  Drawing largely from my work with co--workers, I present arguments that
strangeness does not play an {\it explicit} role in compact-star matter. They
are based on the skyrmion description of dense matter combined with Wilsoninan
renormalization group approach to kaon nuclear interactions. The key idea is
that quark degrees of freedom, carrying strangeness, can be traded in by
topology for hadron degrees of freedom.
