Warm your heart. Shake your head. Plug your nose. Have a seat. Check out three of the best articles The Motley Fool offered investors this week.

What 1,000 Points of Light Really Look Like
Fool writer Christopher Barker has sparked a hubbub like no other at The Motley Fool -- and that takes some doing. After all, plenty of you put fingers to keyboard whenever Steve Jobs and Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) are the topic. And the fervor of those commenting on Sirius XM (NASDAQ:SIRI) shines with a light of its own.

But Christopher's post about raising money to cultivate financial literacy has garnered the most comments ever -- 1,805 and counting as of 10:30 Friday morning -- on a Motley Fool CAPS blog. That's double the number of comments posted to the second-most popular blog.

The response has been so enormous for two reasons. First, for each comment posted through Jan. 8, the Fool will donate $0.10 (up to $20,000) to the Thurgood Marshall Academy charter school in Washington, D.C. But even more impressively, many readers also stepped up to add their own pledges.

"Through the sheer generosity of spirit among the individual investors that make up the Motley Fool CAPS community, what began as a simple reminder about The Motley Fool's annual Foolanthropy campaign morphed into a spontaneous outpouring of support with a life all its own," Christopher wrote on Tuesday.

There's still time to join the blog party. When I last looked, Christopher's post had raised pledges and donations of $2,495, but some of them are contingent on the post reaching 2,000 comments. Add a comment and help send some money toward a worthy cause.

The Daily Walk of Shame: Keynesians
Fool writer Alyce Lomax isn't giving a pass to Keynesian economists who soft-pedal the danger of our gigantic -- and growing -- deficit and public debt.

"Eager opponents of free-market strategies fail to point out that government interference creates massive economic distortions, ample irrationality and inefficiency in federal spending, and the moral hazard inherent in bailouts that reward and incentivize failure," Alyce wrote on Monday. "Our current economic policy isn't reversing our road to ruin -- just paving it faster."

And if you want more of Alyce's straight talk, read what she had to say about the asinine audacity at AIG (NYSE:AIG) and whether it's time for shareholders to spit out McDonald's (NYSE:MCD).

Your Home Run Stocks May Actually Stink
John Keeling, general manager of Motley Fool CAPS, brings the mixed news that stocks you think are out-of-the-park winners might not be so great, even if they include well-known names like Pfizer (NYSE:PFE), Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL), and Dr Pepper Snapple (NYSE:DPS).

Here's how his made-up portfolio of five stocks did:

  • Compared with the S&P 500: "It appears that a touchdown dance is in order."
  • Compared with market-cap peers: "Oof."
  • Compared with sector peers: "Is there a doctor in the house? ... Clearly I missed something in my analysis."

But John's got some medicine we all can use:

"Despite the humbling results of this exercise, running my portfolio through the Motley Fool Stocks360 tool has reinforced one of the most important rules of successful investing: Understand how your stocks stack up against their peer groups. Without this type of '360-degree analysis,' you're likely to be better off in index funds," John wrote on Thursday.