Midnight Monday: Just got back from a session of one of my dinner clubs in NYC. Our speaker this evening was Colin Flaherty, author of White Girl Bleed A Lot.

Colin is a very impressive guy, an old-style just-the-facts reporter with no ideological axe to grind. He frames no hypotheses. Even when I suggested that social networking via smartphones may have something to do with the rash of black mob violence his book reports on, Colin just shrugged. "I don't get into reasons or causes, I just tell you what's happening."

What's happening, as the book makes indisputably clear is, first, black mob violence against nonblack persons and property, and second, appalling indifference, denial, and cover-up by police and the media.

Colin may not have been framing any hypotheses, but we, his listeners, were less restrained.

A common opinion around the dinner-table was that nonblack weakness and ethnomasochism have generated contempt among antisocial young blacks. "It’s not our fault you can’t fight," jeered one of the black mob beating and kicking a white victim in Philadelphia last summer. He had a point.

There are, I think, two possible reactions to Colin's book: (1) What on earth is wrong with black people? and (2) What on earth is wrong with nonblack people? My dinner companions leaned towards the latter, as do I.

It was a pleasure to meet Colin and hear what he had to say. I wish him all success with his book.