Pulse: Origins

1347: What the Plague Built — Act 3

The Statute Nobody Could Enforce: Farm wages doubled in England and stayed doubled for 450 years. The Statute of Laborers tried to freeze wages at 1346 levels and failed fastest where no one was watching — while a Westminster Abbey auditor crossed out inflated payments right next to the seat of power. Meanwhile, in Eastern Europe, the plague produced the exact opposite result: intensified serfdom, divergent political economies, and a fracture line that historians trace to the 20th century. ---------------------------------------- New episodes every Sunday. Follow us on X @ThePulseSPN [https://x.com/ThePulseSPN] singularitypulse.substack.com [https://singularitypulse.substack.com]

1347: What the Plague Built — Act 2

The Thing Itself: Where the plague actually came from (Kyrgyz cemeteries, 1338 tombstones, severe drought), why the Caffa catapult story is almost certainly fiction, and what we know — and don't know — about the pathogen: one mile per day overland, 24 by sea, doubling infected populations every 43 days, and possibly not even Yersinia pestis. ---------------------------------------- New episodes every Sunday. Follow us on X @ThePulseSPN [https://x.com/ThePulseSPN] singularitypulse.news [https://singularitypulse.news]

1347: What the Plague Built — Act 1

The Black Death did not create the pressure that broke medieval Europe — it revealed pressure that had been building for three centuries inside a social order built on surplus labor. The cities that organized Jewish massacres in 1348 to 1350, researchers found, showed measurably higher Nazi Party vote shares in 1928 and higher deportation rates after 1933, even where the Jewish community had been absent for six hundred years. Roman and Austin trace the load-bearing assumptions of feudal society from the heavy plow to the Statute of Laborers, and the question the episode leaves open is which of those lines are still holding. 0:21 — the material cause of feudal hierarchy, agricultural technology circa 1000 CE 4:22 — the Church's spiritual economy and why it required chronic suffering 5:36 — Genoese ships at Messina, the spread mathematics of the plague 6:32 — Strasbourg, administrative violence, and the Voigtländer and Voth finding 13:13 — canon law, debt cancellation, and the economic function of the massacre 14:34 — the Statute of Laborers and the wage revolution that followed ---------------------------------------- New episodes every Sunday. Follow us on X @ThePulseSPN [https://x.com/ThePulseSPN] singularitypulse.news [https://singularitypulse.news]

1347: What the Plague Built — Teaser

1347: What the Plague Built — Teaser: The plague killed half of Europe in two years. The disease is gone. What it built is not. Roman introduces 1347: What the Plague Built — a four-part series on what the Black Death left standing and why it still matters. ---------------------------------------- New episodes every Sunday. Follow us on X @ThePulseSPN [https://x.com/ThePulseSPN] singularitypulse.news [https://singularitypulse.news]

The Strait of Hormuz — Act 4

The Prisoner's Strait: Iran threatens to close the Strait of Hormuz every few years and never does — because forty percent of its own government revenue transits the same six miles of water. This act covers the IRGC swarm-boat doctrine, why Lloyd's of London actuarial tables are a more effective weapon than missiles, and China's structural exposure to Hormuz: an industrial economy that cannot function without fuel it doesn't control, flowing through a corridor it can't secure — identical to Britain's position in 1914. ---------------------------------------- New episodes every Sunday. Follow us on X @ThePulseSPN [https://x.com/ThePulseSPN] singularitypulse.news [https://singularitypulse.news]