Today I am thinking of Alice in Wonderland Day, marking the 150^th anniversary of Lewis Carroll publishing the first edition of his tale. While the writer-mathematician's story was aimed at children like Alice, it is full of deep insights into how people think—or fail to think.

Every now and again some thoroughly weird addition or subtraction from main stock indexes leads me to write about “Alice in Indexland”. So in order to properly celebrate the first edition of the stories Carroll told Alice as they picnicked in the Oxford area or punted on the Isis River (which is what the Thames is called there), always suitably chaperoned by one of her parents who may have missed some of Carroll's reasons for palling up with this 11-year old.

I will start with one logical inconsistency that shocks me the most, the prevailing view among Chinese margin investors that the officially Communist government is supposed to make sure they don't lose money with their speculative Shanghai or Shenzhen stock purchases. To be sure Beijing tried to ease rules for bank lending and cut interest rates which could have helped refloat the speculators. But it did not go far enough to make them whole at the expense of the overall economy. How awful of the heirs of Chairman Mao!

* Israel comes first. The country wants and needs private investment to bring on the largest offshore gasfields found on earth in the last decade. But politics is getting in the way and both sides are imbibing bottles of stuff called “drink me” either to make problems grow to panic size or make them disappear even if they matter. The potion is called Leviathan, the huge field's name in Hebrew which is also used in many other languages. Financing the development has been tough because the concession was hemmed around with conditions which drove away a potential Australian bidder, and because working with Israel is not something major oil companies are ready to take on lest they lose Arab business.

The politics of panic were undertaken by the left starting with David Gilo, the head of the Israel Anti-trust Authority, a sort of Mad Hatter. He late last year ruled that the drillers, Israeli Delek Group (DGRLY) and US operator Noble Energy (NBL), had a “cartel” going. While the trust-buster resigned after the re-election of Benjamin Netanyahu, he made a big splash by reiterating his charges. Israel has very high prices for lots of goods because they are produced on a small scale (because of regional boycotts) or because the climate is not conducive to large-scale temperate climate farming. So opposition parties, newspapers, and street activists joined up to attack the Netanyahu attempt to work out a compromise: requiring that the two companies divest their control of other gas fields, including one already in production, and others which they had concessions for. They were also given only 10 years before the investments in Leviathan would have to be partly divested too.

Now even more tsoris (trouble) arose. First the terms of the deal between the Likud govt and the two gas firms were secret because of security concerns, among other things because some of the gas from the existing fields is already being sold to the Palestine Authority (West Bank), Jordan, and Egypt. But the Parliament (Knesset) insists that it wants to examine the terms, and major opposition parties have clamored for immediate hearings.

Then too Isramco, a small 15% partner in the existing producing gas field, Tamar, opposes forcing out DGRLY and NBL because it worries that it will have to find more cash to continue operations if there is a new partner. And it wants cheap gas for its sub which makes electricity in Israel. So it wants the deal about divestiture to go before the Knesset right now (and be passed). Netanyahu, a slick operator, asks that hearings be delayed until a full report can be issued to the parliamentarians. The opposition parties, Zionist Union and Yesh Atid, support instant hearings as do street demonstrators called by the trade unions and consumer activists: “We want cheap gas now,” they shout.

Every headline makes it harder for Delek to finance the Leviathan project where its sunk costs already exceed $50 bn. Noble, which loves to search for oil in politically-troubled waters, is facing a stock crash. Gideon Tadmar, CEO of Delek's listed Israeli gas sub, has charged that the whole thing is about “lies in the media” and “catchy slogans by politicians”, a statement with some truth. High prices for milk do not justify demanding prices below costs for gas (for electricity which will ultimately help air condition Israeli cow barns). Part of the uproar in my opinion is plain old manipulation possibly incited by another gas producer in the area, Gazprom of Russia which has just cut off supplies to Ukraine again under the aegis of Vladimir V. Putin. The goal of all that agita is to stop exporting Israel gas to Western Europe in competition with politcally riskier pipeline gas from Russia.

I do not like Netanyahu and my Israeli relatives don't either. But that doesn't mean we will let the hard Left in Israel, fed propaganda by Mother Russia (the birthplace of about 20% of all those who live in Israel now), make it impossible to develop Leviathan on a timely basis. That is manipulation, a term also used by Mr Tadmor. His oligarch boss, Delek's largest shareholder, Yitzchak Tshuva, who speaks Hebrew with a Libyan Arab accent (because that is where his family came from) is silent for now. He has sold down considerable financial sector and non-Israeli assets to fund the Israeli side of the Leviathan project. He is not arguing with the propagandists or the pols, but he may just walk away, which would be a total disaster. I am of course a shareholder in Delek, but I am also a believer in developing resources the country never expected to find.

Is Leviathan a monopoly? If the gas is left in the under-seabed reservoir nobody will ever find out. Alice, you will recall, followed a rabbit into a hole.

* BP plc (BP) has decided to pay the maxi-fine over the 2010 US Gulf of Mexico Deepwater Horizon disaster, a mere $18.7 bn, and on Thursday the stock rose 5.14% on that news. There are a couple of reasons. BP has been collecting its pence and pounds over the past few years in anticipation of a bad outcome. It will be given 10 years to pay. And it will be able to offset part of the bit by paying lower taxes. Fitch, a rating agency, was positive on this humiliating defeat the day before we celebrate the one inflicted on King George III. King George was Mad as a Hatter. BP is not. And they will not play "The World Turns Upside Down" when BP hands over a check. Oil is political and has been since John D Rockefeller created Standard Oil and since it was broken up.

* Iron ore stocks rose despite a 5% further drop in iron prices on Thursday mainly because of a theory that the reversal was a one-off. Flooded mines Down Under resumed production in mid-June nipping the ore price recovery. For whatever it is worth the new theory is that supply and demand can balance at about $60. Among the gainers is Vale (VALE) of Brazil. Smaller miners are felt to be more vulnerable as they have less access to funding or opportunities to divest, and less flexibility in delaying capex.

*Bloomberg reported that despite new-broom management and promises to behave,GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) in 2014 spent nearly as much on honorariums for US medicos who took its seminars on how to prescribe its drugs or who delivered the talks, $15 mn. In China where bribes were paid to hospitals and doctors for prescribing GSK meds, the company is offering to helpDesano Pharma of Shanghai make a copycat version Tivicay, an HIV drug, for Chinese and export markets by supplying the precursor active ingredient in a $195 mn deal. This is bad for Viiv the GSK sub which owns the patent.

*At Novartis (NVS), new-broom management is also in focus as the US Dept of Justice and attorneys-general of 11 states decided to seek fines totalling a whopping $3.4 bn for how the Swiss firm manipulated pharmacies to get more presciptions of its drugs filled—versus those of its arch-rival and fellow-Swiss Roche (in which it does own about 30% of the stock). Druggists got a kickback for filling prescriptions with NVS Exjadi rather than Roche Allcept for transplant patients, and for Myforec in iron ore problems rather than a different Roche med. Some kickbacks went to MDs but most to druggists, around 5% handed over in bonus amounts of the drugs themselves the druggists could peddle for profit. This is the biggest pharma kickback fine to date and will go to trial in November.

Separately, NVS announced it would help visually disabled people (and blind people) use Apple-watch or Android phones by helping them navigate via guiding voices and vibrations. Presumably NVS will not try to get these people to buy its drugs rather than those of competitors in return, but who knows?

* Meanwhile starting in September Novo Nordisk (NVO) will cease supplying German diabetics with long-lasting Tresiba insulin. This results largely from the tight-wads at the drug registry for the health service limiting what NVO charges to the price for standard 30-year old insulin versions. What scares me is that other countries may follow the German example.

* All the culprit drug firms plus Teva (TEVA) rose Thursday, maybe because of the sensible way its CEO and commanding officer discussed strategy on Tuesday. TEVA.

* The big loser was Hikma Pharma (HKMPY), the Jordanian-owned generic drug firm whose shares are listed in Dubai and London. I sold the stock after it made a decent gain partly because I couldn't imagine telling my mentors like my father or my great-uncle Jack that I was buying an Arab competitor of Teva. Now it has fallen because the other Arab-American generics drug firm it is trying to buy, Mylan (MYL), is not doing well at resisting Teva's share purchases to force a vote on its $40 bn bid in MYL's new Dutch homeland, where it moved for tax inversion reasons. Neither Teva nor HKMPY can lure in a buyer with cheap taxes. MYL is attempting a buy of its own to stop Teva but did not even consider HKMPY, going instead after Perrigo (PRGO), another inversion firm, now Irish.

Vivian is holding forth a talk about global investing at the www.liveandinvestoverseas.com conference and that you can find out more by visiting www.global-investing.com where she will tell about the meeting and advise about moving to Europe with dogs.