years and then built the middle class. Your grandparents handled that. This shirt asks for .
The military-industrial complex will never allow it.
The CEO of Lockheed Martin is not exempt from biology. They can keep roughly spare apocalypses, watch their family die of curable diseases, and retire into the current trajectory. Or they can keep of the military budget, give up the unusable apocalypse, invest in the biotech sector absorbing redirected trial money, and retire in an economy larger where their children are alive to spend the money. Blocking the treaty to protect the last is not self-interest. It is arithmetic failure with a lobbyist.
Why would leaders agree?
Leaders follow the numbers their presidents can see. Right now the military lobby spends buying the spreadsheet. The treaty campaign budget is . When eight billion presidents understand the spreadsheet is killing them, changing the numbers becomes the boring part.
Military contractors spend because lobbying works. Fine. After the treaty passes, leaders who voted yes receive Incentive Alignment Bond benefits: campaign support while running, cushy careers when done. Leaders who vote no receive nothing. This is Pavlovian conditioning, but for senators.
What if countries cheat or refuse?
Of course some will try. The system does not use trust. It uses published disbursements, trial-linked payouts, the Decentralized Accountability Office, and the Automated Revenue Service. The first country to sign makes refusal more visible and more expensive for the next one.
Why put it on shirts?
A human wearing this on purpose is making a political declaration. A human wearing it because someone defaced their closet has a funny story. That drops the social cost from "I am advocating" to "you will not believe what happened," which is the conversation humans actually like having.
Most pranks cost the prankster something. This one earns VOTE points, makes the recipient a walking billboard for not dying, and counts each unwitting wearer toward the social-proof threshold. The joke spreads itself. Play the joke.
Why this is the funniest joke in the universe
A normal joke produces one laugh and dies. This joke tries to turn a shirt into a chain reaction: shirt, conversation, vote, treaty, clinical trials, treatments, humans still alive to hear another joke.
About diseases have no FDA-approved treatment. Humanity currently finds about first treatments per year. At that rate, we are projected to find treatments for all diseases in .
Redirecting of military spending buys about as much clinical-trial capacity. That takes us from about first treatments per year to about first treatments per year. Now we are projected to find treatments for all diseases in instead of .
That removes about from the treatment line. Those avoided centuries of untreated disease prevent and of suffering. If each healthy day recovered contains only one laugh, that is extra laughs. The less insulting laugh model, where humans laugh more than once per day because they are not rocks, counts .
That is why this is the funniest joke in the universe. Not because writing on shirts is clever. Because the smallest dumb-looking action available to you might make humanity notice it has been keeping spare apocalypses while dying in a treatment wait.