Daily Bafflements

• Margaret Hartmann at New York has a roundup of the most terrifying warnings politicians have uttered about Ebola. For instance, Rand Paul, speaking about President Obama’s plan to send 3,000 U.S. soldiers to West Africa to help, said: “You also have to be concerned about 3,000 soldiers getting back on a ship. Where is disease most transmittable? When you’re in a very close confines on a ship, we all know about cruises and how they get these diarrhea viruses that are transmitted very easily. Can you imagine if a whole ship full of our soldiers catch Ebola?”

• Read Susan Sontag’s “Fascinating Fascism,” a 1975 essay for The New York Review of Books about Leni Riefenstahl and her documentation of an African tribe. (Via Longform.)

• Your Morning Paranoia: this Guernica interview with Ben Wizner, privacy advocate and Edward Snowden’s legal adviser at the ACLU, and a first-person account by James Bamford for First Look, of his experiences in the 1970s and 80s reporting on (and then being pursued by) the NSA.

• Today in Billionaires: according to Business Insider, there is one billionaire for every three million non-billionaires in the world.