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Spell it out for me. Are you saying that the acceleration (or apparent acceleration) is caused by vacuum flaws like cosmic strings or domain walls? Or are you saying that you think general relativity itself is simply wrong, preferring instead something like MOND? Steady state theory? Autodynamics? Superluminal gravity? Orgone?

The apparent acceleration cannot be verified regardless of what either of us believe at this point. I think relativity is mostly right. I think this article is bunk.

[I think relativity is mostly right. I think this article is bunk.]

This article was written by a scientifically illiterate journalist in an attempt to take an inherently complicated and difficult to understand paper and present it to the public in a watered down and dumbed down version, no matter how many irrelevant Einstein anecdotes need to be introduced or how many misleading, but interesting, metaphors have to be invented.

This is typical of the MSM (in this case the AP) and the only way to fairly judge this is to wait until the paper comes out in February and read it, assuming one already has a thorough understanding of the relevant physics and the topic of cosmology itself (and very few people do). I majored in physics in college and I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have the knowledge required to check the validity of the arguments put forth.

The apparent acceleration cannot be verified regardless of what either of us believe at this point.

Ah, so it's the observation you don't like. Either you have in mind some specific flaw in the technique, or you simply don't want the universe to behave in that fashion and infer that they must have made a mistake.

I'll assume it's the former. Why won't this technique give a reliable measurement of the change in the Hubble parameter--I can't call it the "Hubble constant"--over time?