America's Cup is dead.

Nothing about America's Cup is happening.

It's a weird world of lawyers, cat designers, Ernesto (Bertarelli, SUI)'s silence, Larry (Ellison, USA)'s silence, and total silence from Brad Butterworth (NZL) and Russell Coutts (NZL), who are the uber-hired guns of Ernesto and Larry.

And we have heard nothing meaningful from their attorneys.

AC sailors and their families are thinking about educating their children, looking for alternative forms of revenue, praying for a resolution, and if they are lucky, preparing to sail big fat useless cats, trimarans or barges. But nobody knows for sure.

What we do know for sure is this:

(1) Ernesto never raised any kind of money to stage any kind of America's Cup 33.

(2) Period. (Full stop, for the rest of you.)

(3) That's the real reason why AC33 isn't happening in a dignified way.

(4) That's also why Ernesto has retreated to the courts, and has curiously and mysteriously disappeared and gone underground (where? The Alps? Martinique? South America?).

(5) Larry's team injected a multihull into their protest as a threat to force Ernesto to respond seriously, but as we subsequently discovered, Ernesto wasn't serious. Or actually was ultra canny.

(6) Ernesto called Golden Gate Yacht Club (USA)'s bluff.

(7) Now, maybe GGYC's language (about keels, hulls and barges) has thrown an unnecessary wrench into the works.

(8) Maybe catmarans are going to be it for AC33. Maybe not.

(9) Everything has warped into a weird world, and the rest of us are watching what happens on ValenciaSailing and Scuttlebutt and GGYC and Sail-world, rather than following what should really be happening on these sites which is about those big, beautiful boats being built for AC33.

(10) The sad fact is, America's Cup is in worse shape than ever.

(11) This huge, powerful event basically doesn't exist.

(12) It's dead.

(13) We may fuss about it. We may worry about it. We may blog about it. But the rest of the world actually has moved on -- legitimate journalists have removed America's Cup from their websites, focused on other sports, and gone elsewhere.

For example, The New York Times correspondent Christopher Clary (who did a great job during AC32) was last seen writing from Melbourne about the Australian Tennis Open (he did a great job).

If you are a sailor, you know that Olympic and other sailing agendas currently are more important than AC33. Just log into Sail-World and see.

Summer-down-under sailing events are filling all the online websites we visit.

Round-the-world challenges enthrall us.

AC33 stubbornly remains a non-event. It's about press releases from major players, learned assessments from uber-lawyers, blogfluff from the rest of us, and occasional sideline lobs from sailing bigwigs who have no jurisdiction over America's Cup.

It's all rather sad.

Nobody, nowhere, anywhere, for any reason, has anything substantive to say about America's Cup.

If we drain the swill pond, maybe something can happen. But we doubt it. Anyone who cares anything is fruitlessly centered on Justice Herman Cahn's New York courtroom, where maybe something will happen, sometime.

But probably even the great Cory Friedman, Esq. would admit it's going to be an elevation to an appeal court, somewhere in New York. God help us.

Meanwhile, the defender has no money. And never did.

Ernesto had no money to make an authentic AC33 happen because he never recruited new sponsors. And he blew away the only real sponsor that counts, Louis Vuitton.

So AC33 is deader than dead.

And AC34 has no viable reality, thanks to the confusion.

That means a lot of serious, rich and vested people must be thinking seriously about what America's Cup means, and whether or not it will ever mean anything again.

Frankly, that's up to Ernesto.

He is the man who committed the humongous bruta figura that started all this.